If you want carpets on your stairs but don’t know what is and isn’t important when choosing them, you’re not alone. While nearly everyone who installs carpets in a home will do so on the stairs, getting it right is tricky business. Besides choosing style and color, you also need to keep durability and thickness in mind, as well as safety–because it doesn’t matter how nice your carpet looks if it’s too dangerous to use in the long term. Today we’ll cover some of the most important factors to keep in mind when choosing the best carpets for stairs in your home, small business, or rental property, as well as tips for maintaining them.

Consider the safety benefits of carpets on stairs

With as tricky as choosing carpets for stairs can be, you might be tempted to skip them and just use a hard flooring like hardwood or laminate. However, we don’t advise it; you’ll at least want a stair runner if nothing else for safety. Hard surfaces are a recipe for slips and falls, and once a fall is in progress, injury rates are much, much higher when landing on hard flooring than on carpets. To keep your family and guests safe, carpet your stairs. If you remember nothing else, remember this.

High stair traffic demands high durability and quality

Once you’ve decided to carpet your stairs, you’re gong to need to think of durability and quality. The highest traffic area of a home with stairs will be–you guessed it–the stairs. This isn’t just because people use them whenever they need to get from one floor to the next; it’s also because we put much more force on flooring when descending (due to gravity) than we do when walking on level surfaces.

To keep your carpets from wearing down prematurely and a.) becoming unsafe and b.) looking bad, you’ll want to choose the highest levels of durability and overall quality you can afford in your preferred style. Consider it an investment in safety and aesthetics.

Look for thickness, but not too much thickness on stairs

That said, don’t confuse thickness with durability. While it’s a common belief that the thicker a carpet is, the more durable it will be, the truth is that some of the longest-lasting carpets will be some of the thinnest, while some of the thickest you’ll ever walk on will break down in a handful of years. Look at warranty lengths and details over pile thickness.

Besides durability, thick carpets are also a no-no on stairs from a safety standpoint. Too-thick carpets wrap around the front edges of each step in a stair, which can lead to false footing when walking downstairs. To put it bluntly, people are more likely to slip and trip with thick carpets on stairs than with thin ones. Carpet installers also disfavor them because of how much more difficult it is to wrap thicker carpets around stair nosings. You’ll want to stick to a maximum pile height of 1/2 inch, at least 8 pounds of pile density, and no more than 7/16 inches of carpet padding.

Consider soil resistance (which is different from stain resistance)

When choosing a carpet for stairs, think about soil resistance and not stain resistance. Stain resistance has to do with resisting spills from beverages (e.g., coffee, wine, or orange juice); this doesn’t happen very often on stairs, unlike in family rooms.

However, soil resistance is more important because of residue we leave on carpets when walking barefoot. The oils in our soles leave residues that can attract dirt and soil carpets. While this can be avoided through using socks or slippers indoors, it’s simpler to just invest in soil resistance ahead of time. This is particularly relevant when you consider the fact that your pets are never going to wear socks or slippers, and many of your guests won’t either.

The style of the carpet doesn’t really matter

Despite what carpet retailers may try to tell you, you can use virtually any style of carpet on stairs. Berber works well on stairs, as does saxony. Synthetic fibers are fine (e.g., nylon, polyester, or SmartStrand). Many natural carpet fibers can work as well. The main thing to keep in mind is that some styles will hide seams more than others, if this is important to you from an aesthetic point of view. A longer pile carpet like a frieze or saxony will do a better job of hiding seams than a looped or shorter pile.

Maintain your stair carpeting with a good carpet cleaner and vacuum

No matter which kind of carpet you choose for your stairs, you’re going to want to maintain it to avoid going through the hassle of replacing it in the near future. While you don’t need special carpet cleaners or vacuums to maintain carpets on stairs, we still recommend buying machines that will last as long as possible and work with as many styles of carpets as possible. This will reduce your odds of needing to buy additional machines if you change styles in your home (e.g., from low-pile carpets to high-pile carpets).

When it comes to cleaning carpets, we recommend what we consider to be the best carpet cleaner under$1,000: the Bissell 86T3 Big Green. We’ve reviewed it repeatedly (e.g., here and here) and continue to see it as one of the best investments a homeowner can make. For vacuuming, we’re fans of either the Miele Complete C3 Soft Carpet or the Miele Compact C2 Electro+. Both will handle carpets of a range of piles with ease. The Soft Carpet is capable of tackling every carpet on the market, while the Electro+ is a good compromise for families looking for quality on a smaller budget.

You can buy the Bissell 85T3 Big Green carpet cleaner here on Amazon. You can buy the Miele Complete C3 Soft Carpet here or buy the Miele Compact C2 Electro+ here.

Canadians can buy the Miele Soft Carpet here, the Compact Electro+ here, and the Bissell Big Green here.

If you find our research on PMC helpful, you can follow our efforts to keep maniacally reviewing home cleaning tools by shopping through our links above. We promise to keep fighting the good fight against every horror children, animals, and grown, yet messy humans can inflict upon a clean home.