Which horsepower, and whose numbers

Tractor Picker covers 238 tractors from 11 brands across 3 size classes — 16.6 to 101 engine horsepower, $12,546 sub-compacts to $91,323 utility machines. Two numbers dominate how these are advertised and neither is the number your implements care about. Sorting that out, and being clear about where every figure came from, is what this page sets out.

Engine horsepower is not PTO horsepower

A tractor is sold on engine horsepower and does its work through the power take-off, and the drivetrain takes a cut in between. Across this catalog that cut runs from 8 to 31 per cent, with a typical figure around 18. A machine badged 25 hp therefore arrives at the shaft with something near 18, and a rotary cutter or a chipper rated for 20 PTO horsepower will bog behind it. Both figures are recorded for every tractor here, and the size-class and guide pages rank on whichever one the page is actually about rather than on the larger of the two.

Lift capacity depends on where it was measured

Loader lift and three-point lift are both published as a weight at a stated point, and manufacturers do not all pick the same point. A loader figure quoted at the pivot pins is larger than the same loader's figure measured 500 millimetres ahead of them, which is closer to where a pallet's weight sits, and a three-point number quoted at the ball ends is larger than one quoted 24 inches behind. The catalog carries the manufacturer's figure without converting between conventions, because a converted number would look more comparable than it is. Where a maker publishes only one, that is what appears, and the field stays empty rather than being estimated when none is published at all. Each entry also records whichconvention its figure uses, and the head-to-head pages act on that: a lift row is left without a winner whenever the two machines were measured in different places, or where either maker did not say. A pin figure and a figure taken 500 millimetres ahead of the pin describe the same loader and differ by about a third, so ranking one against the other would manufacture a result rather than report one. Of the 238 tractors here, 179 record the point and 59 do not yet, which is why a good many matchups decline to call that row.

Transmission is the choice people regret

103 of the 238 tractors here are hydrostatic and 135 are geared or power shuttle. Hydrostatic drive is far easier for loader work, where you change direction every few seconds, and it costs some efficiency at the PTO and some pulling ability under sustained load. Geared transmissions do the opposite. It is a structural decision rather than a spec-sheet nicety, which is why it is a filter on the main list.

Prices, and the package-deal problem

Prices are typical list prices for the tractor as commonly configured. This category is sold in packages — a loader, a mower deck, a box blade and a trailer bundled with subsidised finance — and those bundles move the number by thousands in either direction while making two dealers' quotes almost impossible to line up. Read a price here as a tier rather than a dealer quote.

Why there are no star ratings

This catalog carried a star rating and a review count for every tractor until September 2026, when they were removed. They did not survive being checked: every rating sat between 4.2 and 4.7, every review count was divisible by ten, and no field recorded where any of it had been read. Tractors are not sold on Amazon, and the dealer and manufacturer sites that do carry owner reviews do not publish them in a form that can be compared across brands. Rather than leave numbers standing that nothing supported, they were archived out of the data, and nothing here sorts or ranks on a rating any more. Where a figure does come back it will name the site it was read from, on the page, beside the stars. Everything the guides and matchup pages rank on is a specification a manufacturer published.

Where the owner reports come from

There is no test plot here, nothing in a barn, and no hours put on any of these machines by us. 113 of the 238 models carry an owner section, distilled from what owners write publicly — people who have run a tractor through several seasons of real property work, and long-term ownership write-ups — and marked as owner opinion rather than as testing. The other 125 have none, because nobody has written enough about them to summarise, and those pages say so instead of inventing a consensus. Something reaches the cons when unconnected owners keep reporting it: a three-point hitch that maxes out with a heavy box blade, emissions equipment that turns routine maintenance into a dealer visit, a loader that needs the bucket empty to get full height. Where only one owner has written about a machine, the page says one owner rather than “owners”. Which reports recur widely enough to print is a judgement made here.

Who runs it, and how it is paid for

Two people look after this catalog between other commitments. No office, no dealership, no shed, nobody drawing a wage from it. No dealer or manufacturer has ever paid for a placement, a write-up or a link here, and there are no retailer links on this site to earn a commission from. Brand and size-class pages list every machine cheapest first; each buying guide sorts by the specification it is about — engine horsepower, loader lift, price — and states that basis on the page. Nothing anywhere sorts on a rating, because there are no ratings.

How current it is

The catalog last changed on September 29, 2026. That is not the same as every entry having been checked that day, so here is the actual state of it: of the 238 tractors listed, 238 record the manufacturer page their figures were read off and are dated individually, and 0 are older entries that predate that practice and are being worked through. The listing, the size-class pages and the matchup pages all draw on the same catalog, so an older entry is not marked differently anywhere — if a figure matters to a purchase, check it against the brochure in front of you.

Tractor model lines are long-lived by consumer standards, so most changes here are added machines, corrected prices, and the occasional series number that rolls forward with a new emissions tier on an otherwise identical machine. That last one is the trap: a maker can retire a model and replace it with a near-twin under a new number, and an entry that quietly becomes last year's machine is worse than a missing one. A figure that disagrees with the brochure in front of you is a mistake here rather than a placement anyone bought.