Common Problems With Toro Lawn Mowers (According To Users)

Toro has been in the mowing business for more than a century, and its lineup today consists of everything from homeowner-friendly walk-behinds to the same commercial zero-turns used by landscaping crews to cut golf courses and municipal parks. For a lot of people, "getting a good mower" simply means buying a red Toro, pulling the cord, and expecting it to run for years with basic maintenance. The company also banks on being a major lawn mower brand, even promoting its walk-behinds as America's best-selling walk mower.

On the smaller end, you've got gas and battery Recycler and Super Recycler models with Toro's Personal Pace self-propel system, built for homeowners who want a simple 21-22-inch deck. On the more expensive side, the same yard could be cut by Toro's 60V Flex-Force mowers, which use the same interchangeable battery as Toro's snow blowers. That variety is a big part of Toro's appeal, but with any product that sells in the millions, it also means more ways things can go sideways.

Toro owners, across all three mower categories, have been dealing with and reporting those problems for years. A lot of them are just the cost of owning outdoor equipment — belt wear, aging gears, and engines that don't love old fuel. More recently, however, some owners report their Flex-Force battery mowers refusing to charge or shutting down mid-cut. Zero-turn owners keep reporting decks that leave visible steps in the grass, even after they claim to have leveled everything in the garage.

Among Toro's most widely used products — the Recycler and Super Recycler walk-behinds — the most common complaints usually concern the Personal Pace drive, the fuel/carburetor circuit, and the cutting deck's airflow. Personal Pace is Toro's self-propel system on some of its walk-behind mulching mowers, and it is the most common failure, as it tends to wear down gradually over time. Owners report strong drives when new, but over time, it becomes weak on hills, hesitates to engage, and sometimes starts clicking or grinding when they push the handle. Some owners who follow the problems to their source usually land on the same wear culprits — rear-wheel gears, traction belts that are stretched or glazed smooth, or, less often, a transmission whose spring-loaded engagement has worn tired. These parts are considered consumables, and many users say that the drive feels "like new" once again once they replace the belt.

The second most common complaint centers on surging, stalling, or needing repeated pulls to restart — and they overwhelmingly show up after winter storage. Many owners fix it by pulling the carburetor bowl, cleaning a partially clogged main jet, or avoiding anything above E10. The third issue is the mowers leaving thin strips or uncut patches even after sharpening the blade. Owners usually trace it to a deck packed with old grass, which disrupts airflow, mulching over wet or overgrown grass, or pushing the Personal Pace drive faster than the blade can clear clippings. Once the underside is scraped clean and the deck height is raised, most owners report that the cuts eventually even out.

Common problems with Toro's battery-powered mowers — especially on the 60V Flex-Force platform — start with thermal throttling, where owners report their mowers shutting down on a hot day, and the charger refuses to recharge the pack afterward. In these cases, the charger often shows a solid or blinking red light, which means either the battery is outside the safe temperature range for charging or the battery's safety circuitry stops the charger from kicking in, and owners report this happening even with newer packs. The battery recovers after letting the pack cool for 20-60 minutes or with a fan.

A separate but common issue on the 60Vs involves the battery packs that fail to charge at all, even when in the acceptable temperature range. Some complaints often show up after only a season or two of use, with owners claiming their usual 35-40 minutes of runtime goes down to barely 10. Toro's Zero-Turn models — like the TimeCutter and Z-Master — come with their own problems, mostly mechanical, and tied to the deck or drive system, including the well-known issue of hydrostatic fade. The most common problem is deck belts jumping or wearing out sooner than expected, and owners report that belts are rarely the failure point; it's a weak tension spring, a worn idler, or a misaligned metal guard that knocks the belt off as the blades engage. The other persistent issue is the hydrostatic fade, where the mower pulls strongly when cold but loses pulling power once the hydros heat up.

To identify which Toro mower problems were actually common, we went through dozens of owner-related complaints across Reddit (r/lawncare, r/lawnmowers, r/yardwork), doityourself.com, Lawnsite.com, and more. If a problem showed up in multiple threads, across seasons, and was being diagnosed or fixed in the same way by different owners, it made the list. Anything that looked like a freak accident, obvious misuse, or a one-off lemon got tossed unless multiple users were describing the same failure pattern. The last step was a sanity check against Toro's manuals and recall notices to confirm these weren't just Internet myths. And while plenty of owners say Toro mowers are worth the cost and hold up well long-term, the problems that do show up tend to fall into the same few categories we focused on here.