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We added a section to answer Frequently asked questions.

After interviewing two vets and three pet groomers, and testing nine different dog nail clippers, we think the Millers Forge Professional Nail Clip is the best tool to trim your dog’s nails. Every professional we talked to recommended Millers Forge by name, and the company’s medium clipper is sharp, affordable, and suitable for most dogs.

This clipper is sharp, affordable, and the right size for most dogs.

The Millers Forge Professional Nail Clip is a no-nonsense tool that cuts cleanly, consistently, comfortably, and effortlessly out of the box. During our testing, it cut through dozens of bamboo skewers without losing their edge or hurting our hands, which couldn’t be said of other popular options we tested that were difficult to cut with out of the box and will only get worse as you use them. When testing our finalists on our two dogs (weighing 50 pounds and 15 pounds), we found that the Millers Forge clipper produced the quickest, neatest trim and was the least stressful for both our pets and ourselves.

If your pup weighs less than 20 pounds, this is the way to go.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $6.

If your dog weighs less than 20 pounds, the smaller version of our main pick is more maneuverable and has a metal bar guard to stop you from cutting too much nail at once—though in practice, we found the guard just got in the way. The small clipper is not as comfortable for long clipping sessions as the medium clipper and isn’t strong enough for medium or large dogs. Definitely get this if you have a toy-sized dog, but if your dog is closer to 15 to 20 pounds, the medium clipper will be easier to use.

If your dog is more than 60 pounds, then you’ll need to go large.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $13.

If your dog weighs more than 60 pounds, the extra cutting power of the large version of the Millers Forge clipper can really help. But we found that this size requires a lot of strength to use and could crush the more delicate nails of small dogs. Only get this version if you really need the extra oomph.

In case you nick your pet, you can quickly stop the bleeding.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $4.

Styptic is for those moments when you cut a bit too deeply and need to staunch the bleeding, though whether you use powder, pads, or a gel is up to you. But as far as brands go, all the groomers and vets named Kwik Stop as their styptic of choice. Kwik Stop lives up to its name and stops the bleeding in a few seconds.

This clipper is sharp, affordable, and the right size for most dogs.

If your pup weighs less than 20 pounds, this is the way to go.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $6.

If your dog is more than 60 pounds, then you’ll need to go large.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $13.

In case you nick your pet, you can quickly stop the bleeding.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $4.

I’m a journalist with 15 years of experience writing and editing product reviews, which have appeared in AOL, GamesRadar, Polygon, and Wired. I’ve had dogs for the past 20 years and also worked as a professional dog walker for two years.

For this guide, we talked to several groomers and vets about what you should know when it comes to keeping your animal’s claws neat and nice. We researched why keeping your pet’s nails trimmed is important both for their health and for yours, and we learned that your vet probably doesn’t want to cut those claws for you. (It makes your animal hate vet trips just that little bit extra.)

Broadly speaking, your dog’s nails should be snipped every four to six weeks. You'll know it's time for a clipping when you hear its nails tapping on your home's floors. But if you regularly walk your dog on concrete, this may naturally wear their nails down enough that you can avoid clipping altogether.

Most pets don’t enjoy having their feet messed with, and persuading bigger dogs to sit still for a pedicure can be particularly exhausting, but it’s important for your dog’s health to keep their nails at an appropriate length. There are two parts of the nail: the quick and the shell. The quick supplies blood to the nail, as you’ll quickly (ha!) discover, should you cut into it. Regularly trimming your dog’s nails makes the quick recede from the end, which reduces the risk of injuring the quick and makes future maintenance easier.

Furthermore, if a pup’s nails are too long, it can cause their toes to splay, which inhibits their ability to walk properly. Splayed toes can cause nerve damage in the long term and lack of traction in the short term, which can lead to accidents when your doggo goes zooming after the mailman and loses its footing.

Nail trimmers come in sizes intended to correspond to your dog: small, medium, or large. It’s easy to choose the correct size if you have a chiweenie or a Great Dane, but what about all the mutts in between? “I go on a case by case basis, but in general, a dog under 20 pounds is considered small, over 60 is large, and everything in between is medium,” said Jared Wiley, who’s been a vet tech with Oak Grove Animal Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, for the past year.

"In general, a dog under 20 pounds is considered small, over 60 is large, and everything in between is medium.” —Jared Wiley, vet tech with Oak Grove Animal Hospital

Most clippers will work up or down a size category, but probably won’t be ideal—a small clipper will be hard on the hands when trying to cut through the thicker nails of a medium-size dog, and a medium-size clipper may be hard to maneuver around small paws. You might be tempted to simply buy the large clipper, assuming it can handle any dog thrown at it, but we found it was too much for wee nails. Wiley backed up that experience, saying, “I’ve used large trimmers on small dogs when I had to, and it’s almost like they break the nails instead of cutting them.” The medium trimmers we used worked well on both a 50-pound and 15-pound dog, but stick with large clippers for large dogs only.

We talked to five pet groomers and veterinarians about what they felt was most important when it came to keeping pet nails tidy, and while their opinions varied, they all concurred on one thing: the brand of tools they used. Every pro we spoke to recommended trimmers from Millers Forge, praising their price and reliability. Because of this universal endorsement, that’s the brand we focused on. There are three different styles of trimmer—scissor, plier, and guillotine—and we tested a variety from Millers Forge.

However, we recognize that the needs of a professional are different from the home user. You’re not likely to be messing around with the feet of a dozen dogs in a day, so your trimmer will stay sharp much longer. You’re also not likely to be as skilled a hand at wielding a clipper, or have a harness handy to keep your 100-pound dog nicely still. So in addition to the Millers Forge options, we also tested the most popular nail trimmers on Amazon.

Every pro we spoke to recommended trimmers from Millers Forge, praising their price and reliability.

Since dog nails take about two weeks to grow to the point where they need trimming, in the interest of time, we used bamboo skewers as stand-ins for toenails for the initial round of tests. Skewers make a good analog for toenails. Bamboo skewers offer ample resistance to being cut, they splinter and crush when cut using a dull blade, and they offer enough resistance that you can quickly tell if a clipper is comfortable or not. Smaller dogs were emulated with a single skewer, while two or three bundled together represented a larger animal. We gauged each clipper on ease of use, comfort, and sharpness of blades.

Once we were satisfied with a few finalists, we tried those on our two dogs: a 50-pound Lab/whippet mix and a 15-pound doxie-pin to ensure that our picks would be just as good in real world use.

This clipper is sharp, affordable, and the right size for most dogs.

When it comes to making your pet’s pedicure as hassle-free as possible, the clear winner is the Millers Forge pliers-style clipper. It’s reliably sharp, comfortable, and affordable, and it doesn’t crush even the thickest nails. After testing these clippers against options from other brands popular online, it was obvious why Millers Forge was the unanimous favorite among all the groomers and vets we spoke with.

This clipper kept on snipping no matter how many skewers we threw at it. The cuts were sharp and clean, with no crushing even on thick bundles. The shape of the handles fit well into the natural contours of your hand, allowing for the application of great pressure when necessary without hurting or causing muscle fatigue. This is in stark contrast to the Boshel (and other functionally identical) clipper, which is heavily padded but uncomfortable to use, and required far more force to make cuts.

When not in use, the Millers Forge clipper has a plastic band attached to one handle that loops over the hinge to keep the pliers safely closed. You have to pull it up toward the blades to use the trimmers, but it doesn’t get in the way at all.

The Millers Forge clippers are also usually available for about $10, the same price as clippers that fared far worse in our testing. The medium clipper cut cleanly through bundles of two skewers, so it should work for most animals, and we successfully used it on a pair of dogs weighing 15 pounds and 50 pounds, which is a range that covers many house dogs. But if you have a really big dog, you may want to try the large size instead.

The one thing these trimmers are missing is a plate guard (also called a quick guard or stop bar) to prevent you from snipping off too much of your pet’s nail at a time (which the smaller pair has). The guard is a simple metal plate that blocks the clipper opening so you can only put a wee bit of your dog’s nail through at a time. They’re a nice safety measure if you’re particularly worried about nipping your animal’s quick, but are not necessary. “I feel like they just get in the way,” said vet Tech Jared Wiley in an interview. Our own testing confirmed this assessment. The bar constrains your ability to maneuver while clipping so we ended up retracting it out of the way in most cases.

If your pup weighs less than 20 pounds, this is the way to go.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $6.

While our main pick will work with most dogs, for pets that weigh 20 pounds you may prefer Millers Forge’s smaller version. The daintier size makes it a bit more maneuverable around delicate feet, but its smallness doesn’t prevent these clippers from making quick, clean cuts. These clippers have a metal plate guard that only lets a tiny bit of the nail through to be snipped, rendering it virtually impossible to accidentally cut your dog’s quick. The plate swings in behind the blades, stopping the nail before more than a smidge is in cutting position.

These trimmers don’t feel quite as sturdy as their larger counterparts, and the thinner handles aren’t as comfortable to use over extended grooming sessions. They’re also not going to be particularly effective on dogs that lean towards medium size, whose nails are thicker or stronger, and will require more hand strength to cut through with these clippers. These trimmers are definitely best used on dogs less than 20 pounds.

Some Amazon buyers have reported the rubber grips sliding off the handles of these clippers, but we didn’t encounter this issue in our testing.

If your dog is more than 60 pounds, then you’ll need to go large.

*At the time of publishing, the price was $13.

You could be forgiven for confusing the Millers Forge Large Dog Nail Clip for gardening equipment—if you need to trim your rose bush, it’d be more than up to the task. If your dog weighs more than 60 to 70 pounds or has particularly tough nails, this model has the necessary oomph to cut difficult nails. However, it requires a fair amount of hand strength to operate. Also, the substantial cutting force and large blades can crush rather than cut the nails of smaller dogs if you’re not careful, so get them only if you need them.

Some dog owners prefer to use a dremel or grinder to more safely remove their dog’s nails. If you prefer a safer way to remove your dog’s nails with less chance of nicking the quick, see our separate guide to the best dog nail grinders.

At first blush, Boshel’s pliers-style clippers look rather luxurious, with fat, cushy handles, a guard plate to protect your pet’s quick, and a metal nail file tucked neatly away in the end. Don’t be lured in by the frippery; these clippers are awful. They simply don’t have the oomph to cut anything more than a matchstick and are uncomfortable pretty much instantly. You should never need to use both hands to squeeze plier trimmers closed, something we had to do often. If they’re this tough fresh out of the package with sharp blades, they’ll only get worse as they dull. Hard pass.

We also spotted a number of nail clippers identical to Boshel’s, differing only with the label printed on the guard plate, like this or this. You can similarly avoid them all.

You could use Millers Forge Dog Nail Scissors on either dogs or cats ... but probably don’t want to. The metal handles are quite uncomfortable virtually immediately, and I also couldn’t get enough torque to cut through a single skewer with regularity. Unless the nail in question is very petite, these scissors create a very real danger of crushing instead of cutting due to the force required to close them.

If your dog is toy-sized (yes, that’s an actual category), you might consider the Millers Forge Cat/Bird Claw Clipper. The 45-degree angle of the blades makes them maneuverable around tiny feet, and they cut well. However, the overall diminutive size of the scissors makes them awkward for pet owners with larger hands, and the handles have a tendency to overlap during use. They’re not nearly as well-built or comfortable as our runner-up.

The guillotine-style trimmer from Millers Forge is very easy to use and quite comfortable, but it comes with some serious drawbacks, especially for larger animals. Your pet’s nail goes through a loop where it is then sliced by a blade hitting it at a perpendicular angle—just like an actual guillotine. Because the nail is fully encircled by the metal loop, it’s difficult for your pet to yank their foot back if they get scared or you’ve strayed too close to the quick. Also, the blade can become embedded in the nail if you don’t muster up quite enough energy to push it all the way through, which is enough to make both you and your furry pal freak out. A guillotine cutter is a good choice for smaller pets, but we can’t recommend it for any medium-size animal or larger.

The Millers Forge Professional Nail Clip is the best tool to trim your dog’s nails. Every professional groomer and vet we talked to recommended the brand by name, and the company’s medium clipper is sharp, affordable, and suitable for most dogs.

Overgrown nails can hurt dogs because they can make it harder for the animal to walk. The long nails can push into the ground, forcing the animal’s toes to spread out, a condition known as “splayed toes”. This can reduce traction, which can lead to accidents when your doggo goes zooming after the mailman and loses its footing. Long term, it may cause nerve damage. Overgrown nails can also get caught on rugs and uneven sidewalks, tearing the nail in the process. And longer nails will curl under the toes and may become impacted and infected.

Nail clipping should be pain free as long as pet owners take small, quick cuts to the outer shell. But it will sting for a moment if you cut your dog’s nails past the quick (the nail’s blood supply). In that case, you can apply Miracle Care Kwik Stop Styptic to quickly stop the bleeding and ease the pain. And regularly trimming your dog’s nails makes the quick recede, which reduces the risk of injury and makes future maintenance easier.

If they’ll tolerate it, it’s better to grind your dog’s nails because you can’t accidentally cut too much. But since many dogs don’t like the sound or sensation of nail grinders, clippers are another fine choice.

Melissa Andrews, groomer, Creature Comforts Inn, phone interview, June 21, 2017

Nadia Oxford, former groomer’s assistant, email interview, June 23, 2017

Stephanie Dalrymple, DVM, Oak Grove Animal Hospital, phone interview, June 24, 2017

Eva Welch, DVM, Healing Paws Veterinary Hospital, interview, June 21, 2017

by Kaitlyn Wells and Susan Arendt

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