Best Booster Seat High Chairs From Our Lab Tests

The best booster seat high chairs are safe, easy to clean, and easy to store. When you’re shopping for a booster seat, look for the following features. 

A safety harness: Most booster seats come equipped with a three-point safety harness, which crosses over the lap. CR experts prefer a five-point harness (which has shoulder straps), like the ones that come with full-sized high chairs, but these are hard to find. Only one booster in our tests (the Fisher-Price Space Saver) comes with a five-point harness. 

Minimal moving parts or crevices: Nooks and crannies in the design of the tray or seat can be traps for crumbs and grime and prove difficult to clean.

A dishwasher-safe tray: Booster seats score highly in our tests if they include a tray that can easily fit in a dishwasher (and bonus points for a separate tray insert). This makes cleaning a piece of cake. 

Portability: Ideally, you’ll be able to easily carry or store your booster seat for travel or meals out of the house, so a carry handle, a carry bag, or an easy fold can all be useful features. 

Here’s what Muratore recommends keeping in mind whenever you use a booster seat with your baby or young child.

• Follow the recommended usage guidelines in the booster seat’s manual: Babies should only use a booster seat once they’ve developed the ability to sit up without support.
• Never leave your child unattended in a booster seat.
• Always use the included harness system when your child is in the booster seat.
• Only strap a booster seat to a sturdy dining chair and never to a folding chair.
• Only use the included straps to attach the booster seat to the chair.
• Watch for table or counter proximity, as a child could use their legs to push off the surface and tip the chair that the booster seat is strapped to.

CR’s expert product testers spend several weeks testing high chairs in our onsite labs for three key factors: safety, ease of cleaning, and ease of use. 

Safety: Our safety tests are based on the same standards used by the federal government and include evaluations of the restraint system as well as static load assessments to make sure the seat can hold more than its stated weight capacity without sagging or collapsing. For boosters specifically, we also test to ensure that the straps supplied with the chair will hold it securely to a dining chair.

Ease of use: Our testers evaluate how easy it is to adjust the harness, fold and unfold the chair, remove and replace the seat cover, adjust the seatback (if it reclines), and remove and replace the food tray or tray cover. 

Ease of cleaning: We evaluate how easy or difficult the chair is to clean by looking at all its parts, including the materials it’s made of, the design of the food tray, the frame of the chair, whether it has a machine-washable seat pad (or no seat pad at all), and how the seat pad is configured in the chair.

At CR, we hold baby gear to the highest standards—because nothing matters more than your child’s safety. Our testing is rigorous, independent, and free from outside influence. We buy everything we test, and we don’t accept advertising. Our nonprofit mission is to champion fairness, safety, and transparency, and to help every family make confident, informed decisions about the products they use. Support our efforts by becoming a member or donating to our mission today.