Best Harness-to-Booster Car Seats

Harnessed boosters offer a safe option for a preschooler or older child who’s not yet ready to ride in a booster seat with a vehicle seat belt. Experts say that booster readiness isn’t just a matter of your child’s weight or height.

“For booster seats, the child needs to be able to sit upright with the belt properly positioned the entire ride—no squirming or moving around,” says Ben Hoffman, MD, president of the AAP’s Council on Injury, Violence, and Poison Prevention and the author of the AAP policy on child passenger safety. Because vehicle seat belts are not locked in place, as the straps of a five-point harness are, a wiggly preschooler may ride more safely in a harness booster. (Before transitioning to using any booster in seat belt mode, make sure your child can get a proper seat belt fit with the booster seat. The shoulder belt should rest midway across their collarbone and chest, and the lap belt should sit across the upper thighs and hip bones.)  

A harnessed booster can also be helpful with a three-across car seat installation, since it’s easier to secure a child in a harness than to dig around in a narrow opening between car seats for a seat belt buckle. And harnessed booster seats can also be good if you have multiple children who have graduated out of rear-facing mode but still need to be harnessed—a harnessed booster is usually less expensive than purchasing a second convertible or all-in-one seat. 

Be sure to max out the height and/or weight (whichever comes first) of your child’s rear-facing car seat before transitioning to a forward-facing harnessed booster. CR’s experts recommend keeping children in a rear-facing car seat for as long as possible for safety. See our car seat buying guide for more information.

Consumer Reports tests harnessed-booster car seats for harnessed crash protection, ease of use, and how well they install in a variety of vehicles, as well as their ability to achieve and maintain proper seat belt fit as a booster. (See more about how we test car seats, below.) You’ll find three of our top models below.

Consumer Reports’ harnessed-booster car seat ratings have been updated with our latest test findings, revealing the seats that provide the best balance of crash protection, ease of use, fit to vehicle, and booster belt fit. 

Our fit-to-vehicle scores take into account how long parents can use the car’s built-in lower anchors (or LATCH) to install the seat vs. using the seat belt and are rated for both installation methods.

We also evaluate how the belt fits a child when these models are used as a booster seat. We evaluate this in actual vehicles—the same ones we use for our fit-to-vehicle assessments for all car seats—and we use a child-sized dummy that represents an average 6-year-old. We evaluate belt fit both after the initial positioning of the dummy in the booster and again after we simulate typical child movement.

Our crash-test protocol goes a step further than federal government requirements for car seat tests by using an actual vehicle seat that sits behind a simulated seatback, and our test has higher crash energy and speed to be more representative of current vehicles and crashes. Harnessed booster seats are evaluated in harnessed mode for their crash protection on a scale of Basic, Better, and Best.

Child seats have come a long way over the years, but proper installation is key. Consumer Reports expert Jennifer Stockburger demonstrates what to do to keep little ones safe in a car.