Short answer: a floor jack and a trolley jack are the same tool. "Floor jack" is the American name, "trolley jack" is the British and Australian name, and "service jack" is what US shop-equipment makers often print on the carton. All three describe a wheeled hydraulic jack with a long chassis, a lifting arm and a lever handle, which you roll under a vehicle and pump. There is no spec, no mechanism and no capacity class that separates them.
Why there are two names at all
The wheeled hydraulic jack arrived in American and British garages at roughly the same time and picked up a different descriptive noun in each. The US name describes where it lives: on the floor, as opposed to the bottle jack or the scissor jack you keep in the trunk. The British name describes how it moves: it is a trolley, something you wheel. Neither is a technical term, and neither was ever standardized.
You now meet both on the same screen, because marketplace listings are written once and sold everywhere. A seller who wants the listing to surface for shoppers in Manchester and Memphis puts both words in the title. That is the whole mechanism behind the confusion — not two competing designs.
The one case where the vocabulary does tell you something is the review text. A jack whose listing talks about kilograms, millimeters and MOT testing was written for a market where the car fleet, the driveway surfaces and the dealer network are all different. The specifications are still real; the buying advice around them may not apply to you.
The full naming map
| Name you will see | Where it is used | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Floor jack | United States, Canada | Wheeled hydraulic jack, long chassis, lever handle |
| Trolley jack | United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand | The same tool |
| Service jack | US shop-equipment makers (Hein-Werner, Sunex) | The same tool, usually the heavier-duty end of it |
| Garage jack | Informal, both markets | The same tool |
| Car jack | Informal, any market | Ambiguous — can mean this, a bottle jack or the scissor jack in your trunk |
| Bottle jack | Both markets | A DIFFERENT tool: vertical ram, tall, small footprint, no wheels |
| Scissor jack | Both markets | A DIFFERENT tool: the folding mechanical jack supplied with the car |
Two rows in that table are the ones worth your attention. "Car jack" is the genuinely ambiguous term — someone saying it may mean any of the five tools above, which is why it is the phrase that produces the most crossed wires in a parts-counter conversation. And "bottle jack" and "scissor jack" are real, different machines, with real consequences for what you can safely do. Floor jack vs bottle jack and floor jack vs scissor jack are the comparisons that do contain a substantive difference.
The four specs that actually differ
Because the name tells you nothing, you are left comparing jacks on their published figures. Four of them decide whether a given jack suits your car, and they vary enormously inside both vocabularies.
1. Minimum saddle height
How thick the jack is when fully down, and therefore whether it fits under your car at all. Across the four picks above the published figures run from 3-1/2 in to 5-7/8 in. That is a 2-3/8 in spread, which in this context is the difference between a usable tool and a paperweight. Measure the clearance at your own lift point before you order anything.
2. Maximum lift height
How far up the saddle goes, which decides whether your jack can raise the car high enough for a stand to fit underneath at a setting you trust. The same four jacks run from 14 in to 24.4 in. This is the spec a budget jack sacrifices first, and the one a "service jack" typically buys you most of. How high a floor jack lifts puts every published range on this site side by side.
3. Rated capacity, read correctly
2 ton and 3 ton are both ample for a car, because a jack lifts roughly a quarter to a third of a vehicle rather than all of it. The reason to buy 3 ton is usually the lift range that comes bundled with it rather than the capacity itself. The capacity guide works the arithmetic properly.
4. Chassis length and material
A longer chassis reaches further under the car, which opens up lift points a short jack cannot get to. Aluminum cuts the weight roughly in half — 56 lb for the Arcan against the steel competition — at a real price premium. Aluminum vs steel covers that trade in full.
The four picks on the numbers
| Pick | Maker's own name for it | Capacity | Lift range |
|---|---|---|---|
| BIG RED T83006 | Hydraulic Trolley Jack | 3 ton | 5-7/8 in – 20-7/8 in |
| Arcan A20019 | Aluminum Floor Jack | 3 ton | 3.75 in – 18 in |
| Pro-Lift F-767 | Low-Profile Floor Jack | 2 ton | 3-1/2 in – 14 in |
| Sunex 66035HR | High Reach Floor Jack | 3.5 ton | 3.58 in – 24.4 in |
Read the second column and then ignore it. The first and fourth columns are the purchase. On fit alone the Pro-Lift is the car jack, the Arcan is the one that spans a household's worth of vehicles, and the Hein-Werner is the truck jack — and the one that calls itself a trolley jack sits in the middle of that range, not outside it.
So does the word ever matter?
The short version
- Not for safety. Both words describe the same mechanism and the same standard applies — ASME PASE in the US.
- Not for capacity. 2 ton and 3 ton exist under both names, at the same prices.
- Not for quality. There are excellent and awful examples in both vocabularies.
- Yes for searching. If a listing you want will not surface, try the other word — US marketplaces carry imported listings titled either way.
- Yes for reading reviews. A trolley-jack review written for the UK market is about a different car fleet and different driveways.
- Yes for one detail: handle length and storage. Long-chassis service jacks are the bulkiest of the family, whatever the title says.
What to buy, once you stop worrying about the word
Measure the clearance under your own lift point. Subtract half an inch for the saddle pad and an uneven driveway. Buy a jack whose published minimum height is below that figure and whose maximum lift clears your tire with room for a stand. Then buy the stands. Nothing in that sequence changes based on whether the listing said floor jack, trolley jack or service jack.
If you want the shortlist rather than the method, best floor jacks is the ranked field and what size floor jack do I need is the sizing walk-through.