To understand how dishwashers went from being about as loud as a vacuum cleaner to being so quiet they wouldn’t get kicked out of a library, we first need to talk about dBA (decibel A-weighting). Most stainless-steel dishwashers will have dBA levels below 50, which you won’t be able to hear from outside the room, and inside the room it should only be a low white-noise sound. Reviewed / / Emily Northrop / Getty Images / Enis Aksoy / Nadiinko / Rudzhan Nagiev / Bogdan Populov / vectorwin / bsd555 Decibel A-weighting: The best tool for measuring loudness However, if you want to know why some dishwashers make less noise than others, we first have to start with how that noise is measured. If you want to skip all the science and get to the recommendations of the best quiet dishwashers that also clean well, we’ve got you covered. We’ve tested hundreds of dishwashers in the Reviewed labs, and one question we've pondered often is “What is considered a quiet dishwasher?” While we don't measure it ourselves due to the specialized space required for accurate readings, we do consider it as a data point for every dishwasher we test.

It’s not completely silent, but also not loud enough to wake someone up. Where older models averaged about 60 decibels-just below the sound level of a vacuum-modern dishwashers average between 40 to 50 decibels, which is about as loud as typing on a keyboard. More recently, however, the dishwasher space has changed. If you’ve ever wondered why an old dishwasher was almost as loud as your garbage disposal, it’s because it was using one. Very few had any features designed to muffle the sounds coming from inside, and the sounds themselves were louder due to their built-in macerators.

Twenty or 30 years ago, dishwashers were far from quiet.

Dba decibel scale