The best clothes drying racks for an apartment

Two square feet of floor is roughly a bath mat. That is the entire footprint, and it still takes 16 feet of line, because the tiers go up rather than out.

The 4.3 inch folded depth is the number that matters in a rental. That fits behind a door or between a washer and a wall, which a gullwing rack folded to 8 or 10 inches does not.

The trade-off is bar length. Eleven short bars suit shirts, underwear and socks; a bath towel hung full-width will drape over two tiers and slow both of them down.

Open, this is nine and a half square feet - about the size of a two-seat sofa laid on the floor. That is the price of doing a whole load at once, and in a studio it is a real price.

46 feet of line is enough for a standard washer load with the shirts spaced rather than crammed, which is the difference between four hours and nine.

The wings fold down when you only need the middle section, so it can run at half width on a normal day and full width on laundry day.

Three square feet open, and the accordion frame collapses to something you can carry one-handed. At 4.5 lb it moves from bathroom to bedroom without a second thought.

The 32 lb rating is the lowest of the standing racks here, and it is honest rather than stingy: one washer load of shirts is nowhere near 32 lb wet, but a load of wet towels can be.

Amazon does not publish a linear-foot figure for this one, so we do not print one. Bar count and spacing are what you can see in the listing photos.

Six feet wide with both wings out. It is the widest rack here and it buys you 59 feet of line, 13 more than the Honey-Can-Do gullwing.

The load rating does not scale with the line, though: 33 lb against the Honey-Can-Do's 50. More line, less weight per foot - fine for shirts, tighter for towels.

The 20 windproof hooks are the detail that makes it worth using on a balcony, where an unhooked garment ends up on someone else's railing.

Stainless is the material answer to a bathroom. Chrome plating and powder coat both fail at a scratch; stainless does not have a coating to lose.

The 3.5 inch rod spacing is published, and it is the one spec that maps directly to drying time. Wider gaps mean air reaches both faces of a garment instead of one.

Sakugi does not publish a load capacity. We are not going to estimate one from the frame photos, so this is the rack you buy for material and spacing rather than for a weight number.

Six inches deep. Nothing else here comes close, because it leans on a wall rather than standing on its own base.

The teepee mode over a bath or a sink is the genuinely clever part: drips go where drips should go, which no free-standing rack solves.

Whitmor publishes neither a load capacity nor a linear-foot figure for this rack. On a leaning frame, where load is transferred into a wall at an angle, the missing weight rating is the one we would most want.