A skid steer looks like a steel box on four small wheels with a bucket in front and two lift arms running back along either side of the cab to a hinge behind the operator's head. It is short, upright and roughly six feet wide. The giveaway is the door: you get in over the front of the machine, stepping on the bucket, because the arms block both sides.
The outline: arms that fold back past your ears
Stand in front of one and you see a bucket, then two heavy arms rising on the outside of a narrow cab and running back to a pivot behind it. Nothing swings, nothing articulates in the middle, and the wheels sit at the corners with no visible steering linkage. That silhouette belongs to no other machine on the lot.
You enter over the bucket, and that is deliberate
The cab has one door, at the front, and a safety bar you pull down across your lap before anything moves. Lowering the bucket flat to the ground gives you the step. It feels odd once and then never again, and it is the quickest way to tell a photograph of a skid steer from a photograph of a small wheel loader.
Next to a track loader, a backhoe or a mini excavator
A compact track loader is the same body on rubber tracks instead of wheels. A backhoe is a tractor with a loader in front and a digging arm behind. A mini excavator has an upper house that spins on a ring and no bucket at the front at all. If the frame is rigid, boxy and wheeled, you are looking at a skid steer.
Size shows in the frame, not the sticker
Yards stock small, mid and large frames. The small ones stand about waist high at the bonnet and slip through a garden gate; the large ones are a head taller with visibly fatter tyres and a deeper counterweight at the back. Day hire across those classes commonly runs $250 to $400 before attachments.
Questions people ask about what does a skid steer look like
Is a skid steer the same thing as a Bobcat?
No. Bobcat is one maker among several whose name stuck to the whole machine type. Walk a lot and you will see half a dozen badges on machines of the same shape and much the same behaviour, so choose by frame size and by wheels or tracks rather than by name.
How wide is a skid steer?
The common mid frame class is around six feet wide at the tyres, with the bucket a little wider. Small frame machines get under four feet, which is what makes them the answer for a back garden with a side passage.
Can I tell the size from a photograph?
Not reliably, because they are all the same shape. Compare the machine to the operator's head in the cab, or ask the yard for the operating weight, which is the number that actually tells you what it will lift and what will tow it.