Best Air Purifiers of 2025
We've tested scores of models for every room. Here are the air purifiers that blew us away.
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On average, Americans spend roughly 90 percent of their lives indoors. That’s why having good-quality air inside the home is essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Owning an air purifier helps with that, offering cleaner, fresher air at the touch of a button. These clarifying devices draw in air pollutants, trap them with filters, and disseminate clean air back into your space. A HEPA filter is theoretically rated to capture at least 99.97 percent of the size of particles that dust can be.
A high-quality air purifier can come in handy if you spend a lot of time cheffin’ it up in the kitchen, if you have pets that shed, if you use cleaning products throughout the house, or even if your surfaces seem to collect a considerable amount of dust. This is particularly true if you don’t or can’t open windows to let fresh air circulate, or if the air outside isn’t the freshest to begin with, which may be the case during allergy or wildfire seasons.
When used with an activated carbon filter, an air purifier can also tackle smells, viruses, and volatile organic compounds, which is particularly helpful during natural disasters such as wildfires.
Our current ratings of more than 160 air purifiers confirm that some models are better than others. The best air purifiers can remove particles at any speed setting, says Misha Kollontai, who oversees air purifier testing for Consumer Reports. The worst air purifiers, he says, will struggle even when running at the highest speed, and produce a fair amount of noise.
Below, we provide a closer look at the top five air purifiers, listed according to the room size each is designed to cover. We designate extra-large rooms as 650 square feet or more, large rooms as 350 to 650 square feet, medium rooms as 150 to 350 square feet, and small rooms as 150 square feet or less.
For more options, explore our comprehensive air purifier ratings, where you can read about the 150-plus models we currently rate and filter them according to your needs (including price, brand, room size, and weight). To learn more about how air purifiers work, check out our air purifier buying guide.
Best Air Purifiers for Extra-Large Rooms
At 50 pounds, the Coway Airmega ProX is by far the heaviest air purifier in this roundup, but it also provides the best performance. On both higher and lower speeds, this model excels at clearing rooms of dust, pollen, and smoke. And it has the best noise scores on this list.
It accommodates indoor spaces of up to a whopping 2,126 square feet. But the ProX’s top-tier performance comes at a hefty price up front and $249 annually for filter replacements and energy costs.
Unlike many of the other air purifiers shown here, this one doesn’t have a remote control or an app. The ProX features three speeds, a filter indicator, and a dirt sensor. CR members are highly satisfied with their Coway air purifiers and give them top marks for predicted reliability.
At high speeds, dust, pollen, and smoke are no match for the pricey AirDoctor AD5500. Not only does it excel at clearing the air, but it’s also easy to use. Noise, however, is an issue. It’s loud when operating at high speeds. At a lower speed, the noise isn’t as bad, but it only does a middling job at removing airborne particles. This particular model is one of the most expensive in our ratings, and the second most expensive to operate, roughly $332 per year, to be exact. CR members who own AirDoctor units give the brand high marks for predicted reliability and owner satisfaction.
Best Air Purifier for a Large Room
The portable Blue Pure 311i+ Max from Blueair features an indicator light to alert you when you need to change or clean the filter. It also has a dirt sensor and four speeds. On its higher setting, it’s terrific at removing dust, pollen, and smoke, but expect a bit of noise. Try it on low and you’ll have more quiet while still experiencing near top-level results.
This model is designed for use in a large space of 350 to 650 square feet and costs about $128 a year to maintain. Because it weighs just 8 pounds, it can be easily moved from room to room. CR members find Blueair air purifiers to be highly reliable, and they’re very satisfied with their purchases.
Best Air Purifier for a Medium-Sized Room
The Honeywell AirGenius 5 HFD-320 is one of the few models we test with a washable main filter, which saves you money because you don’t have to buy replacement HEPA filters. The machine, which has an estimated annual cost of only $88, is good at removing smoke and dust particles at its lower speed and does so with relatively low noise. It performs better in our particle reduction test at higher speeds, but expect a bit more noise with those results. Honeywell air purifiers receive a so-so mark for owner satisfaction and an above-average score for predicted reliability in CR’s member surveys.
Best Air Purifier for a Small Room
You’d be hard-pressed to find a better-performing air purifier for a small home office or bedroom than this model from GermGuardian. This unit is just one of two models in the small room category of 150 square feet or less that excels at removing dust, pollen, and smoke at both high and low speeds. What’s more, the unit is easy to use and can be controlled from a smartphone using the Guardian Technologies mobile app. Its major drawback is its price. This unit is three times as much as the Blueair Blue Pure Mini Max and four times the amount of the Lasko FF305, which are just below it in the ratings and receive better scores for predicted reliability and owner satisfaction.
How We Pick the Best Air Purifiers
Our engineers find that many of the models we run in our labs can ace our tests at high speed with no problem. It’s often how much debris these machines can capture when not on full blast that’s a challenge. The best air purifiers in our ratings are capable of clearing the air even on low settings—and they do it without making a racket. What’s more, they feature an intuitive design, so you don’t need a PhD in particle physics to operate them. And it’s a breeze to move them from room to room, maneuver the controls, and change filters. We also fold a brand’s owner satisfaction and reliability ratings into a model’s Overall Score.
How CR Tests Air Purifiers
To test air purifiers, we inject smoke and dust particles into a sealed chamber to assess how well each model removes particles between 0.1 and 1 micron. (Human hair has a diameter of roughly 100 microns.) Using a particle counter, we measure the change in particle concentration as the air purifier runs for 15 minutes at the highest speed and then at a lower speed. And because these machines are designed to run day and night, we measure noise levels in decibels at every speed and calculate annual operating costs for filter replacements and energy to run the machine 24 hours a day.
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