Best Air Purifiers of 2023

Do you cook on a stove or use cleaning products? Do you own a pet that sheds or have people in your home who often get sick? Do your surfaces collect dust? Then the air in your home might not be as squeaky clean as you think it is. This is particularly true if you rarely open the windows to let fresh air circulate, or if the air out there isn’t the freshest to begin with. And that may be okay if it doesn’t bother you. But if you often find yourself coughing or feeling itchy-eyed, or simply wish the air were more pristine, then you might consider an air purifier.

An air purifier can remove very small particles, such as dust, pollen, and particulate matter that’s in smoke. It can also tackle viruses and suspicious-smelling volatile compounds. The best air purifiers can do this at any speed, says Misha Kollontai, who oversees air-purifier testing at Consumer Reports. And the worst, he says, will struggle, even when it’s at the highest speed, “accompanied by a lot of noise.”

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 and at a reasonable annual cost. What’s more, they feature an intuitive design, so you don’t need a PhD in particle science to operate them. And it’s a breeze to move them from room to room, maneuver the controls, and change filters.

How Consumer Reports Tests Air Purifiers
To test air purifiers, we inject smoke and dust particles into a sealed chamber and assess how well each model removes particles between 0.1 and 1 micron. (Human hair has a diameter of 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 use to run the machine 24 hours a day.

Here’s a look at the five top-scoring air purifiers we’ve tested, in alphabetical order. For more options, explore our comprehensive air purifier ratings, where you can read about more than 100 models and filter them according to your needs (including by price, brand, and weight). To learn more about how air purifiers work, check out our air purifier buying guide.