Best Cordless Drills in 2026: 6 Picks by Battery Platform

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Our quick picks

Ranked by what each one is best at, not by a score we made up. Ratings are what the product showed on Amazon when we last checked — how we rank.

Everything below is the why: the specifications that settle the choice, and where each pick falls down.

Here is the thing nobody tells you when you buy your first cordless drill: the drill is the cheap part of the decision. What you are actually buying is a battery platform, and once you own two batteries and a charger for one brand, every future tool purchase — impact driver, circular saw, leaf blower, work light, inflator — is heavily biased toward that same brand, because the bare tool costs a fraction of the kit. Ten years and eight tools later, switching brands means buying an entire second ecosystem of batteries and chargers.

That is why this guide treats the platform as the primary decision and the drill as the secondary one. It is also why the torque numbers on the box deserve much less of your attention than they get. Every manufacturer measures output differently — DEWALT quotes unit watts out, Makita quotes maximum torque in inch-pounds, Ryobi quotes inch-pounds too but under its own test conditions — and none of those figures are directly comparable to each other. A drill advertising a bigger number is not reliably stronger than one advertising a smaller one.

What does reliably differ: whether the motor is brushless, whether there is a two-speed gearbox, how many clutch positions it has, whether it has a hammer mode, how heavy it is, and how good the batteries are. Those are the things the six drills below actually differ on. Every one is a current Amazon listing rated 4.6 stars or better, and we have written what each one is truly for rather than restating the marketing. We do not publish prices, because they change constantly — follow the links for what each costs today.

Quick picks

• Best overall: Makita XFD131 18V LXT brushless — the balance of power, weight and platform depth that makes it hard to regret.
• Best first drill: DEWALT DCD771C2 kit with 100-piece accessory set — everything a new homeowner actually needs in one box.
• Best for masonry and heavy work: Milwaukee 2804-22 M18 Fuel hammer drill — the one that keeps going when the job gets unreasonable.
• Best DIY platform: RYOBI ONE+ HP 18V brushless hammer drill — the cheapest route into an actually enormous tool range.
• Best for cabinets and tight spaces: Bosch GSR12V-140FCB22 Flexiclick — a 12V drill that changes shape to get where others cannot.
• Best compact pro drill: DEWALT 20V MAX XR brushless compact — full capability in a much shorter body.

Safety first: the four ways a cordless drill hurts people

A drill is not a dangerous tool in the way a chainsaw is, which is exactly why people get injured by them. The hazards are unglamorous and easy to prevent.

Kickback and wrist injuries

The most common serious drill injury is not to the drill bit’s target — it is a sprained or broken wrist. When a large bit binds in the workpiece, the drill stops and the body keeps rotating, and a modern brushless drill has enough torque to twist out of a one-handed grip instantly. This is worst with hole saws, spade bits and auger bits in wood, and with large bits in metal as the bit breaks through. Use the side handle if the drill comes with one, keep your elbow in rather than extended, brace against something solid, and never drill a large hole one-handed from a ladder. If your drill has an electronic clutch or anti-kickback feature, leave it on.

What is behind the wall

Drilling into a live cable or a water pipe is the failure that turns a ten-minute job into a rewire or a flood. Before you drill into any wall, use a combined cable and pipe detector, and treat the areas directly above and below sockets and switches as cable routes by default because that is where vertical runs usually are. If you are drilling deep into a wall you do not know, set a depth stop. In an older house, assume nothing about where wiring goes.

Eyes, hair and gloves

Safety glasses, every time, and not sunglasses — drilling into masonry throws dust and fragments upward, and metal swarf comes off hot and sharp. Loose sleeves, long hair, cords, jewelry and anything dangling can be caught by a rotating chuck and pulled in with real force. Loose-fitting gloves are worse than no gloves on a drill for precisely this reason, which is the opposite of the advice for most other tools.

Lithium batteries

Use the charger that came with the tool, or the manufacturer’s own. Do not charge a battery that has been physically damaged, has swollen, or has been dropped hard, and do not charge one that is still hot from heavy use — give it time to cool. Store batteries indoors at moderate temperature and part-charged rather than in a freezing shed or a hot car boot, and do not leave a pack on a charger for weeks at a time. A battery that gets hot, smells, or deforms goes outside onto a non-combustible surface, not into a bin and not back on the charger.

Drill vs impact driver vs hammer drill — the distinction that saves you money

These three get confused constantly, and buying the wrong one is the most common mistake in this category.

• A drill/driver spins a chuck at controlled speed with an adjustable clutch. It drills holes and drives screws. It is the tool to own first.
• An impact driver has a 1/4-inch hex socket and delivers rapid rotational hammer blows. It drives long screws and bolts far better than a drill and with much less strain on your wrist, but it is poor at precise drilling and cannot take round-shank bits. It is the second tool to buy, not the first.
• A hammer drill is a drill/driver with an added forward-and-back hammering action for masonry. It will get anchor holes into brick, block and concrete. It is not the same as a rotary hammer (SDS), which uses a piston mechanism and a different bit shank and is what you want for anything larger or more frequent than the occasional wall anchor.

Almost everybody should own a drill/driver. Most people with a house should eventually own an impact driver too. Hammer mode is worth having if you have brick or block walls; if your walls are timber and plasterboard, you will use it approximately never.

The six cordless drills worth buying

1. Makita XFD131 18V LXT brushless — best overall

The XFD131 is the drill we would put in most people’s hands. It is a half-inch brushless drill/driver with a mechanical two-speed transmission running 0–500 rpm in low and 0–1,900 rpm in high, and Makita rates the brushless motor at 440 inch-pounds of maximum torque. The two-speed gearbox is the part that matters more than the torque figure: low range gives you the grunt and control for big holes and stubborn screws, high range gives you the speed that actually drills cleanly in wood and metal. A single-speed drill has to compromise on one or the other.

Makita’s point about the brushless motor being electronically controlled is not marketing filler either. Electronic control is what lets the tool manage its own current draw and heat, which is why brushless drills hold speed under load instead of bogging down, and why they get noticeably more work out of the same battery. At 4.8 stars, owners consistently describe this as the drill that does not surprise them.

The LXT platform is the other half of the argument: it is one of the largest 18V ranges in existence, so the batteries you buy here will power tools you have not thought of buying yet.

What you give up: a full-size half-inch brushless drill is a real handful in a kitchen cabinet or a loft space — if most of your work is in awkward corners, a compact 12V is the better tool and this one will annoy you. Makita batteries and bare tools are priced at the professional end, so the platform is not the cheapest one to grow. And there is no hammer mode here: for masonry you want the hammer-drill version or a different tool entirely.

Check the Makita XFD131 on Amazon →

2. DEWALT DCD771C2 kit with 100-piece accessory set — best first drill

This is the best-rated product in the whole category at 4.9 stars, and the reason is not that it is the best drill. It is that it is the right package. The DCD771C2 is a compact, lightweight brushed drill/driver whose motor DEWALT rates at 300 unit watts out, and the kit pairs it with a 100-piece accessory set covering the drill bits, driver bits and holders that a new homeowner otherwise discovers they do not have at the exact moment they need them.

For hanging shelves, assembling furniture, fitting blinds, building a raised bed and the general run of household jobs, a brushed drill of this class is completely sufficient, and it has the enormous advantage of putting you on the 20V MAX platform — the biggest cordless range in North America — for the least money. If you are buying a drill because you own a home rather than because you build things for a living, start here.

The part that annoys people: brushed motors run hotter, wear out their brushes eventually, and get less work from each charge than brushless ones. This drill will bog down in work a brushless drill shrugs off — large hole saws, long lag screws, dense hardwood — and the batteries in a starter kit are the small-capacity ones, so expect shorter runtime than the spec sheet of the platform suggests. There is no hammer mode. And be realistic about the accessory set: 100 pieces of included bits are convenience-grade, not the bits you would buy for repeated work in steel.

Check the DEWALT DCD771C2 kit on Amazon →

3. Milwaukee 2804-22 M18 Fuel hammer drill — best for masonry and heavy use

If your work involves brick, block or concrete, or if you simply want the drill that stops being the limiting factor, this is it. The 2804-22 is Milwaukee’s M18 Fuel half-inch hammer drill, and the three things Milwaukee builds it around are all real: a POWERSTATE brushless motor designed specifically for this tool rather than adapted from a generic one, REDLINK PLUS electronics that communicate between tool and battery to manage load and prevent damage, and a REDLITHIUM XC5.0 high-capacity pack that does meaningfully more work per charge than the small batteries in entry kits.

That tool-battery communication is the part worth understanding. On a cheap platform, the tool draws until something gives. On this one, the electronics throttle before the motor cooks or the cells are damaged, which is why professional users get years out of them under abuse that would kill a budget drill in a season. At 4.8 stars with the review volume of a trade standard, the reputation is earned.

Where it disappoints: it is heavy and it is expensive, and both are consequences of what it is. If you are hanging pictures and assembling flat-pack, you will be carrying weight you never use and paying for headroom you never reach. M18 batteries are among the pricier packs on the market. And hammer mode still is not a rotary hammer — for repeated large anchor holes in concrete, an SDS tool remains the right answer.

Check the Milwaukee 2804-22 on Amazon →

4. RYOBI ONE+ HP 18V brushless hammer drill — best DIY platform

RYOBI’s ONE+ range is the strongest argument in the whole category for thinking about platforms rather than drills. The system covers an unusually wide spread of tools — not just the obvious saws and drivers but inflators, glue guns, fans, misting kits, radios, lawn tools, cleaners — and every one of them runs the same battery you buy with this drill. For a household that accumulates tools gradually, that breadth is worth more than a few percent of torque.

The drill itself is a proper modern tool: a brushless ONE+ HP half-inch hammer drill with a two-speed gearbox at 0–500 and 0–2,100 rpm, a 24-position clutch and a hammer mode that will handle concrete, brick and block. Twenty-four clutch positions is a useful number — it is the difference between driving a screw flush into softwood and driving it straight through, and cheap drills often give you a fraction of that resolution.

The drawbacks: RYOBI is built for the serious DIY user, not the trade, and it shows in the details — more plastic, a chuck that is good rather than excellent, and durability that is fine for weekend use rather than daily site abuse. The very breadth of the ONE+ range also means quality varies a lot between tools within it; the drill being good does not mean every ONE+ tool is. And at 4.7 stars it is well liked, but if you use a drill all day, the professional platforms above are the better long-term buy.

Check the RYOBI ONE+ HP hammer drill on Amazon →

5. Bosch GSR12V-140FCB22 Flexiclick — best for cabinets and tight spaces

The Flexiclick is the most interesting tool on this list and the one most likely to be the right tool for someone reading a drill guide. It is a 12V Max drill/driver with a modular front end: the head detaches and swaps between a keyless chuck attachment, a locking bit holder, an offset head and a right-angle head. In practice that means one small tool that can drive a screw in the back corner of a base cabinet, into a joist from a loft crawl, or inside a stud bay where a full-size drill physically does not fit.

Anyone who installs kitchens, fits furniture, works on boats or campers, or does electrical and plumbing work in existing buildings will recognize the problem it solves. The alternative is owning three separate tools plus a fistful of adapters, and the adapters add length at exactly the moment you have none to spare. At 4.7 stars with two batteries in the box, it is the specialist pick that earns its place.

The catch: it is a 12V tool, and 12V means what it says — this is not the drill for boring 2-inch holes through joists or driving 6-inch structural screws, and asking it to do that will disappoint you. The modular heads are one more set of parts to keep track of and lose. Bosch’s 12V platform is good but much smaller than DEWALT’s or RYOBI’s, so it is a poor choice as your only battery system. Buy it as a second, precision tool rather than a first drill.

Check the Bosch Flexiclick on Amazon →

6. DEWALT 20V MAX XR brushless compact — best compact pro drill

DEWALT appears twice in this guide, and the two entries are not variations on a theme. The DCD771C2 above is a brushed starter kit for someone who owns no tools. This is the brushless XR compact, and it exists for someone who already knows what they want: a short-bodied drill that still has pro-level output, a high-speed transmission, a half-inch metal ratcheting chuck with strong bit retention, and tool-tracking compatibility for people who lose tools on jobsites or need to know which van something is in.

Compact brushless drills are, for a lot of trades, the sweet spot. You give up some absolute capability against a full-size drill and you get a tool that fits between studs, does not wear your shoulder out overhead, and still drives a 3-inch screw without complaint. At 4.8 stars on the largest cordless platform in the market, it is the easy recommendation for anyone already holding DEWALT batteries.

Where it falls short: there is no hammer mode, so masonry is out. Compact means a shorter gearbox and less leverage than the full-size XR drills, so for the heaviest boring work it is the wrong DEWALT. The tool-tracking feature is only useful if you actually set it up and use the app — most home users never will, and you are paying something for it either way. And as always with kit versus bare tool: check which batteries are included, because the difference in runtime between a compact pack and a high-capacity one is larger than any difference between these drills.

Check the DEWALT 20V MAX XR compact on Amazon →

Also worth considering: Milwaukee M12 Fuel 2504-22

If you want Milwaukee’s electronics and build quality in something you can hold all day, the M12 Fuel half-inch hammer drill is the one to look at. It is a 12V subcompact hammer drill kit rated 4.8 stars, and the M12 range has grown into a serious platform in its own right — particularly strong for installation, automotive and mechanical work. Note that M12 and M18 are entirely separate battery systems that do not interchange, so owning one does not get you into the other.

What owners complain about: as with all 12V tools, you are trading capability for size, and a subcompact hammer drill in concrete is doing the job slowly rather than easily. Running both M12 and M18 means two sets of batteries and chargers, which is a real cost that people underestimate.

Check the Milwaukee M12 Fuel on Amazon →

What actually matters on the spec sheet

• Brushless or brushed. Brushless buys you runtime, a smaller and lighter body for the same output, and a motor with no brushes to wear. It does not double the power, whatever the packaging implies. For occasional household use, brushed is fine; for regular use, brushless pays for itself in battery life alone.
• Two-speed gearbox. Non-negotiable in our view. Low range for torque and control, high range for clean drilling. A single-speed drill is a compromise you will notice.
• Clutch positions. More positions means finer control over how deep a screw goes before the clutch slips. Twenty or more is good; a handful is not enough to be useful.
• Chuck. A half-inch metal ratcheting chuck holds bits better and takes larger shanks than a 3/8-inch plastic one. Bits slipping under load is one of the most common frustrations with cheap drills.
• Battery capacity, in amp-hours. This affects your actual experience more than any motor spec. Two small packs give you less total work than one large one, and a kit’s included batteries are usually the small ones.
• Weight and length. Read the numbers, because a drill you dread getting out is a drill you do not use. Overhead work and cabinet work punish weight and length far more than you expect.
• What you can ignore: the headline torque figure as a cross-brand comparison, the number of accessories in a bundle, and LED brightness claims.

Frequently asked questions

Is 12V enough, or do I need 18V/20V?

For assembling furniture, fitting blinds, hanging shelves in timber and general light work, a good 12V brushless drill is enough and much nicer to hold. You will feel the limit when you start boring large holes, driving long structural screws, or working in hardwood and masonry. If you can only own one drill and you own a house, 18V/20V is the safer choice; if you already have one big drill, a 12V as the second tool is one of the best upgrades in the workshop.

Are 18V and 20V MAX different?

Functionally, no. It is a naming convention: some brands quote the nominal voltage of a five-cell lithium pack, others quote its maximum voltage at full charge. The same battery gets called 18V by one manufacturer and 20V MAX by another. Do not choose between platforms on that number.

Can I use another brand’s batteries with an adapter?

Third-party adapters exist and we would not use them. They bypass the communication between tool and battery that manages current and temperature, which is precisely the protection that keeps both alive, and they will void warranties on both ends. If you are committed enough to two platforms to want an adapter, buy the second battery.

Do I need a hammer drill?

Only if you drill into brick, block or concrete. Hammer mode adds a little weight and cost and does nothing for wood, metal or plasterboard. If your walls are masonry — which in older housing stock and in much of the world they are — it is worth having. If you have never once drilled a wall that fought back, you do not need it.

How long do the batteries last before they need replacing?

Lithium packs degrade with cycles and with heat, not with calendar age alone, so the honest answer is that it depends heavily on use and storage. What you can control: avoid charging hot packs, avoid storing them fully discharged or in extreme temperatures, and avoid running them flat repeatedly. Buying into a large platform also means replacement packs remain available for years, which is another quiet argument for the big brands.

Should I buy a kit or a bare tool?

Kit for your first tool on a platform — you need the batteries and charger anyway, and a kit is almost always cheaper than the parts. Bare tool for every subsequent addition, provided you already have enough battery capacity to keep working. This is the mechanism that locks you into a platform, and it is worth understanding it before you pick one rather than after.

So what should you buy?

Pick the platform first. If you want the best single drill and a deep professional range, the Makita XFD131 is the one we would buy. If you own no tools and a house that keeps producing jobs, the DEWALT DCD771C2 kit is the honest starting point and puts you on the largest platform there is. For masonry and hard use, the Milwaukee 2804-22. For the widest range of cordless toys at DIY prices, RYOBI ONE+. And if your problem is access rather than power, the Bosch Flexiclick solves something none of the others do.

Then spend your remaining money on batteries and decent bits rather than on a bigger torque number. A mid-range drill with good bits and a charged high-capacity pack will out-work a flagship with blunt bits and a dead battery every time.

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