Best Home Water Filtration System – Recommended Water filters
It’s important to know what, if any, contaminants are in your water before you buy a filter. Then you can match the filter to the problem. Also consider how much water you consume vs. how much effort and disruption to your daily routine you’re willing to tolerate. Generally, the more contaminants you need to remove, the more complicated the filter, though there are trade-offs to every choice.
Our top picks tend to be excellent at removing those impurities their makers claim they remove. Don’t forget installation costs, which could be $150 to $300 for an undersink or reverse-osmosis system.
The Ratings rank filters within a type by performance.
In our lab tests, Water filters are rated on multiple criteria, such as those listed below.
- Lead removal: Lead removal indicates the percentage of lead that was removed by each filter.
- Flow rate: Flow rate is how fast a gallon of water filtered through the cartridge. The criteria for flow rate scores differ between different types of filters. Faucet-mount, countertop, and undersink models have the same criterion; carafes and reverse osmosis models each have their own.
- Clogging: Clogging measures how well the filter retains its flow rate over time and whether it stopped flowing completely before its claimed life span.
Home Water Filtration System – Best Water filter Pitcher
Features & Specs | |
---|---|
NSF certified for lead removal | No |
NSF certified for organic contaminants removal | No |
Filter cost | 60 |
Filter-life indicator | Yes |


Home Water Filtration System – Best Faucet-mounted water filters
Features & Specs | |
---|---|
NSF certified for lead removal | Yes |
NSF certified for organic contaminants removal | No |
Filter cost | 72 |
Filter-life indicator | No |


Home Water Filtration System – Best Countertop water filters
Features & Specs | |
---|---|
NSF certified for lead removal | Yes |
NSF certified for organic contaminants removal | Yes |
Filter cost | 217 |
Filter-life indicator | Yes |


We buy and test thousands of products every year to generate reviews and ratings to help consumers, support our investigative journalism and trusted consumer guidance, and advocate for consumer-friendly marketplace practices. Before any product even enters one of the dozens of labs we considerable research — gathering data about products and services, consumer demand in the marketplace, and what our members care about most. Editorial, technical, and research staff then scrutinize that material, along with suggestions from our members, to develop our testing protocols and schedule.
Our experts use only state-of-the-art testing equipment, along with some equipment designed by our engineers — since the actual tests are based not only on government and industry standards but also on standards our specialists develop to recreate the experience you’ll have with the product. Sometimes our test methods become part of an industry’s standards. And sometimes individual companies will work to improve their own competitive advantage by meeting our testing standards for everyday-use cases in their own quality assurance departments.