How We Chose the Winners of Our 2026 Best New Picks Awards

A grid collage of eight photos showing various consumer products being tested, including Palmolive dish soap, a Baratza coffee grinder, headphones, and a hair straightener. A central circular badge reads

At Wirecutter, our goal is simple: to recommend what really matters.

You can find the results of our rigorous research and testing in each one of our 1,300 (and counting) guides covering everything from action cameras to yoga mats, each of which we regularly review and update for accuracy and helpfulness.

Publishing and updating a Wirecutter guide is a thorough and monthslong — sometimes yearslong — process. At the core of this process is rigorous and completely independent testing by our journalists and other testers, who evaluate products according to carefully considered criteria. Only after our testing and reporting is complete, and sometimes hard decisions are made, does a product show up on our site.

Our inaugural Best New Picks Awards are the culmination of this journey.

To arrive at the 71 winners of our 2026 Best New Picks Awards, our newsroom of more than 170 journalists first evaluated more than 10,000 products over the past year across all of Wirecutter’s review categories, everything from beauty and fashion to home improvement and tech. All were thoroughly researched and assessed, and many were eliminated during initial knockout phases.

We then personally assessed more than 4,300 products in a variety of ways. We subjected 35 dish soaps to all manner of post-meal detritus to test their cleaning chops, browned over 140 pounds of meat to determine the best gas grill, lathered ourselves in 144 body washes to find the squeakiest clean, trekked miles across Maui to test hiking umbrellas, and otherwise lived with and evaluated everything else to confirm which things are worth your time and money.

In total, we spent more than 50,000 hours testing products in the past year.

Of the thousands of products we evaluated for the first time over the past 12 months, 2,900 received Wirecutter-pick status, whether as a top pick, budget pick, upgrade pick, or so forth.

We then consulted this list of new picks to determine the select few — just 71 out of nearly 3,000 — that were our absolute favorites and deserved to rise to the top for these awards.

Lisa Fischer/NYT Wirecutter and Laura Nash/NYT Wirecutter


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