Best Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators of 2025
They tend to offer better reliability and value than other popular configurations. Here are CR's top models.
When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission. Learn more.
Bottom-freezer refrigerators are “often more budget-friendly than French-door refrigerators and can cost less to run,” says Breann Chai, who oversees refrigerator testing at Consumer Reports. They aren’t as popular as French-doors, though, which some people consider more attractive (and come in more designs).
- Best Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators: 30-Inch 33-Inch
- How CR Tests Refrigerators
Best 30-Inch-Wide Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators
At 30 inches wide (and in two cases, smaller), these bottom-freezers will take up the least room in a kitchen.
Best 33-Inch-Wide Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators
If you have more room in your kitchen, these 33-inch-wide refrigerators are about the same price as the 30-inch-wide models above and have more usable capacity.
How CR Tests Refrigerators
During testing, we outfit each refrigerator with thermocouples in a climate-controlled chamber and monitor it for more than a month, collecting more than 5.4 million temperature readings that identify warm and cold spots, to determine which models will keep your food fresh longest. We also factor in survey data from thousands of CR members to judge brand reliability and satisfaction. All of that—and then some—informs CR’s refrigerator ratings and each model’s Overall Score. Get more details on how we test refrigerators.
Get more details on how we test refrigerators.