Best Large Refrigerators for Big Families

Top-performing models from CR’s tests with plenty of storage space

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family in kitchen Troy House

If you’re looking for a spacious refrigerator to store a full week’s worth of groceries—or drinks and snacks for your child’s soccer team—you'll find plenty of supersized options for sale.

“There's a trend of making refrigerators taller and deeper, to increase capacity while still maintaining a common width,” says Larry Ciufo, CR's test engineer for refrigerators.

But most refrigerators fall short of their capacity claims, some by as much as 32 percent, according to CR's measurements of usable capacity of the hundreds of refrigerators in our tests. (We measure the actual storage space in a fridge—shelves and all—while manufacturers treat the refrigerators like an empty box.)

You can zero in on the usable capacity column in the Features & Specs section of our refrigerator ratings. And keep in mind that you don’t want to get stuck with a supersized electricity bill, so you'll want to pay attention to the energy efficiency score as well.

More on Refrigerators
CR's Refrigerator Ratings & Buying Guide
Most and Least Reliable Refrigerator Brands
Best Counter-Depth Refrigerators
Best French-Door Refrigerators
How to Make Your Refrigerator Last Longer

Most important, there’s performance. During testing, we outfit each refrigerator with thermocouples in a climate-controlled chamber and monitor it for 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 longer. We also factor in survey data from thousands of CR members to judge brand reliability and satisfaction.

All that data—and then some—informs CR’s refrigerator ratings charts and each model’s Overall Score. Our ratings are now sorted by width so you can easily find the best fridge that will fit in your kitchen. The most common widths are 30, 33, and 36 inches. One of the best large refrigerators we've tested, a built-in model, is an outlier at 42 inches wide.

Below, CR members can read ratings and reviews of the five best large refrigerators from our tests, ranked by Overall Score, with one pick for each fridge configuration (top-freezer, bottom-freezer, French-door, side-by-side, and built-in). They include models from Café, Kenmore, LG, and Samsung. For other high-capacity options, check CR's complete refrigerator ratings and sort by total usable capacity.

5 Supersized Refrigerators

Home Content Creator Daniel Wroclawski

Daniel Wroclawski

I'm obsessed with smart home tech and channel my obsession into new stories for Consumer Reports. When I'm not writing about products, I spend time either outside hiking and skiing or up in the air in small airplanes. For my latest obsessions, follow me on Facebook and Twitter (@danwroc).
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