Some users depend on a laptop's battery more than others—but how long a notebook endures unplugged is a measurement no shopper should ignore. Even powerful workstations and gaming laptops, once lucky to last an hour or two away from a wall socket, can now get you through an eight-hour workday. (Ultraportables run anywhere from 12 to 20 hours or more.) At PC Labs, we've been testing laptops for decades, running rigorous, repeatable tests on each of the 100-plus machines we review every year. On each machine, PCMag's expert laptop reviewers run a standardized battery-rundown test, as well as a host of CPU and graphics performance benchmarks and screen-quality trials. The aim? To craft authoritative recommendations and insights before you buy. HP's Dragonfly G4 is our current top battery-life pick for professional productivity, but keep reading for other great, long-lasting choices, a detailed spec comparison, and key buying advice.

Modern improvements in laptop battery life are largely thanks to CPUs and other components that are more power-efficient than ever. (It's not just battery technology that deserves the credit.) That's especially true of Intel's 13th Generation Core and AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors, as well as Intel's fresh AI-centric Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" chips, all of which power some of the longest-lasting models on our list. Intel and AMD alternatives, like Apple's M series (and Qualcomm's Snapdragons), demonstrate lengthy battery life, too.

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In addition to being a critical specification, battery life is one of the toughest to measure. If you're watching movies all day long, you'll get far more unplugged time than someone who's editing images nonstop in Photoshop. We test battery life based on a very specific scenario: watching a specific test movie on a loop, stored locally, at 50% screen brightness, and with airplane mode turned on. If you're frequently performing more CPU-intensive or graphics-hammering tasks, you'll want to shave an hour or two off of our results.  

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What Designs of Laptops Have the Longest Battery Life?

Our top laptop list is stacked with traditional laptops and some convertible hybrid designs. Detachable Windows tablets tend to be underrepresented, and for good reason: You have simply no room for a large battery in such a small enclosure. The best of these, like Microsoft's Intel-based Surface Pro 9, tend to run around 12 hours, though the Arm-based version broke the mold at 21 hours. Some convertibles, like the HP Spectre x360 14 (2024), use a rotating hinge rather than a detachable keyboard.

"Traditional laptops" doesn't always mean big laptops, though: You will find plenty of these laptops and convertible picks to be relatively thin and light. Advancements in chassis design, Windows settings, and processor architecture allow for thin-and-light laptops to squeeze more life out of their batteries than ever. A long-lasting battery doesn't have to mean a heavy laptop, even in those with larger screens.

Of course, no matter what kind of laptop you're in the market for, you can always add a few minutes or a few hours to your unplugged time by changing your computing habits. It's a bit like driving more conservatively to save gas. For some ideas, take a look at our tips for improving your laptop's battery life.

Want the Best Battery Life? Also, Consider a MacBook

Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro lineups have a reputation for excellent battery endurance, and Cupertino's current offerings are no exception. Most of the portable Macs we've tested recently can manage more than 18 hours away from an outlet, but the newest releases last even longer.

The M1 MacBook Air ran for an incredible 29 hours in our battery rundown test. Which one you should choose depends on your budget, your portability needs, and your usage patterns, but you can't go wrong on the battery-life front with either Apple ultraportable. Most recently, the 2023 14-Inch Apple MacBook Pro with M3 Pro raised the bar at more than 30 hours.

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Other manufacturers are more hit-and-miss. The top honors for battery life among Intel-based Windows laptops in the last several years went to the first generation of the Asus ExpertBook B9450 (30 hours in our video rundown!), but many competing machines expire much more quickly. We're also seeing an emerging class of "always on" machines based on low-power Qualcomm Snapdragon processors that have outlasted most Intel-based Windows and macOS laptops we have tested. (See for example our review of the Lenovo Flex 5G) But know that these laptops are meant more for lightweight mobile computing with a continuous internet connection, and are far from power-user models meant for CPU muscle work.

Ready to Buy the Right Long-Life Laptop for You?

If you have a long plane flight (of course, that's been way less common for lots of folks since the pandemic upended the world) or a spate of working outdoors ahead of you, or if you're just too busy to linger around a power outlet for long enough, any of these laptops will keep you productive throughout the day and into the evening. For a look at the wider laptop landscape, check out our very latest laptop reviews, as well as our picks for the top business notebooks and the best budget laptops.