Refrigerators

Best Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators of 2024

Consumer Reports' tests reveal the top models from brands including Amana, Beko, Fisher & Paykel, Ikea, and LG

By Daniel Wroclawski

Updated July 1, 2024

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A bottom-freezer refrigerator in the kitchen. — Bottom-freezers have their priorities straight. They keep fresh food at eye level and frozen stuff down below, where it occupies less valuable real estate.

Though the most popular refrigerator configuration is, undoubtedly, the French-door refrigerator, bottom-freezers are “often more affordable than French-door refrigerators and can cost less to run,” says Breann Chai, who oversees refrigerator testing at Consumer Reports.

In this article

Best Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators: 30-Inch 33-Inch
How We Test Refrigerators

Our most recent surveys of CR members found that bottom-freezers tend to offer better reliability than French-door models, too. For example, LG French-doors receive moderate reliability ratings, while LG bottom-freezers have exemplary scores. (See which brands make the most and least reliable refrigerators.)

Bottom-freezers tend to have fewer features than French-door refrigerators—water dispensers, for instance, are rare—though most of them do come with an icemaker.

Best 30-Inch-Wide Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators

At 30 inches wide (and in one case, smaller), these bottom-freezers will take up the least room.

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 they have more usable capacity.

How We Test 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 tefrigerators.

Daniel Wroclawski

Dan Wroclawski is a home and appliances writer at Consumer Reports, covering products ranging from refrigerators and coffee makers to cutting-edge smart home devices. Before joining CR in 2017, he was an editor at USA Today’s Reviewed, and launched the site’s smart home section. In his spare time, you can find him tinkering with one of the over 70 connected devices in his house. Follow Dan on Facebook and Twitter @danwroc.