Best Refrigerators for Small Kitchens
These slim, 24- to 28-inch-wide fridges shine in Consumer Reports' tests
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If you live in a small apartment or condo, the conventional refrigerators you’re most likely to find at an appliance store—from 30 to 36 inches wide—might not fit in your kitchen. Smaller kitchens often call for a narrower fridge, one that’s 24 to 28 inches wide.
- Best Narrow Fridges: Top-Freezer Bottom-Freezer French-Door
- How We Test Refrigerators
“These smaller models gained more visibility in retail stores in recent years, likely due to changing consumer preferences from the many millennials entering the appliance market. But most major brands only offer one to three models, with limited color options,” says Nish Suvarnakar, Consumer Reports’ senior market analyst for refrigerators. “Nearly all also lack some of the features that consumers desire the most, such as external water dispensers.” Indeed, it’s rare for a narrow model to carry more than three of the dozen or so features that CR tracks.
Best Narrow Top-Freezer Refrigerators
Top-freezer models pack a lot of storage in a small space, with widths varying between 24 and 33 inches. These highly rated options offer solid temperature uniformity and are not too noisy.
Best Narrow Bottom-Freezer Refrigerators
Bottom-freezer refrigerators typically cost a bit more than top-freezer models but come with the same dimensions. With the refrigerator section at eye level and the freezer section below, you can more easily access your fresh produce. And while they may have limited features, the top-rated models in this category are not too loud and deliver great thermostat control and temperature uniformity.
Best Narrow French-Door Refrigerators
French-door refrigerators feature two side-by-side doors on top and a freezer below. The space-saving, small-swing doors provide the added value of opening only half the fridge when you’re stashing smaller items. These highly rated options boast solid or top-notch temperature uniformity and thermostat control.
How Consumer Reports Tests Refrigerators
In CR’s labs, our technicians 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 a refrigerator brand’s reliability and to gauge how satisfied owners are with their fridges. All of that data and more are used to arrive at a model’s Overall Score in our refrigerator ratings.
For more information on CR’s refrigerator tests, see our How We Test Refrigerators page.
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