We Tested 35 Phones and Found a Surprising Winner for Best Battery Life

Key takeaways:

• Apple and OnePlus are the best phone brands for long battery life in our tests.
• Models from Apple, OnePlus and Motorola made our top five phones for longest battery life.
• The 2025 phones have longer battery life on average than the 2024 models, but only slightly.
• About half of our top battery life options use silicon-carbon batteries.

Is it yours smartphone do it all day on one charge? That’s a rough benchmark for phones sold in 2026, but in reality some people burn through their battery very quickly scrolling through social media and taking photos and videos. As features like cameras get the annual upgrade, the batteries last. But that is starting to change.

I’ve been reviewing and testing phones for CNET for nearly a decade and heard from many readers that long battery life is very important. In a CNET/YouGov poll as of September 2025, readers ranked “longer battery life” as the main reason for buying a new phone (second only to price).

For better or worse, we’re tied to our devices more than ever and you can’t do much with your phone when the battery is dead. So it’s important to know which phones have the longest battery life before buying your next handset.

2026 is a turning point for batteries

In the past year, we have seen many phone makers use a new type of battery with a silicon anode, often called a silicon-carbon battery. This new power source can increase capacity without requiring a physically larger battery. Space is already limited in phones, especially since designs become smallerso finding a way to increase capacity without making the battery bigger is an amazing development.

All of this leads to the question: Do the phones sold today have better battery life than previous models? And if so, what phones and brands last the longest on a single charge? We’re doing an experiment to find out.

Watch this: iPhone 17 Pro Max Has Incredible Battery Life

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Which phone has the best battery life?

Many factors, such as your carrier’s signal strength and the brightness of your screen, can affect your battery life. How you use your phone throughout the day also has a big impact. Battery capacity and software and processor performance also have a significant impact on battery life. In order to make our tests uniform and reduce variables as much as possible, we run each phone through anecdotal stress tests and video streaming tests, starting with the battery at 100%. The results from each test show the remaining battery percentage. We averaged the two results to get a perfect score and limited our rankings to phones that are legally sold in the US.

In 2025, CNET tested the battery life of 35 phones, and our top performer is the iPhone 17 Pro Max. With a starting price of $1,199, it was the most expensive phone in our top five. Its 5,088-mAh battery capacity wasn’t huge, but it shows how well Apple’s A19 Pro chip works and iOS 26 there is.

Among our top five positions, several were tied. I iPhone 17 again OnePlus 15starting at $829 and $900, respectively, both finished in second place. The iPhone 17 has the smallest battery of all the top phones, proving that battery size doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, the OnePlus 15 has one of the biggest in the lineup.

Notably, OnePlus had three phones in our top rankings, all with silicon-carbon batteries of that high capacity. The only other silicon-carbon battery phone in our top ratings was the Poco F7 Ultrawhich you can buy in the US for as low as $649.

The smaller iPhone 17 Pro, which starts at $1,099, landed in fourth place. Rounding out the top five were four calls tied for fifth place: $400 Motorola Moto G Stylus (2025)$500 Motorola Edge (2025), $600 OnePlus 13R and $700 OnePlus 15R.

Overall, only two of the nine phones ranked in the top five cost more than $1,000. The most affordable phone on the list is the Moto G Stylus, which combines a large battery with a less power-hungry screen and processor, resulting in incredible battery life.

What product makes phones have longer battery life?

We averaged the scores from both tests for each phone model, and for any company where we tested three or more models, we averaged those scores to give each product a rating. Our lab data showed that Apple and OnePlus were the top brands for longest battery life.

Apple’s iPhones and OnePlus handsets dominate our top five phones, so it’s no surprise that they rank high in overall brand battery life. Oppo was not included despite having two phones that performed well in our tests. (OnePlus is a subsidiary of Oppo.) The Oppo Find X9 Pro again Oppo Find N5 is foldable got good scores, but because we haven’t reviewed other Oppo models, we couldn’t include them in the overall product ratings. Also, the phone isn’t on sale in the US but if you’re abroad you should still find any phone with outstanding battery life.

In third and fourth place were Motorola and Samsung. We tested seven Motorola phones and nine Samsung phones, and the results were solid. Motorola never surpassed Samsung. I’m excited to keep an eye on these two models in 2026 and see how their battery life compares.

Rounding out our top five products is Google. We tested five Google phones in 2025, and they got decent battery life, especially the Pixel 10, but there’s a big step up from that to the battery life we ​​get from OnePlus phones. Surprisingly, Google is the only other phone maker besides Apple to control the software and processor design with its combination of Android and Tensor chips, respectively.

Battery test results

CNET uses two battery life benchmarks (video streaming and stress testing) that allow us to compare the phones. In our 3-hour video battery test, where we streamed a video over Wi-Fi with the screen at full brightness and the battery starting at 100%, the iPhone 17 Pro Max was the top performer. Most of the other phones that performed best in this test were in our top five for battery life. A nice surprise is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus, which starts at $999. It performed well, tying the Motorola Edge (2025) for fifth place. Sadly, the S25 Plus didn’t fare well in our second test.

In CNET’s 45-minute endurance test, where we played games, streamed videos, scrolled through social media and took a video call with the battery starting at 100%, the iPhone 17 Pro Max was once again the best and joined behind three other Apple models, including the iPhone 16E, which starts at $599.

We’ve had a lot of ties to the top five results, including a few phones we haven’t seen rank up until now. Google’s Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro Fold did very well in this test, as did the Motorola Razr (2025) – that’s two folds in the top five results.

CNET’s shopping advice

Because we’ve been using these tests for years, we can also compare the new phone to older models. We were able to see how the 2025 phones performed compared to the 2024 handsets. We rated all 35 phones we tested in 2025 and are doing the same for 2024. And while the 2025 models had more battery life, it was less than 1%, averaging 0.78%. Most people don’t buy a new phone every year, but if you’re trying to choose between last year’s version of your favorite phone and this year’s model, you probably won’t notice much of a difference in battery life — just go for the cheaper, slightly older phone.

If you like your current phone (iPhone or Android) and the only problem is that the battery life is not what it used to be, consider replacing the battery instead of buying a new phone. You will save a lot of money and extend the life of your phone by a few more years.