The Best Home-Office Furniture and Supplies of 2025 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Wirecutter Staff

We’ve updated this guide with our latest picks.

Your home office should be a place where you feel comfortable doing your best work, day after day. Over more than a decade, Wirecutter’s writers and editors—many of whom work from home—have researched and tested equipment for a variety of workspaces. We’ve collected our picks to give you a comprehensive guide to the best of the best.

This is the most customizable desk we’ve ever tested, and it works for people of a wide range of heights (between 5-foot-4 and 6-foot-9).

Of the desks we’ve tested, the Uplift V2 Standing Desk offers the best mix of performance and features. Its controls are responsive, and it barely wobbles, even at tall heights.

It accommodates people of the average female and male seated and standing heights. But if you’re shorter than 5-foot-4, the desk likely wouldn’t work for you if you were sitting without a footrest.

Uplift’s walnut laminate and bamboo desktops are attractive, and you can get them in a curved design if you prefer. In addition to those finishes, you can choose from nearly 30 other finish options, four frame colors, five grommet colors, and three keypad colors. And there are multiple add-on accessories, so you can truly make this desk your own.

For more, read our guide to the best standing desks.

Of the converters we’ve tried, this one is the most adjustable, which also makes it the most ergonomic choice. It’s stable, and it takes up less space than competing converters.

The Ergo Desktop Kangaroo Pro Junior makes the fewest ergonomic compromises, without being too annoying to use. And, crucially, it allows you to control the height of your monitor and the keyboard platform separately.

Thanks to the monitor mount, your display is more stable and takes up less room than it would on its own stand. And the work platform can accommodate a keyboard, a mouse, and other tools while still fitting on even the smallest of desks.

For more, read our guide to the best standing desk converters.

This mat’s varied terrain encourages movement, so standing is less tedious and achy. And you can easily move the mat when you switch between standing and sitting.

You’ll need a comfortable place to stand while you work at your standing desk. The Ergodriven Topo’s contoured surface gives you lots of different ways to place your feet, and our testers found this mat more comfortable than others with topographic features.

However you stand, the Topo relieves pressure on your heels, legs, back, and shoulders. It’s also resistant to spills and punctures, and you can move it around with one foot, instead of having to bend over to reposition it.

Several Wirecutter staffers have used this mat for years. Even desk-mat skeptics have shared that they move around on the Topo more than they expected to, and this is where the real benefit of standing versus sitting comes from.

For more, read our guide to the best standing desk mats.

Here’s how to set up a workspace that fits and supports you best, based on advice from ergonomics experts and what we’ve found over years of testing home-office furniture and gear.

This is one of the most adjustable chairs available—anyone can make the Gesture comfortable, regardless of their height or size—and it’s built to last.

The Steelcase Gesture is expensive—about $1,400 at this writing. But if you sit for long periods, this chair is well worth the investment for its support, adjustability, and comfort, all of which should last for over a decade.

The Gesture is one of our longest-lasting picks—we’ve been recommending it since 2015. And it’s one of the most comfortable, supportive, and durable office chairs we’ve ever tested. From the back support to the fabric quality to the dependable adjustment knobs, everything has stood the test of time.

The Gesture also comes in the widest range of fabrics and finishes of the office chairs we’ve tested, so you can customize its appearance for your workspace.

For more, read our guide to the best office chairs.

You can save hundreds of dollars on a high-end office chair if you know where to look and what to look for.

Balancing structure and comfort, this cushion’s proprietary material offers substantial spinal support without pushing you forward. Because it lacks straps, you have to readjust it often.

The small but mighty Tempur-Pedic LumbarCushion Travel is the best lumbar-support cushion, relieving pressure without producing the dramatic, sinking-in feel of most Tempur-Pedic mattresses and bedding. The cushion’s slight curvature molds to your spine, keeping you in a comfortable, upright position.

The LumbarCushion Travel also has a removable, machine-washable cover that’s chic-looking and easy to clean. And in our testing the pillow’s proprietary foam didn’t lose shape or density, even after prolonged use.

For more, read our guide to the best lumbar support pillows.

This footrest has a washable cover that’s easy to remove and feels great on bare feet, and the high-density foam offers firm yet cushy support. It can be used as a foot rocker, and it’s height-adjustable.

If your feet don’t touch the floor when you’re sitting all the way back in your desk chair, you should consider getting a footrest. In our testing, the ComfiLife Foot Rest outshone all of its competitors. It offers firm, all-day comfort, thanks to its foam construction, which provides a plush surface and a soft give.

For added movement, you can even flip it over for rocking. The base is detachable, so you can use it at a height of either 3.9 inches or 5.9 inches, and it stays in place on both hard and carpeted floors.

We also love that the cover is easy to remove when you want to toss it in the washing machine (just remember to use the gentle cycle).

For more, read our guide to the best under-desk footrests.

Made of thin yet dense memory foam, this contoured cushion encourages better seating posture than completely flat alternatives. At 2 inches thick, it does not provide much added height.

For proper ergonomics when you’re sitting at your desk, your legs should be at about a 90-degree angle to your hips. If your seat is too low and your knees are higher than 90 degrees, you should adjust your seat higher. If your chair doesn’t have that feature, we suggest adding a seat cushion.

We recommend the Tempur-Pedic Seat Cushion for people who prefer cradling, firm support and helpful posture adjustment over ample cushioning and height. Testers praised this cushion for offering firm, stable support without requiring too much adjustment. The 16-by-16-inch cushion fit well on the three chairs we tested it with. And its stretchy nylon-and-spandex cover is fully removable and machine-washable.

For more, read our guide to the best ergonomic seat cushions.

This lap desk is the total package in terms of style, comfort, stability, and build quality, and it includes a few storage features.

The LapGear Designer Lap Desk has a clean, simple design, and it comes in a variety of colors and patterns. It’s sturdy and well made, and it feels comfortable and cool in your lap. This lap desk weighs about 2 pounds, and it measures 17.75 inches across—wide enough to fit both a 13-inch laptop and a mouse or a larger laptop (up to 17 inches) alone. It has a handle, so you can carry it around or hang it up. You’ll also find a spot to perch your phone and an elastic strap for storing index cards or a pen. Toward the front edge, a short, unobtrusive plastic laptop rest keeps your stuff from sliding off. This lap desk works equally well for left- and right-handed people.

For more, read our guide to the best lap desks.

This high-security shredder offers the best balance of price, sheet capacity, and ease of use. But the pullout bin isn’t as large as the ones in other models we’ve tested.

The Royal 14MC 14-Sheet Micro Cut Paper Shredder is a Costco-exclusive model (available to non-members for about $4 extra), and it offers the best value for a paper shredder. It has nearly twice the sheet capacity and a longer warranty than competing micro-cut shredders that cost about the same.

Like other micro-cut shredders, the Royal 14MC shredder chomps documents into tiny shreds, making any sensitive paperwork all but impossible to reassemble. Through batch after batch of our paper-shredding tests, it ran jam-free and quietly (for a shredder), and we found the large buttons and indicator lights simple to understand.

For more, read our guide to the best paper shredders.

This safe is certified to withstand high-temperature fires for twice as long as the competition. However, it weighs 42 pounds and has the footprint of a mini fridge.

The Honeywell 1114 Lightweight Fire and Waterproof Chest is independently verified by the safety organization Intertek to keep personal items safe during a fire for up to an hour—twice as long as the competition—in conditions as hot as 1,700 °F. And Honeywell says the chest will keep floodwater out for 100 hours.

It’s large enough to hold both letter- and legal-size sheets of paper, and they don’t have to be folded. The additional protection makes the Honeywell 1114 noticeably larger and heavier than other safes of similar capacities—it weighs 42 pounds and takes up the same amount of floor space as a mini fridge.

For more, read our guide to the best fireproof document safes.

This label maker trades a built-in screen and keyboard for an easy-to-use smartphone app. It’s compact and portable, prints quickly, and automatically cuts labels. And Brother’s design software offers plenty of customization options.

The compact Brother P-touch Cube Plus is a Bluetooth label maker that consistently prints good-looking, high-quality labels durable enough to survive multiple runs through the dishwasher. But what we love about this label maker is how easy it is to create and print labels with Brother’s Design&Print 2 smartphone app, which is equipped with a huge library of fonts, templates, and symbols. Offering a rechargeable battery, the ability to auto-cut labels as they print, and compatibility with a wide range of tape sizes, the Cube Plus is a convenient, portable device that can get the job done no matter the labeling project. Although it lacks the built-in screen and keyboard that many longtime labelers may be used to, we’ve found that the familiarity of typing on a phone keyboard makes this model easier to use overall.

For more, read our guide to the best label makers.

Desk lamps are necessary for a productive workspace. And the best ones are highly adjustable in their physical design as well as in their color-temperature and brightness settings. But choosing the right lamp isn’t only about functionality, it’s also about aesthetics. That’s why we recommend several lamps with drastically different looks.

This great-quality, highly adjustable aluminum LED desk lamp is affordable, and it can reach high and far.

This desk lamp is 3D-printed from plant-polymer plastics, and it comes with a dimming switch on its cord and a replaceable E12 LED bulb (increasingly rare).

This uncomplicated desk lamp uses LED bulbs instead of built-in LEDs, and it’s the most flexible model for positioning light just where you want it.

This portable and adjustable lamp has a compact base that can draw power from an outlet, a rechargeable battery, or a USB port.

The Uplift LED Desk Lamp E7 with Clamp provides a modern, utilitarian look with an exceptionally long reach.

If you prefer a dimmable desk lamp that can double as a bedside lamp, consider the Gantri Gallery Task Light. Compact yet stable, this lamp shines both in its pleasingly warm glow and in its distinct, design-forward silhouette—one designed to blend naturally into the background of a living space.

The budget-priced IKEA Forså offers a timeless architectural design. And it’s one of the most physically adjustable lamps we tested, bested only by the Anglepoise 90 Mini Mini Desk Lamp—our top pick for anyone who has to make every bit of available surface space count.

For a variety of other styles we recommend, read our guide to the best desk lamps.

This sleek, sturdy monitor arm makes raising, lowering, and rotating a monitor easy, and it’s backed by a 15-year warranty.

An adjustable monitor arm is the best option for keeping your monitor at an ergonomic height (with your eye level 2 to 3 inches below the top of your monitor), so you can maintain proper posture and avoid slouching or craning your neck. The Fully Jarvis Single Monitor Arm is the best model for most people who want to save space on their desks.

It accommodates a wide range of positions and angles to improve workstation ergonomics, and it’s adjustable, unobtrusive, and sturdy enough to support heavier monitors (up to 32 inches or 20 pounds). The Fully Jarvis Single Monitor Arm is fully covered with a 15-year warranty, and it comes in three colors.

For more, read our guide to the best monitor arms.

This stand is made of anodized aluminum, so it's exceptionally sturdy and stylish. Also, of all the models we’ve tested, this one is the easiest to adjust.

If you don’t have the budget or space for a monitor at your desk, a laptop stand—one that puts your eye level 2 to 3 inches below the top of your screen and keeps you from slouching—is the next best thing for your posture and health. In our tests, the Rain Design iLevel 2 was the clear winner.

It held 11- to 15-inch laptops without issue in our tests, and it has a simple, straightforward, and stylish design. We loved its adjustment mechanism, too: Simply slide a knob left or right, and the platform tilts up or down.

For more, read our guide to the best laptop stands.

This surge protector was among the best at preventing surges. It shuts off once the protection wanes, and it has 12 AC outlets—plus coaxial and phone ports—but no USB.

Plugging valuable equipment, including computers and monitors, into a surge protector helps protect them during power outages. But surge protectors don’t last forever: Like light bulbs, they need to be replaced every few years when they burn out. After more than 100 hours of research and testing with an electrical engineer, we recommend the Tripp Lite Protect It 12-Outlet Surge Protector TLP1208SAT.

It offers enough space to satisfy most home-office needs. It has superior build quality compared with others we’ve tested, stellar surge-protection performance, and safety features.

It will actually stop working when its protection circuits wear out, too, as opposed to relying on an easily ignored indicator light. That way, you’ll know with certainty whether your expensive electronics are protected.

For more, read our guide to the best surge protectors.

With five outlets on battery backup and 10 in total, this UPS can keep a Wi-Fi network running for up to four hours, or it can power your home-office setup long enough for you to save your work and shut down.

The CyberPower CP900AVR covers the basics for most people during common, short-term blackouts.

It provides enough power to keep a household modem and router running for four hours. So you can stay online when the power is off and get in touch with emergency services, follow news and weather changes, or just pass the time on your favorite websites.

It requires no setup and includes automatic voltage regulation—an important feature that some cheaper models lack. Five of its 10 outlets are on battery backup. It has a 6-foot cord, and its compact shape—about the size of a three-ring binder—makes it easy to stow away.

For more, read our guide to the best uninterruptible power supply.

With its fast-drying ink, this is our go-to pen for everyday writing on any kind of paper.

(pack of three, deal on black)

If you need a pen to take notes during a teleconference or to hastily scribble down an idea, the Uni-ball Jetstream RT is the one to grab.

It’s widely available, and it created some of the smoothest, quickest-drying lines in our testing. It doesn’t bleed, it doesn't skip, it doesn’t feather. It dries indelibly and so quickly that left-handed people can use this pen without worrying about smudging.

The Jetstream RT also requires very little pressure, so once you get a feel for it, you can write quickly because it pretty much glides over the page, especially if you write in cursive.

It comes in sizes from 0.38 mm up to 1.0 mm, with a bunch of different bodies in different styles.

For more, read our guide to the best pens.

This metal pencil is a pleasure to use, thanks to its smooth grip section and satisfying, solid knock.

At under $10, the Blick Premier Mechanical Pencil is a stellar value. It writes smoothly, and in our tests, the lead never snapped because this model has a lead-cushioning mechanism to prevent breakage.

Most other retractable options require you to hold down the knock (usually the top of the eraser cap) while pressing down on the tip to retract it. But the Blick Premier pencil extends or retracts the lead sleeve instantly, with a single click, similar to a retractable pen. This mechanism helps you avoid the issue that is all too common with other retractable mechanical pencils: mistakenly advancing the lead when you intended to retract the tip.

For more, read our guide to the best mechanical pencils.

After interviewing experts, researching over 100 notebooks, and writing zealously in 34 of them side by side over several weeks, we have picks in a number of sizes and styles.

This notebook is a pleasure to use, thanks to its sturdy yet lightweight cardstock cover, excellent paper quality, and lie-flat design. The medium size can serve a wide range of purposes.

With page numbers, index pages, two ribbon bookmarks, and sticker labels, this notebook has all the bells and whistles. It simply feels a bit more special than competing notebooks.

With thick, smooth, perforated paper, this notepad is a fine companion for note-taking.

We recommend the Apica Premium C.D. Notebook (A5) for people who want a softcover notebook that is the size of a trade paperback book. The smaller, A5 size doesn’t take up too much room on a desk, and its lie-flat design allows you to easily write on both sides of each sheet. The paper is thick and smooth (but not plasticky), and it works well with a variety of pens, including inky fountain pens, with little feathering and minimal ghosting.

The Leuchtturm1917 Hardcover Notebook Classic (A5) is our top pick for a hardcover notebook that helps you organize and keep track of your thoughts and ideas. It features tiny details, such as index pages and labels for archiving, two thick ribbon bookmarks, labels for the spine and title page, page numbers, and a sturdy back pocket.

The Maruman Mnemosyne N166 Steno Pad (A5) is a medium-size notepad that’s easy to flip through to refer back to your notes. Because this notebook is top-bound, lefty writers should find it easier to use than other formats. The paper is smooth and thick, yet slightly translucent. Inky pens (rollerball, gel, and fountain pens) glided across it nicely in our tests. And it has enough tooth to make writing with a pencil or a ballpoint pleasant.

For a variety of other styles that we recommend, read our guide to the best notebooks and notepads.

This planner is a cross between a simple calendar and a beautiful journal. And you can fill it with a range of inserts for any type of planning.

This more-compact version can fit in large pockets or small bags.

Of all the planners we considered, the Traveler’s Company Traveler’s Notebook was the most popular with our testers.

The simple leather folio holds thin notebooks (secured with an elastic band), and you can invest in whatever notebook inserts fit your planning needs. It’s the only system we found that works for all types of planning.

This is the original Traveler’s Notebook, a style of planner often interchangeably called the Midori (the company’s name before 2015). You can find many other notebooks of this style inspired by the original (sometimes called “fauxdoris”), and some of them are great options if you like more colors and patterns.

For a variety of other styles that we recommend, read our guide to the best paper planners.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.

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