The 4 Best Cordless Phones of 2024 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Nick Guy and Melanie Pinola

After a fresh round of testing, we have three new picks: the Panasonic KX-TGD832M, AT&T DLP72212, and Panasonic KX-TGF973B. These join our amplified phone recommendation, the Panasonic KX-TGM420W.

A cordless phone can’t play the latest game or give you restaurant recommendations, but that’s fine. There’s a beauty in its purpose of Doing One Thing Well: helping you make and receive phone calls as clearly and as pleasantly as possible—whether you’re in an area with poor cell reception or you like the convenience of having a “house phone.”

We tested 11 top candidates and have determined that the Panasonic KX-TGD832M is the overall best cordless phone. It excels in the most important areas—call quality, range, and ease of use—while including bonus features like call recording.

This phone sounds better, has a wider operational range, and offers more useful features than similarly priced models. It doesn’t connect to cell phones, though.

Get this model if you want one home phone system for both landline and mobile calls—or if bigger buttons and a large display matter to you.

This phone’s higher volume levels can help people with mild to moderate hearing loss, and its tone adjustment may make understanding speakers easier.

This phone is like our top pick but it connects to cell phones, comes with three handsets, and the base has a dial pad and speakerphone.

Clear and crisp calls are paramount in a phone. We gave bonus points when our voice recordings sounded good even to ourselves.

Great cordless phones let you roam far from the base—down the street, even—without dropping the call.

Making and receiving calls is less of a hassle when you have features like speed dialing and intuitive buttons and menus.

One-button call blocking can reduce nuisance calls. Some phones offer automated blocking features, too.

If you’re looking for a cordless phone that can also make and take calls via your cell phone, we recommend the AT&T DLP72212. And if you have mild to moderate hearing loss, we have an amplified cordless phone pick for you.

This phone sounds better, has a wider operational range, and offers more useful features than similarly priced models. It doesn’t connect to cell phones, though.

Panasonic’s KX-TGD832M stands out for its sound quality and value. Our panelists found calls to be clearer and louder than most other models, and in our range tests, we were able to make calls with a handset about a football field’s length away from its base.

Small touches also set this phone apart—from quick call blocking and a speed dial to taking easily accessible rechargeable AAA batteries. And it’s expandable: This two-phone system is also available as a single option or as a three-handset system, and you can add more handsets for up to a total of six.

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Get this model if you want one home phone system for both landline and mobile calls—or if bigger buttons and a large display matter to you.

AT&T’s DLP72212 offers modern features normally found only in higher-end models, like Bluetooth pairing with your cell phone and integration with voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant. In our tests, this phone sounded great and also had a respectable range, though outgoing call volume was lower and the range was about 100 feet shorter than with our top pick.

Still, this is a well-designed phone, with a generous 2-inch screen and blocky, bright blue-backlit buttons that are easy on the eyes. We also appreciated its dedicated buttons for muting a call or connecting to another handset, intercom-style. This two-system model is also available in a four-handset version.

This phone’s higher volume levels can help people with mild to moderate hearing loss, and its tone adjustment may make understanding speakers easier.

Panasonic’s KX-TGM420W is the first phone that most people with hearing loss should consider. We tested three amplified phones with retired audiologist Lisa Devlin, who herself has hearing loss, and we found the KX-TGM420W to offer a significant volume range and suitable tone-adjustment options—both important features for those experiencing hearing loss.

It’s compatible with hearing aids and includes a jack for an optional headset or neck loop. Like our other picks, it offers good range and clear outgoing-voice quality, among other standard phone features. Additional handsets can be added to your home phone system, up to a total of six.

This phone is like our top pick but it connects to cell phones, comes with three handsets, and the base has a dial pad and speakerphone.

The Panasonic KX-TGF973B is the cordless phone for those who want a wealth of features. It’s similar to the KX-TGD832M, with the addition of a dial pad and speakerphone on the base and Bluetooth connectivity to your cell phone. Also, we found the sound quality and range to be the best of the bunch. This package comes with three handsets, and you can upgrade to four- and five-handset versions, so it’s great for large homes.

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Senior staff writer Melanie Pinola has reviewed home-office gear for Wirecutter since 2019. Prior to joining Wirecutter, she covered technology and productivity for over a dozen years for outlets such as Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, PCWorld, and Laptop Magazine. She’s owned a cordless phone for about as long as she’s been reviewing smartphones and other mobile devices, so she knows well the features that could make or break a great one.

Previous versions of this guide were written by Nick Guy, who has reviewed phones and accessories since 2011.

Don’t count them out just yet. Although some may deem cordless phones an anachronism in today’s smartphone-dominated world, having a “house phone” can be extremely useful in an emergency, in homes with poor cell reception, and in plenty of other situations.

If you’re like me, you may have had a cordless phone when your child was young and you wanted to make sure they could easily call 911 in an emergency (although today’s toddlers may already be comfortable with smartphones). Then you might have kept the phone line because the cable company basically gave it to you for free with your internet and TV bundle. And maybe you actually find the phone system useful for things like calls from the in-laws or the doctor’s office, when you can pass the responsibility of answering to anyone in the household instead of just you.

If you take and make a lot of calls, the old-school buttons and hand-friendly design of a cordless phone can make your life more pleasant, in the same way that a keyboard with physical keys offers a better experience than tapping on an on-screen keyboard.

And if you have hearing loss, an amplified phone’s boosted voice levels and tone adjustments may make it easier for you to communicate. “Everybody’s hearing loss is different,” Lise Hamlin, director of communications for the Hearing Loss Association of America, told us. “And the key here is not so much the volume as it is the quality of the sound.” Some people benefit more from louder calls, while others may need the high or low end of their caller’s voice boosted, and still others require both.

But if these scenarios don’t apply to you and you’re doing just fine with your cell phone, you don’t need a cordless phone and the hassle of getting a phone line for your home.

Be aware that traditional, copper-based landlines—the kind that let you use a corded phone during power outages—are being phased out by phone companies. If you’re considering a home phone for emergencies, a cordless phone may not be helpful. Some cordless phones, including our upgrade pick, and some internet-based Voice over Internet Protocol (aka VoIP or “digital”) providers like AT&T and Verizon offer backup batteries, but that won’t do you any good when the internet isn’t available.

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Since 2014, we’ve compiled and updated a spreadsheet of more than 100 phones made by the major manufacturers—Panasonic and VTech, the latter of which also makes AT&T-branded phones. It’s a seemingly endless list of confusing alphanumeric product names, only slightly differentiated feature sets, and designs with few meaningful differences. Complicating things further, many models are available only through certain retailers (Amazon, Target, Walmart, and so on).

So we asked Panasonic and VTech about their latest offerings to help determine which might be worth testing, looked at retailers’ best-seller lists, and pored over the few other professional reviews still being written about cordless phones.

We knew what to look for based on our own experience with cordless phones, surveying Wirecutter staff on what they would want in a home phone and combing through user reviews. Cordless phones have taken on some new skills since the era when they dominated the world (like answering calls with Siri), but the core criteria remain the same:

A few notes on call-blocking: Spam and spam calls are still a nuisance, so it’s important that phones offer an effective way to block them. Most cordless phones today have a button you can press when an unwanted call comes in, which moves that number to a block list so it won’t ring you going forward.

More advanced phones, like our top pick, have a built-in database of blocked numbers. In testing, we turned off Verizon’s spam blocking feature on the landline to see how well these features work; surprisingly, we got fewer spam calls than before we started testing, which could mean that the phones’ database was working (or Murphy’s Law was at work).

Another feature is pre-screening, which prevents robocalls from getting to you in the first place, for example, by requiring callers to press “1” before letting the phone ring. Setting up these blocking features can be confusing, however, and prevent calls you actually do want (if the person who’s trying to reach you gets confused by the screening message), so we would only use it if you’re inundated with spam calls.

In our previous round of testing, we used the same criteria to research amplified phones, with additional qualifications specific to their intended purpose:

Retired audiologist Lisa Devlin made calls using our amplified phone options and toggled through the various settings intended to aid hearing, including the volume-adjustment options, tone control, slow-speech and noise-reduction functions, and any audio assist or boost buttons.

After our latest research, we chose to test 11 promising models. Here’s how:

This phone sounds better, has a wider operational range, and offers more useful features than similarly priced models. It doesn’t connect to cell phones, though.

The Panasonic KX-TGD832M is the best cordless phone for most people because it excels at what matters most—sound quality, range, and ease of use—and has more handy features (except for cell phone connectivity) than competing models at this price.

It has excellent sound quality. Our panelists noted that the voicemails we made with the KX-TGD832M were clearer and louder than the ones from other models we tested, with the exception of our upgrade pick, the Panasonic KX-TGF973B. Incoming calls also sounded great, on and off the speakerphone.

It has a long range. In our tests, the phone kept a call connection for about 360 feet from its base—about seven houses down the street in a suburban Queens, New York, neighborhood. Although the recorded message we listened to broke up at that distance, this was still a substantially longer range than most other models. (If you need connectivity more than a football field’s length away or have many obstructions in a large home, such as thick walls and several floors, consider our upgrade pick instead.)

It’s straightforward to use (for a cordless phone). Navigating a cordless phone’s menus might not be as intuitive as using a smartphone, but the KX-TGD832M balances a generous number of features and settings with simple ways to get to them. Two dedicated buttons at the top of the phone help you go forward and back through the system menus, and the central four-way directional button gives you easy access to your phone book, last number redial, recent callers, and volume adjustments.

Other phones, like the AT&T DLP72212, have a more limited (two-directional) and less clearly labeled central operating button. We found the answering machine buttons on the KX-TGD832M’s base more intuitive to use than competing models as well.

Little conveniences add up to a lot. Unlike models from other manufacturers, this phone lets you assign numbers to speed dial with a long press of the 1 through 9 numbers. You can set “silent hours” for when the phone should not ring. And the phone can record calls to the answering machine for playing back later.

There are neat call-blocking features, too. You can quickly block numbers from the caller ID list using the Call Block button, instead of having to navigate through different menus, as with competing phones. And this phone also has an automated call block feature you can turn on that will prompt unknown callers (those not in your phone book) to enter an access code before the call will be let through.

Battery life is very good. The KX-TGD832M handset lasted three days off of its charger before the battery got down to one bar And unlike other models, the handset verbally nudged us to return it to its charger.

We appreciate that the phone uses rechargeable AAA batteries, too, which are more readily available than the specific NiMH battery packs used by other phones.

It’s expandable. This is the two-handset model; other variants are a single option or a three-handset system, and you can add on more handsets for up to a total of six.

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Get this model if you want one home phone system for both landline and mobile calls—or if bigger buttons and a large display matter to you.

The AT&T DLP72212 sounds great, has good range, and looks cool (for a cordless phone), with its bright blue buttons. Its volume is lower than that of the Panasonic KX-TGD832M, and its range is about 100 feet shorter, but you can pair two cell phones with this system to take all of your calls—landline or cellular—with one handset.

Sound is clear, although a bit low. Our panelists thought the voicemail recording we made was clearer than those from the cheaper models we tested, although the volume was a touch lower compared with our top pick. If you have a naturally low or soft voice, and you want cell phone connectivity, our upgrade pick may be a better choice.

Incoming calls, however, were the loudest of the bunch, thanks to a large grille section on the back of the phone.

It’s got useful modern features. The DLP72212’s Bluetooth connectivity allows you to connect up to two devices to your home phone: two cell phones, or a cell phone and a Bluetooth headset. When paired, your cordless phone can then serve as an extension of your smartphone, allowing you to leave your mobile phone by the base and then wander around with the DLP72212 handset. It will also ring when your cell phone gets a call, and you can set different ringtones for your cell phone and your landline to easily distinguish between them.

This is handy if you don’t have great cellular service throughout your entire home, since you can position the base where you do have good service, leave your cell phone next to it, and use the handset in areas where you don’t.

If you connect a cell phone to the system, you can activate Siri, Google Now, or S Voice on the handset to remotely control your smartphone with your voice, although we didn’t find reasons to do so.

This model also has an advanced call-screening feature that works similarly to the KX-TGD832M, prompting unknown callers to press #. One upgrade over our top pick is that you can filter calls by “robocalls only” or “unknown caller” (calls without caller ID or numbers not in your phone book).

It’s easy on the eyes. The buttons and screen on this phone are the largest and best-looking that we’ve tested. All of the models we looked at have backlit buttons, but the ones on the DLP72212 light up brighter, which can be especially helpful in low-light situations or if you have vision problems.

Its battery life is impressive. This model is the only one we tested that had a full three bars after three days of being left off its charger. Should you need to replace the battery, though, you’ll need to buy a special NiMH pack.

However, it’s not expandable. This is the two-handset system. AT&T also sells a four-handset version, but you can’t add on more handsets à la carte.

This phone’s higher volume levels can help people with mild to moderate hearing loss, and its tone adjustment may make understanding speakers easier.

For those with mild to moderate hearing loss who are looking for an amplified phone, we recommend starting with Panasonic’s KX-TGM420W. It has all the features a great phone should have, amplified or not, and it was retired audiologist Lisa Devlin’s favorite in testing—the one she would tell her clients to get.

It provides a suitable volume boost over our other picks. The KX-TGM420W’s volume adjustments should work for many people who need boosted voice levels. Panasonic says that its speaker can reach up to 40 dB—twice that of our top pick—and that the ringer can go up to 100 dB.

We didn’t measure the volume to confirm those numbers, but Devlin found that with her level of hearing loss, she didn’t need to turn the phone up all the way to reach a useful, comfortable listening level. “That would disqualify any product for me, if I always had to go to the maximum volume,” she said.

Adjusting the tone is easy. A button on the side of the handset, placed above the volume rocker, allows you to cycle through six preset tones with different adjustments to the high-end, midrange, and low-end qualities of the voice on the other end.

“For example, if I was talking to somebody and I hit the button, I could go from a more low-pitch emphasis to another with a mid-pitch emphasis,” Devlin said. “And there were a couple that I could make very sharp, very high-pitched.”

Depending on a number of factors, including your particular type of hearing loss and the speaker’s voice, you may need to adjust the tone even in the middle of a call, and Devlin said it was simple to do so. Panasonic also offers custom tone settings if you’re willing to fiddle around with the phone’s menu, but our tester was happy with the presets.

It’s compatible with hearing aids and has other accessibility features. The phone meets the TIA-1083 standard, so it offers compatibility with hearing aids without causing interference, and it works with headsets and neck loops. Flashing lights on both the base station and the phone itself indicate when you’re getting a call, and the included slow-speech function is especially useful for reviewing voicemail messages.

But the background-noise reduction may not be effective. Although Panasonic advertises a background-noise reduction feature on this amplified phone, Devlin wasn’t able to activate it while on a call. She said it was awkward to navigate to the feature on the KX-TGM420W and that it didn’t make a noticeable difference in the quality of the call.

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This phone is like our top pick but it connects to cell phones, comes with three handsets, and the base has a dial pad and speakerphone.

The Panasonic KX-TGF973B offers superb voice quality, great range, three handsets, and just about every other feature we could think of. Speakerphone and dial pad on the base station? Check. Smart call blocking? Yep. Cellular connection? Yes, indeed. If you want a feature-rich system for several rooms, the KX-TGF973B is the model you’re looking for.

Its call quality is excellent. We found calls on this phone to be loud and clear—the best of the models we tested, in fact, with the KX-TGD832M coming in a close second. Our voice sounded warm and natural in the voicemail recordings.

Range is very good, too. This model kept its call connection for 300 feet, which is about the size of a city block in Chicago (north of the river), Phoenix, and Anchorage, among others.

It offers a panoply of features. Except for amplification, this phone can do just about everything other cordless phones can do, and then some. As with our top pick, the KX-TGF973B has speed dial, call recording, and quick call blocking. It can connect to two cell phones and one headset over Bluetooth, as well as use Siri or Google Assistant. It has a headset jack. There’s even a power backup feature wherein the charged handset can temporarily power the base unit so you can make and receive landline calls should the power goes out.

The dial pad and speakerphone on the base unit may come in handy, especially for people working in home offices and taking a lot of hands-free calls.

Battery life is okay. The handset lasted two days before it told us it needed to be charged—a decent performance but not as good as our top and also-great picks. It takes rechargeable AAA batteries, like its sibling.

It’s designed for a multiroom home. You can expand this three-handset package up to six add-on phones, or purchase the four- or five-handset package to start with.

We previously recommended the simple VTech CS6114 cordless phone as a budget option. In our latest round of testing, we also evaluated the VTech CS6619, CS6719, and CS6919—all similar, simple cordless phones that mainly lack an answering machine.

Across the board, these phones’ sound quality and range left a lot to be desired, and their small buttons with ineffective backlighting made placing calls unpleasant.

If you don’t intend to use your landline until there’s a power outage or you can’t get a cellular connection, we suggest getting a corded phone instead. You won’t have to worry about battery life or losing the handset, and, as a bonus, there are several vintage-looking options for a retro vibe.

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The Panasonic KX-TGU4 is a just-released cordless phone with a few interesting features. It offers a dedicated favorites button for speed-dialing three numbers, a volume boost, and a flashlight. Yes, a flashlight. We have this phone on hand and will be reporting back after doing a bit more extensive testing.

If long range is most important to you: Consider the VTech IS8151-4. A former upgrade pick, it has the most impressive range of the models we’ve tested—450 feet, or the length of almost 13 school buses—but its voice quality isn’t as good as that of the Panasonic KX-TGF973B, and we found the oversize handset to be clunky.

If you need a greater volume boost: The Panasonic KX-TGM450S is a noticeably louder variant of our amplified pick, which may make it better suited to people with more severe hearing loss. Panasonic says the KX-TGM450S’s voice volume can reach 50 dB and the ringer can go up to 112 dB, compared with 40 dB and 100 dB, respectively, for the KX-TGM420W. Retired audiologist Lisa Devlin slightly preferred the tone adjustment on the KX-TGM450S, saying it was “slightly clearer when I went to a more high-pitched emphasis.” She also noted that the slow-speech function, while identical between the two phones for recorded messages, worked better on the KX-TGM450S for live calls because it slowed the speaker down more than on the KX-TGM420W. These upgrades all come at a cost: The KX-TGM450S is about 50% more expensive than the KX-TGM420W. But if any of these features will help you communicate, that’s a price well worth paying.

If you want an amplified phone that connects to your cell phone: There’s Panasonic’s KX-TGM430B, another variant of our amplified pick that offers the same features and volume, plus a Bluetooth cell phone connection. However, it costs much more.

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This is not a comprehensive list of models we have tested. We have removed any discontinued models.

As mentioned above, the VTech CS6619, CS6719, and CS6919 are all similar, budget-oriented phones. They performed poorly in our voice quality and range tests, and they weren’t as easy to use as other phones because of their low-contrast green LCD screens and small buttons.

The AT&T BL102-2 is a best seller on Amazon and available in one- to five-handset packages. Our voicemail recordings were properly loud but muddier than other phones’, which left panelists struggling to make out some words. It also had one of the lowest ranges of the models we tested at about 150 feet.

VTech’s CS5229 and AT&T’s EL52119 both come with only one handset. Also, they don’t have smart call blocking or one-button call blocking, and they don’t connect to cell phones.

Because Panasonic’s KX-TGE633M comes with a third handset, it’s more expensive than the KX-TGD832M and the AT&T DLP72212. It doesn’t support smart call blocking or connect to your cell phone.

Panasonic’s KX-TGC352B is inexpensive compared with other two-handset bundles. But it doesn’t have smart call blocking, a digital answering system, or a Bluetooth cell phone connection.

Although AT&T’s DLP73210 has features that match those of other high-end phones, it comes with only two handsets, and in our tests it had the shortest range of any phone we tested, at about 130 feet.

The VTech SN5147 is an amplified, corded-plus-cordless phone combo. The base has a dial pad with extra large keys, a speakerphone, 10 speed-dial buttons, and the corded handset. Unfortunately, our voicemail recordings had a lot of noise or interference—a crackling sound—and the cordless handset’s range was among the worst of the test pool. It’s a very thick and heavy handset, too, which might not be best for the seniors this phone is designed for.

At nearly $200, Clarity’s XLC8 is the most expensive amplified phone we tested. It doesn’t excel in any of the features it shares with the Panasonic KX-TGM420W, and it doesn’t offer any additional functionality. Our tester also found its tone adjustment to be neither easy to use nor effective.

This article was edited by Ben Keough and Erica Ogg.

Ruth Wilson, marketing chair, DECT Forum, Zoom interview, September 3, 2020

Lise Hamlin, director of communications, Hearing Loss Association of America, phone interview, April 12, 2021

Nick Guy

Nick Guy is a former senior staff writer covering Apple and accessories at Wirecutter. He has been reviewing iPhones, iPads, and related tech since 2011—and stopped counting after he tested his 1,000th case. It’s impossible for him not to mentally catalog any case he sees. He once had the bright idea to build and burn down a room to test fireproof safes.

Melanie Pinola

Melanie Pinola covers home office, remote work, and productivity as a senior staff writer at Wirecutter. She has contributed to print and online publications such as The New York Times, Consumer Reports, Lifehacker, and PCWorld, specializing in tech, work, and lifestyle/family topics. She’s thrilled when those topics intersect—and when she gets to write about them in her PJs.

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