The Best Meat Thermometers for Perfectly Cooked Proteins Every Time (2025)

There is no shortage of Bon Appétit recipes that ask you to cook something to a particular temperature (165°F for chicken thighs or 130°F for medium-rare steak). And a lot of the recipes that don’t call for a specific temperature probably should. It is, without question, the most reliable way to ensure you don’t overcook or undercook your meal and nonnegotiable in our opinion if you have any BBQ aspirations at all. To pull this off, of course, you need a meat thermometer.

Our top picks

Best instant-read meat thermometer: Thermapen One
Best budget meat thermometer: Thermoworks Sizzle
Best leave-in meat thermometer: ThermoWorks RFX
An awesome predictive thermometer: Combustion Predicitive Thermometer

The first question you need to answer in your meat thermometer journey is whether you want a leave-in thermometer or an instant-read. Like the names suggest, a leave-in thermometer goes in whatever protein you’re cooking before you put it in the oven or on the grill and stays there throughout. Typically, they come equipped with alarms to let you know when your cook has hit the temperature you’re aiming for. An instant-read is what you use for spot-checks. It allows you to quickly check the temperature of different parts of the meat, like the breast and thigh of a roast chicken, which often cook at different rates. Both come in handy, and we think both are worth owning, but we’ve got a couple favorites in both categories below.

Best instant-read meat thermometer: ThermoWorks Thermapen One

Instant-read thermometers do not come faster or easier to use than the ThermoWorks Thermapen One.

What we love: The two most important features of an instant-read thermometer are its accuracy and its speed, and the Thermapen One excels with both. It took one second to produce an accurate reading in our water boiling test and two seconds in our freezing water test. The focus on speed might seem excessive, but remember, whenever you go to check temperature, you’re opening the oven or grill and the longer it’s open the more the temperature inside will drop.

Besides its quick read capability, the Thermapen has a few other nice features. It turns on automatically when opened, goes to sleep if not used (you can set the sleep function to kick in anywhere between 10 seconds and three minutes), has an LCD display that rotates so you can read the thermometer easily at whatever angle you’re holding it. And while the battery life is not an issue (we used one for over a year without changing the battery), the Thermapen One has an easier to open battery compartment than the original Thermapen and uses a AAA battery instead of two of those annoying to find circular batteries.

What we’d leave: This is the ideal instant-read food thermometer in our opinion. The only downside is price—it retails for over $100. However, it’s frequently on sale for less.

Best budget meat thermometer: Thermoworks Sizzle

What we love:

Thermoworks is well-represented among our favorite Thermometers, currently taking three of the four spots in this story because the company just keeps finding new niches to fill with their excellent products. If you like everything you’ve read about the Thermapen One but are put off by the normal $100+ price tag, Thermoworks heard you and came out with the Sizzle. It has the same features as the Thermapen One, just slightly downgraded, which is what we’d expect for something that costs half as much. It can read temperatures to the tenth of a degree in two seconds. That’s about a second slower than the Thermapen One (are you really going to miss that second?). And it promises to read temps within .9℉, whereas the Thermapen One promises to be within .5℉.

The one place it has a little more functionality than the Thermapen is in its probe, which rotates 270° to the One’s 180°. It also has a backlight to work in the dark that can stay on for a full minute, a magnetic back, and a sleep timer that’s adjustable between 30 seconds and two minutes.

What we’d leave:

We think it’s worth it, but we will note that even at $50 (the price at the time of writing), this thermometer is still more than double the cost of plenty of other instant read thermometers. It’s a more precise instrument and you will pay for that.

As far as the design tradeoffs you have to make choosing the Sizzle instead of the One, the backlight button on the front of the thermometer is a little obtrusive. It’s also not entirely necessary because the light still turns on automatically.

Best leave-in meat thermometer: ThermoWorks RFX

This wireless meat thermometer had the most reliable signal of any we tested, and it comes from the makers of our longtime favorite instant-read thermometer.

What we love: One of the most frustrating parts about using wireless probe thermometers is that they drop their signal, often right when you need to check on progress. The RFX is the first thermometer I’m aware of that uses a radio frequency for its transmission instead of the much more common Bluetooth or occasional Wi-Fi. That means we got a clear signal from the backyard into the house with no dropouts. The radio transmitter also comes with built-in magnets to stick to the side of a grill or oven, which makes it easy to keep it right where you need it.

ThermoWorks also solved another longstanding problem in the thermometer space: ambient temperature measurement. Lots of leave-in thermometers now have ambient temperature sensors on the exposed end of the probe to let you know if your oven or smoker is getting too hot or cold. The problem is, as moisture evaporates from, say, the brisket you stuck a probe in, the surrounding air will cool it down. That can cause the sensor to read lower than it should, leaving you second-guessing the actual temperature inside your oven or smoker. ThermoWorks provides a separate ambient temperature probe that connects to the radio transmitter. You can place it away from the meat to get a read on the chamber’s true temperature.

Finally, there are a number of nice extras, like high and low temperature alerts for both the cook and the ambient probes, a real-time graph of the temperature so you can see if a project is progressing as you’d expect it to, and a Wi-Fi connection that lets you monitor a cook away from home.

What we’d leave: The only way to use the RFX is with the ThermoWorks app. The app works well, but an always-on external display would be nice so you don’t need to take your phone out (and run down its battery) every time you want to check progress. The RFX also doesn’t work well as an instant-read thermometer; it took four or five seconds longer than what we’d ideally like to see in our boiling water and ice bath tests. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a huge surprise from ThermoWorks though, because they make a number of specific thermometers for specific tasks. If you need instant-read capabilities you can just use one of their Thermapens.

Good to know: When I used the RFX the default transmission setting (how often it sends information to the cloud) was 15 seconds. That runs down the battery incredibly quickly. If you plan to do cooks longer than 90 minutes, you need to change that setting to transmit every 60 seconds.

An awesome predictive thermometer: Combustion Thermometer with Wi-Fi Booster

That this unmissable bright yellow thermometer is one of the best in its class is not surprising. It came from one of the minds behind ChefSteps, one of the great culinary technology innovators and makers of amazing techy gear like the Joule Sous Vide and Joule Oven.

What we love: This may be the most technologically advanced thermometer we tested, which makes sense. Combustion’s founder, Chris Young, had previous stints at ChefSteps (where he developed the Joule Sous Vide circulator) and Modernist Cuisine. It has eight sensors running through the probe and you can isolate any one of them to see what is happening with a particular part of a cook.

The thing that sets the Combustion Thermometer apart from almost everything else on the market is the way it uses its readings to track the cooking process and predict when your food will be ready. You can set a target temperature, and the thermometer tracks how quickly your food is heating up, along with the ambient temperature. It then uses that data in a built-in algorithm to estimate how much cooking time is left. It’s not perfect for particularly long cooks (it struggled to deal with a brisket stall in our tests), but for shorter- or medium-length cooks, like when we roasted a whole chicken, it proved quite accurate. It can also alert you when enough of your food reaches the USDA’s minimum internal cooking temperatures for food safety.

Unlike the RFX, the Combustion really could be your only cooking thermometer, as it also works as an instant-read, registering readings in our boiling and freezing water tests in about two seconds. It also has a wide temperature range—the entire upper half of the probe can withstand temperatures up to 900°F, making this versatile enough to use when deep frying or in a pizza oven.

Finally, while you can just use the probe with the Combustion app, you can also get a digital display that shows both temperature and predicted finish time for an added layer of visibility.

What we’d leave: The reason we recommend getting the (slightly more expensive) version of the Combustion with the Wi-Fi booster is because we did have signal issues with the standard version. When using it in the backyard I had to stand outside in order to get a reading.

How we tested meat thermometers

To find the best meat thermometers, we put a range of leave-in and instant-read models through hands-on testing both in the kitchen and on a grill and smoker. We evaluated accuracy, response time, ease of use, and additional features to determine which tools were the most reliable, intuitive, and helpful for optimal cooking performance. Here’s how we tested:

What makes a good meat thermometer

We only tested digital meat thermometers here. You can use an analog thermometer like this, but it will be slower and more challenging to read. Here are the other things we looked for in our tests.

Other thermometers we tested and liked

These thermometers still performed well across our tests, and we think you’ll be happy if you pick one of them, but they lack some of the features of our top picks.

Kizen Instant Read Thermometer

During our tests, the Kizen proved to be a powerful thermometer for the money. It did take four seconds to read during the water boiling test, but it has a number of other nice features that make it user friendly. A button turns on a backlight for use in dark settings, another toggles between Fahrenheit and Celsius. The display automatically turns on when you unfold it and a magnet lets you stick it on to the door of your range or fridge so it’s easy to keep track of.

It does take four times as long as the Thermapen to provide a reading, but that is the kind of compromise you should expect to make if you’re spending under $20. The sleep function also takes 10 minutes to turn on and isn’t adjustable.

The Instaprobe was a close second to the Thermapen One in our testing. It was hard to notice any difference in its read time, and its rotating, bright OLED display is easy to read no matter the angle of insertion. A magnet on the back makes it easy to stick on the stove, so it’s always ready to use. Ultimately, the choice of the Thermapen was a subjective one; We thought the wider base was easier to hold and use compared to the slimmer, sleeker Instaprobe. This is still a terrific instant-read thermometer.

For around half the price of the Thermapen One or the Typhur Instaprobe, the Javelin offers many of the same features, including an automatically rotating display and sleep function. The backlight requires pressing a touchpad, and it wasn’t quite as fast to read, but this is still a good, less expensive instant-read.

The Typhur Sync has a lot going for it. It comes with either two or four meat probes to handle multiple cooks at once, reads quickly, and didn’t have issues dropping its signal. The five sensors in the probes provide a robust picture of temperature changes and the base offers a clear display as well as a (very loud) alarm when a cook is done. If you don’t want to use the base, which is quite large, the Typhur app is straightforward and easy to navigate. There is a prediction feature, though it wasn’t as accurate as the Combustion prediction when we cooked chicken.

Of the three Meater thermometers we tested, the Pro series was by far our favorite. It read quickly and accurately during our water tests, and the improved high heat capabilities (up to 1000°F) allows use in searing cooking temperatures like a pizza oven or an open fire. It also didn’t drop signal the way the original Meater Plus did during our tests. We tested the single probe Meater Pro, but we’d also recommend the Meater Pro Duo with an extra probe.

This wireless thermometer is more basic than the RFX or the Combustion (but it is much less expensive). It doesn’t have a separate display and only has a single sensor at the tip of the thermometer. Its charging case doubles as a Bluetooth booster, supposedly extending its range up to 500 feet; however, we found getting that kind of range outdoors required optimal conditions. The companion app is simple but useful, with temperature readings for both what you’re cooking and the ambient temperature as well as the ability to set high and low temperature alerts.

Thermometers we don’t recommend

Not every thermometer we tested earned a spot in our recommendations. Some were outclassed by newer models, others had usability issues, and a few just didn’t offer enough value for the price.

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