Key takeaways:

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

Does your smartphone make it through the day on a single charge? That's the rough benchmark for phones sold in 2026, but in reality some people burn through their battery far quicker scrolling through social media and capturing photos and video. As features like cameras get yearly advancements, batteries have largely stayed static. 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 a priority. In a CNET/YouGov survey from September 2025, readers ranked "longer battery life" as the main reason to buy a new phone (second only to price).

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

2026 is a turning point for batteries

In the past year, we've seen more phone makers adopt 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 larger physical battery. Space is already limited in phones, especially as designs get thinner, so finding a way to increase the capacity without making the battery larger is an incredible advancement.

All of this leads to the question: Do phones sold today have better battery life than previous models? And if so, which phones and brands last the longest on a single charge? We did some testing to find out.

Watch this: The iPhone 17 Pro Max Has Incredible Battery Life

12:10

What phone has the best battery life?

Multiple factors, like your carrier's signal strength and your screen's brightness, can affect your battery life. How you use your phone throughout the day also has a huge impact. The battery's capacity and the efficiency of the software and processor also significantly influence battery life. To standardize our testing and minimize variables as much as possible, we run each phone through an anecdotal stress test and a video streaming test, starting with the battery at 100%. The results from each test show the remaining battery percentage. We averaged the two results to determine an overall score and limited our rankings to phones officially sold in the US.

In 2025, CNET tested the battery life of 35 phones, and our overall top performer is the iPhone 17 Pro Max. At a starting price of $1,199, it was the most expensive phone in our top five. Its 5,088-mAh battery capacity wasn't the largest, but it shows just how efficient Apple's A19 Pro chip and iOS 26 are.

Among our top five rankings, several were tied. The iPhone 17 and OnePlus 15, which start at $829 and $900, respectively, both finished in second place. The iPhone 17 has the smallest-capacity battery of any of the top phones, proving that battery size doesn't matter. Meanwhile, the OnePlus 15 has one of the largest on the list.

Notably, OnePlus had three phones in our top rankings, all of which have a silicon-carbon battery for that larger capacity. The only other silicon-carbon battery phone in our top rankings was the Poco F7 Ultra, which 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 phones tied for fifth place: the $400 Motorola Moto G Stylus (2025), the $500 Motorola Edge (2025), the $600 OnePlus 13R and the $700 OnePlus 15R.

In total, only two phones of the nine ranked in our 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. 

Which brand makes phones with the longest battery life?

We averaged the scores from both tests for each phone model, and for any company where we had tested three or more models, we averaged those scores to assign each brand an average. Our lab data showed that Apple and OnePlus were the top brands for long battery life.

Apple's iPhones and OnePlus handsets dominated our top five for phones, so it's not that surprising that they rank high in overall battery life for a brand. Oppo was not included despite having two phones that did well in our testing. (OnePlus is a subsidiary of Oppo.) The Oppo Find X9 Pro and Oppo Find N5 foldable scored well, but because we hadn't reviewed any other Oppo models, we couldn't include them in the overall brand rankings. Also, neither phone is sold in the US but if you're abroad it's still worth getting either phone for the outstanding battery life.

In third and fourth place were Motorola and Samsung. We tested seven Motorola phones and nine Samsung handsets, and the results were tight. Motorola barely surpassed Samsung. I'm excited to keep an eye on these two brands in 2026 and see how their collective battery life compares.

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

Battery testing results

CNET runs two battery-life benchmarks (video streaming and stress tests) that let us compare 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 other phones that performed fantastic in this test were in our overall top five for battery life. A nice surprise is Samsung's Galaxy S25 Plus, which starts at $999. It did well, tying with the Motorola Edge (2025) for fifth place. Sadly, the S25 Plus didn't do as well in our second test.

In CNET's 45-minute endurance test, during which we play games, stream videos, scroll social media and take a video call with the battery starting at 100%, the iPhone 17 Pro Max was again at the very top and joined behind by three other Apple models, including the iPhone 16E, which starts at $599.

We had a lot of ties for the top five results, including a few phones we haven't seen rank yet. Google's Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro Fold did great in this test, as did the Motorola Razr (2025) -- that's two foldables in the top five results.

CNET's buying advice

Because we've been using these tests for years, we can also compare a new phone against older models. We were able to see how 2025 phones performed compared with 2024 handsets. We averaged all 35 phones that we tested in 2025 and did the same for 2024. And while 2025 models did have more battery life, it was by 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 a phone you like and this year's model, you likely won't see a drastic difference in battery life -- just go for the cheaper, slightly older phone.

If you like your current phone (iPhone or Android) and the only issue is that the battery life isn't what it used to be, consider replacing the battery instead of buying a new phone. You'll save a lot of money and extend your phone's life by another couple of years.