The Best Cordless Drill 2026: UK Picks, Honest Prices and What to Skip

Almost every UK household ends up owning a drill, and almost every one is bought badly. Either it is a £29 supermarket special that stalls halfway into a Victorian brick wall, or a £320 trade kit that spends its life hanging picture hooks and flat-pack shelving.

The honest answer for most homes sits between the two, at around £110 to £180 for a kit that will still be working in a decade. What follows is where that money goes, what the same tool costs bare versus boxed, and which price tags should make you suspicious rather than excited.

Buy according to how often you will actually pull the trigger, not according to the job you are imagining. We see three genuine buyer types, and the gap between them is mostly battery capacity and duty cycle rather than raw power.

• •Occasional DIY (a dozen jobs a year): flat-pack, curtain poles, a few shelves. One 2.0Ah battery is plenty. Budget £70–£110.
• •Regular home improver (something on the go most months): decking, fencing, kitchen fitting, plasterboard work. Two batteries, 2.0Ah and 4.0Ah. Budget £130–£200.
• •Trade or serious renovator (daily use): you need brushless, a metal chuck, 5.0Ah cells and a repair network. Budget £220–£300 for the drill alone, more once you buy into a platform.

Be sceptical of any site claiming laboratory torque figures. Ours come from paid work — kitchen and bathroom fits, fencing, plasterboard and second-fix carpentry — plus current UK retail listings checked against Screwfix, Toolstation, B&Q and specialist dealers. Where we have not personally used a model for a sustained period, we say so rather than dressing up a spec sheet as a review.

The criteria that separate a good drill from a bad one on real jobs are narrower than marketing suggests. Before you spend anything, it is worth being clear whether you need a drill at all or an impact driver, because they are not interchangeable and most people buying their first tool want the wrong one.

• •Does it drive a 5 x 80mm screw into softwood on one charge segment without the clutch slipping?
• •Does it clear a 7mm hole through hard London stock brick without smoking?
• •Are replacement batteries stocked in the UK at a sane price in five years' time, and is the warranty handled by a UK service agent?

The single most useful thing to understand is the split between the tool and the power. On an 18V kit, the drill body is typically only 35–45% of the price you pay. Batteries account for 40–55%, and the charger another £30–£45. That is why a bare Makita DHP484 sits around £95–£120 while the same tool as a twin-4.0Ah kit is £190–£240.

Accessories are the cost people forget. A usable bit set — HSS twist bits, brick bits and a driver set — is £25–£45. Decent nylon wall plugs and screws for a full room of shelving add another £10–£15. Budget £40–£60 on top of the drill before you can finish a job.

• •Reasonable: £75–£110 for a branded 18V brushless bare tool with a genuine warranty.
• •Reasonable: £140–£200 for an 18V brushless combi kit with two batteries, charger and case.
• •Reasonable: £55–£90 for a genuine 4.0–5.0Ah replacement battery from the same manufacturer.
• •Suspect: a "brushless 18V twin 5.0Ah kit" at £45 on a marketplace. The cells alone cost more than that — those are repackaged low-grade batteries and the Ah rating is usually fiction.
• •Suspect: trade-counter listings that look 20% cheaper than everywhere else. Check whether the price is ex-VAT before you celebrate.
• •Suspect: a "grey import" with a two-pin plug and a non-UK warranty card. It may work fine, but you have no service route.

Our picks are set out in full below with pros, cons and price bands. In short: the Makita is the safest all-round buy in Britain because of parts availability, the Erbauer is the value pick if you are not building a tool collection, the Ryobi makes sense only if you will buy more ONE+ tools, and the DeWalt is the one to choose if you are on site five days a week. If you are weighing up ecosystems rather than individual tools, our comparison of which cordless platform to commit to goes deeper, as does the head-to-head on DeWalt versus Milwaukee.

Ignore voltage marketing. A 20V MAX badge and an 18V badge describe the same battery measured differently. These are the specifications that change how the tool behaves on a Saturday afternoon.

• •Brushless motor: 20–30% more work per charge, far cooler running, and no brushes to replace. Worth roughly £30 of the price difference.
• •13mm metal keyless chuck: plastic chucks wander and eventually refuse to grip small bits. Non-negotiable above £100.
• •Two-speed gearbox: low speed (0–500rpm) for driving, high (0–1,900rpm) for drilling. A single-speed drill will burn screw heads.
• •Hammer function (combi): fine for brick and blockwork, useless in concrete lintels. Anything harder needs SDS+.
• •Torque of 50–60Nm covers virtually all domestic work. Above 90Nm you are paying for something you will never use.
• •Weight under 1.6kg with a 2.0Ah battery. Overhead work punishes anything heavier within about ten minutes.
• •An 18-position clutch and an LED that lights the bit rather than your knuckles.

Most regret is about the ecosystem rather than the drill. The tool wears out; the battery mount decides what you can buy for the next ten years. That decision matters more than the 5Nm difference between two models on a comparison table.

• •Buying two platforms. Two chargers, two battery types, twice the dead weight in the cupboard. Pick one and stay there.
• •Paying for a 5.0Ah battery on a drill used for shelving. A 2.0Ah is lighter, charges in 25 minutes and does the same jobs.
• •Assuming a combi drill handles masonry. It handles brick, mortar and thermal block. Concrete and engineering brick need an SDS+, and a day's hire from a plant hire branch is £22–£35.
• •Skipping eye protection and dust control on plasterboard and brick work. Our power tool safety checklist covers the five-minute set-up that prevents most drill injuries.
• •Buying batteries from third-party sellers to save £25. Non-genuine cells are the most common cause of the charger fault codes we get asked about.

If your entire project is one afternoon of heavy masonry — a new gate post, a run of fixings into a concrete floor — hiring an SDS+ rotary hammer for £22–£35 a day beats buying a combi drill that will disappoint you. Equally, if the work is almost entirely screwing rather than boring holes, an impact driver at £80–£120 is the better first purchase, and a corded drill still makes sense for occasional heavy use; we set out the trade-offs in cordless versus corded tools.

And if the drill is for one specific job, price the job first: putting up floating shelves properly depends on correct fixings and a decent bit set far more than on an expensive drill.