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A mini fridge is a convenient addition to your dorm, home office, garage, or anywhere else you care to have chilled drinks or assortment of snacks at the ready.
We spoke with several refrigeration experts, including the folks at Liberty Home Guard, to find out what makes the best mini fridge, what to avoid, and how to care for one to ensure it lasts for years.
When shopping for the best mini fridge for your needs, the most important features to consider are shelf configurations (and adjustability), design aesthetics, and whether you want a freezer. Mini fridges aren't generally built to last the way that full-sized ones are, so depending on how much you use them, a good one will need to be replaced around the five-year mark. Learn more about how Insider Reviews tests and researches home products.
Best overall: Midea 3.1-Cubic Foot Compact Refrigerator - See at Amazon
Best compact: Frigidaire 1.6-Cubic-Foot Compact Fridge - See at Amazon
Best convertible: Avanti Dual Function - See at Amazon
Best for drinks: NewAir 126-Can Mini Bar Fridge - See at The Home Depot
A mini fridge with a separate freezer is a great package for galley kitchens, dorms, and wet bars where you want to have all possible storage options.
Between the slick glass shelves (which we like because they don't have any plastic pieces that could trap bacteria and grime), the can holder, a section on the door for two-liter bottles or wine bottles, and a space on top for butter or smaller items, Midea's 3.1 cubic foot mini fridge is packed with features. Basically, you could easily live out of this fridge if you wanted.
There are a few reasons this fridge isn't for everyone, though. If you don't store 12-ounce cans, you might find that the can holder on the door becomes wasted space, and while most people agree that the freezer works well, some have found that temperature fluctuates above freezing. The back of the refrigerator compartment also tends to get colder, which you can use accordingly, but it can also be a nuisance.
If you're using a mini fridge for snacks and beverages in your dorm room or home office, you'll want something small. Since this is a convenience item, affordability is also important. After taking apart fridges and talking to expert technicians, we found that there's little difference between mini fridges. A few manufacturers supply most of the brands.
Frigidaire is a solid name in the refrigerator industry, and the 1.6-cubic-foot Compact Fridge is a great, affordable, no-frills solution. While taking up minimal space, it has enough room for one or two bottles of wine, six packs, and several smaller items.
The basic wire rack shelf is removable for easy cleaning, and the compact fridge has a chiller for freezing a tray of ice cubes or keeping a small item or two frozen. The door is reversible for your convenience. The bare-bones design means there are fewer components to potentially break down.
In addition to red, the Frigidaire 1.6-cubic-foot Compact Fridge is available in several color options to match your decor or school colors, including purple, blue, green, and orange.
If you're looking for a mini fridge that you can use in a pinch as either a fridge or a freezer, this is the easiest, most compact, and stowable option around. The experts at Liberty Home Guard recommended it to us.
Note that if you do use this fridge as a freezer, you'll want to be hypervigilant about condensation and be sure to get a good seal every time you open and close the door. This is basically destined to be a problem with most similar models, so it's important to understand that you're working with a very small, very inexpensively built appliance.
Many people build this fridge into their RVs because of its size, light weight (33 pounds compared to most others' 40+ pounds), and versatility. It can also store frozen foods well below zero degrees. Some even purchase two of these fridges to store side by side, using one as a fridge and one as a freezer.
If you want a wet or mini bar fridge, look for a model with a double-paned glass door. This allows you to keep an eye on your inventory and not have to stand there with the door open while fishing around or deciding what you want. The longer and more often you open your mini fridge door, the more you overwork the poor little built-in compressor, and the faster you shorten the appliance's life.
NewAir refrigerators use the same compressors found in Magic Chef mini fridges and others owned by Whirlpool. Again, because there are only a handful of big manufacturers, the parts are roughly the same, and so too is the quality.
Otherwise, NewAir offers multiple sizes (a 90-can model and the 126-can model we recommend), a sleek stainless steel design, and five removable shelves, so, yes, you can fit that case of wine in there no problem, should you want to divide space differently.
Based on what we learned from the experts, and our own experience as consumers (we've owned over a dozen models), we decided on our picks for the best mini fridge based on the following criteria:
Design: Because most mini fridges essentially have the same components, design is an important consideration. Simplicity is key; as with any fridge, the more complex, the more that can go wrong, according to Moreno.
Our pick for the best mini fridge is the most versatile we could find. It has room for everything from cans and condiments to takeout boxes, as well as a pint of ice cream or a couple of ice trays in the freezer section.
Size: Within the realm of mini fridges, there are many sizes. Consider what you're going to store, and how much of it. Our recommendations run the gamut from 1.1 to 4.4 cubic feet, which is about as large as they get before being too bulky to fit under a counter or desk.
Configuration: It's important to determine what your mini fridge is going to hold — and how much space those things require — before making a purchase. Removable and adjustable shelves are preferred, and we paid attention to fridges that had both.
Price: While most mini fridges worth recommending fall within the $200 to $400 range, we did consider budget options, particularly for those who don't plan on using their fridge too often. Since all mini fridges have a lifespan of about three to five years, spending a lot of money on one doesn't make much sense, except for built-in options, which require more of an investment. We're researching built-ins for our next update, but for now, Moreno suggests a Whirlpool model.
While writing this guide, we spoke to David Moreno, a New York City-based refrigerator technician with Liberty Home Guard, and also chatted with a mechanical engineer, and a sales associate at The Home Depot. We even disassembled a few mini fridges ourselves to compare their parts, because, as Moreno said, "what I see with mini fridges is a lot of these manufacturers find a factory that produces them, and license out the name. They're produced in bulk using really cheap components, but they do come at a great price point." To that point, we found that the four fridges we disassembled used parts from two manufacturers, both from the same province in China.
Mini fridges are great for offices, dorms, recreation rooms, and so many other places, but it's important to know that they are built economically, and you can't expect to get more than five years out of even a good one.
If space isn't necessarily the deciding factor, and you're going to be using (opening and closing) the fridge a lot, you should consider a full-sized refrigerator on the more affordable side.
If you are set on a mini fridge, consider that it might be wise not to spend too much because of the shorter lifespan. Our recommendations above run the gamut of what we found (based on research and expert interviews) to be a reasonable price range.
The most important thing is to keep the back of the fridge at least three inches away from surfaces to allow for optimal airflow, according to David Moreno, a service technician with Liberty Home Guard.
Keep your fridge clean inside and out. This includes dusting the back, including the coils. Over time, the wrong mix of spills and ensuing mold can start to damage the components.
Make sure you maintain a good seal by wiping the gaskets clean every month. The more a fridge leaks air, the more the compressor runs, and the more the compressor has to run, the shorter its lifespan will be.
Yes, and generally, motors last longer when they're regularly run. What really speaks to your fridge's longevity is how often you open and close it. The more you do so, the harder the compressor works, and the shorter you can expect it to live.
Keep your mini fridge away from heat sources, including other refrigerators (or at least their compressors and hot spots), and keep it three inches away from walls and cabinets so that its compressor has space to cool.
