The best LED light bulb for every room in your home in 2025
LED lights are bright, energy efficient, and offer additional features that you may not find with a traditional light bulb. Whether you’re looking for maximum brightness in the darker rooms of your home or want a light source that can be programmed to dim on your schedule, we’ve found the best LED lights for long-lasting use, offering warm white, cool white, and even multiple colors.
Read more: The best gifts for smart home technology
So how do you choose the right LED lights for the job, especially with so many energy efficient LED bulbs stacking the shelves? The answer depends on how long you use the light in a particular room. For example, if you are a foodie and spend most of your time in the kitchen, you will need brighter and more intense light. Or maybe you’ll kick back and relax in your bedroom, where else intimate, warm lighting is key. With these thoughts in mind, you’ll be able to narrow down the options for your lighting needs.
If you’re still not sure what to choose, here are some room-specific tips to help you navigate the right LED lights for your living space. I’ve also included links so you can easily purchase the light bulbs from our tests. I will keep them updated as I test new products.
If you have high ceilings, you’ll want spotlights that shine nice and bright in one direction.
Too much height? Make it super bright
If you have rooms with high ceilings or recessed lighting—an entryway, for example, or perhaps a staircase with overhead lights or a sconce above—you’ll want to prioritize brightness over softness in your light bulbs. After all, the higher your bulbs are, the brighter they need to be to illuminate the room.
The most common products for overhead lighting are spotlights in the form of BR30. “BR” stands for “bulging reflector” and means that the light inside the bulb sits above a reflective bowl, sort of like a small satellite dish. Screw a bulb like this into your ceiling, and this bowl will catch all the light thrown up, then reflect it back down and out from the bottom, which bulges out to produce the widest possible circle of bright light throughout the room. It’s the same trick the headlights of your vehicle use to produce as much light as possible in front of you while driving.
You have a very energy-saving BR30-form LEDs options in the corridor for lighting. The most common choice among these are 65-watt replacement bulbs, which typically put out about 650 lumens of light each. This is a good, average number and is suitable for medium-height ceilings with at least a few bulbs shining from above. Among the ones I’ve tested, the 65-watt replacement floodlights from Cree and Philips are the two I’d recommend. They are good value and very energy efficient for the money (each consumes less than 10 watts). These dimmable bulbs also work well with dimmer switches and – most importantly for overhead lighting – they’re both nice and bright, comfortably putting out more than 700 lumens each. As of this writing, Home Depot has these Cree bulbs on sale at a two packs for less than $6 each — they are the ones I would go with in my own home if I were buying.
Watch this: The coolest alternative smart lighting fixtures
Dimmability means flexibility for your living room and bedroom
Some rooms serve only one or two primary functions, but other rooms are used in all sorts of ways. For example, you can use your living room for watching TV, reading books, playing board games with the kids or any other activities. Rooms like this can really benefit from quality lights that can adapt to whatever is going on.
The old-fashioned way to do it is to use a combination of different lamps and fixtures that serve different purposes – a reading lamp next to your favorite armchair, overhead lights for a night of board games, everything off when watching a movie and so on. This is all well and good, but it limits you to a binary “on/off” lighting mentality.
The better approach? Give yourself a full spectrum of lighting options by making sure all of these lights are dimmable.
Upgrading your light switches to dimmer switches is one way to do it (and not nearly as intimidating as you might think if you’ve never turned one off before). There are also smart plugs from brands like Lutron that will allow you to dim your fixtures and lamps up and down. However, the easiest way is to simply replace your light bulbs with dimmable ones smart bulbs. that’s it great time to do it — costs have come down significantly in recent years, and the advent of voice controls has given people a quick and easy way to switch to whatever lower setting they want, whenever they want.
Best of all, almost every smart bulb on the market can be dimmed without flickering or buzzing, eliminating the usual headache that comes with a dimmer switch in the wall. This also makes smart bulbs quality choices for bedrooms where dimming is high and the like the previously scheduled wake-up disappears it can do wonders for your mood in the morning.
Philips Hue has an expensive reputation, but dimmable white-light LED smart bulbs are only $15 each, and you can get a starter kit with three bulbs and the Philips Hue Bridge, which acts as the brains of the system, for around $60. From there, you can pick up an additional bulb as they go on sale, gradually building your network of connected bulbs.
We like the Philips Hue smart bulb because well developed app for remote access, on a wide variety of bulbs, lighting fixtures and accessories you can add to your setup and good support experience. With the Hue Bridge controlling the photos, your bulbs will work with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant for quick, voice-activated lighting changes. The next time you’re watching a movie and want the lights dimmed to a minimum, but not completely off, you can simply tell your assistant of choice to “dim the living room lights to 5%.”
Left, an M&M bowl illuminated by a standard GE LED. On the right, the same bowl lit by a GE Reveal LED, which does a much better job of making colors look bright and true.
Think about the colors in your kitchen and your wardrobe
I’m not talking about color-changing smart lights (although if you want to liven up your home with them, don’t let me stop you). No, I’m talking about the colors that are already in your home — artwork, furniture, the clothes in your closet, the fruits and vegetables in your kitchenyou name it.
Whatever it is, if it’s colorful then it will benefit from bulbs with high color rendering scores – bulbs that raise the color temperature and help colors look their best. This is not always the easiest thing to shop for, as manufacturers are not required to list their color rendering results on the packaging, as they are with brightness and efficiency specifications. Some bulbs that claim to emit great colors are actually just that.
My advice for LED lighting: Just stick with GE Reveal bulbs, because after about six years of reviewing light bulbs for CNET, I’ve yet to test one that doesn’t live up to its promise of better-looking colors. This includes standard 60-watt replacement LEDs, floodlights, odd-looking rod-shaped LEDs, dimmable LED bulbs, and more. A 4-pack of Reveal regular A-bulbs (linked below) is currently $14 at Lowe’s.
They tend to cost a little more per bulb, and most are a little less bright than the average LED light because they filter out some of the excess yellow light for a better color temperature—but those trade-offs are worth it if you’re using them for accent lighting or to illuminate the places in your home where you’ll appreciate accurate, better-looking colors day after day.
And that’s really the point – even though we regularly take them for granted, we use light bulbs more than almost anything else in our homes. They’re often the first thing we turn on in the morning and the last thing we turn off before bed. So don’t let lighting overwhelm you – whether you choose an energy-saving light bulb, a CFL bulb, smart LED bulb or even a simple incandescent light bulb, finding the right light for every room in your home is worth it and a lot easier than you think.
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