The Best Home Safes to Keep Your Valuables Secure

Chances are if you’re reading this guide, you want a better, more responsible way to stow your valuables and important documents. If you want to safeguard items like jewelry, a passport, or some cash to keep them close at hand and at the ready, it's well worth investing in a home safe. Even more, home safes can even protect your valuables from fire- or water damage. But before you invest in the best safe for your home, there are a few important things to consider.

The Best Home Safes of 2022

What to Consider

Size

Be sure to consider how big the items you plan to store are. Small items like passports, hard drives, and jewelry won’t take up much space, but if you have several collectibles and documents like birth and death certificates, life insurance policies, savings bonds, stock certificates, and tax returns, you’ll quickly realize how fast your safe fills up.

To gauge how large of a safe you need, we recommend paying attention to safes’ internal sizes. This is expressed in cubic feet, and you can calculate it by multiplying the height, width, and depth of a safe’s interior and dividing that total by 1,728.

It’s almost always cheaper to buy a larger capacity safe than it would be to buy an extra safe later on down the line, so we recommend buying something larger than what you currently need so you have “room to grow.” Of course, you need to ensure you have room in your home to store the safe, too!

Opening Method

The way to open a safe door varies just as much as the size of the safe itself. More traditional safes use a key or dial to open them. Many security experts consider this to be an advantage since there isn’t a possibility for an electronic outage or failure like a digital or biometric lock can experience. However, safes that come with a key come with the risk that the key could be misplaced or stolen and may fall into the wrong hands.

A combination or passcode is something that you or a trusted person can remember without writing it down. Although biometric and digital keypad-equipped safes are easier and faster to open, one downside is you’ll have to replace their batteries regularly.

Ratings

There are several safe ratings worth paying attention to. Given the fact that the National Fire Protection Association says there's a one in four chance of experiencing a household fire large enough to warrant calling the fire department, we think a safe’s fire resistance rating is the one you should pay attention to most. We recommend a safe offer 30 minutes of fire protection, minimum.

Next, you should consider a safe’s burglary rating and waterproof rating. For these ratings, we recommend at minimum a TL-15-rated safe, which means the safe can withstand an attack for at least 15 minutes using common tools. Water-resistant isn’t as important as fire resistance unless you live in an area that’s prone to flooding. Finally, we recommend that the safe has been vetted by UL and Intertek — two agencies that regularly test and certify safes.

Here are the best home safes to keep your valuables secured and protected and that we’d trust storing our very own personal belongings in.