The Best Sheet Pans, Tested by Our Experts

If you ever use your oven—and we’re guessing you use your oven—you need a good sheet pan. Along with a few other pieces—a carbon-steel skillet, a chef’s knife—the sheet pan is one of the quintessential workhorses for a home cook. Baking batches of cookies? Sheet pan. Roasting vegetables or a chicken? Sheet pan. Cake for a crowd? Sheet cake (you make that in a sheet pan, FYI). Need an easy dinner that isn’t an air fryer or Instant Pot meal? Hellooo, sheet-pan dinner.

The best sheet pans

Sheet pans come in a variety of sizes: full sheets (26 x 18″), half sheets (18 x 13″), and quarter sheets (13 x 9″). The most commonly used size, the one ubiquitous in home kitchens, is a half-sheet pan. These bad boys are just the right size—they nestle perfectly into a standard size oven and slide easily into most kitchen cabinets. They’re the size most sheet-pan recipes are built around. We recommend every home cook own a few of the best half-sheet pans, but quarter-sheet pans are also great for toaster oven baking, serving appetizer spreads, and even doubling as trays to wrangle oils and spices on your counter.

What we’re saying is, you’ll use this piece of equipment perhaps more than any other in your kitchen, so you want to get the right one. We did the heavy lifting, testing top ranking models so you don’t even have to think before getting the one that will be a perfect partner through years of Thanksgiving hosting, weeknight dinner scrambling, and emergency cookie-making.

The best sheet pan overall: Nordic Ware Natural Aluminum Half-Sheet

Years of repeated testing have proven this Nordic Ware pan one of the best half-sheet pans out there and one of the most affordable. That mix of quality and value earns it a top spot here. It’s made of 20-gauge uncoated light aluminum, which means it gets hot quickly but also evenly, producing crispy, golden brown results—whether you’re roasting veggies for a sheet-pan dinner or baking cookies. Cleanup is a breeze: Simply hand-wash it with a cellulose sponge, dish soap, and hot water.

Rolled edges help prevent warping. Still, after years of repeated use, our testers did notice the center poking up a bit on some models—this slightly uneven surface may cause ingredients to cook unevenly. The aluminum surface will also stain and discolor over time, though this won’t impact the quality of your food and isn’t itself a cause for replacing the pan. Shout-out to well-worn sheet pans that have been through it all. Still, this thing will absolutely pay for itself in terms of a cost per use analysis. Should you need to replace a well-loved pan, we appreciate that these are relatively inexpensive and widely available.

The best budget sheet pan: Winco Baking Sheet

When we’re talking about baking sheets, you just don’t need to spend that much money, so picking one out as a true “budget” option only makes a difference of a few dollars, but hey, savings are savings. Senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic values accessibility and durability above all else when it comes to her sheet pans, and she tends to prefer heavy-duty restaurant-grade sheets that won’t buckle or warp under high heat. They’re the same quality as sheet pan name brands like Nordic Ware or USA Pan, but often a little cheaper. Aside from that, she likes a sheet pan with a low lip, a rolled seam, a smooth bed without any ridges, and a light color (darker pans absorb more heat).

The Winco pan fits all of that criteria. While Shilpa’s not necessarily married to any particular brand of sheet pan, for her it felt like the Winco pan was just always there. It was always easily available to buy at any restaurant supply store, and it happened to tick all her boxes. The Winco is constructed of stainless steel, which makes it a little more durable than an aluminum sheet pan, but also means it will not hold its heat quite as well as the aluminum Nordic Ware pan. But it’s easy to clean (Shilpa also likes to give it an occasional scrub with Bar Keeper’s Friend to give it an extra bit of TLC that’ll keep it shiny, prevent buildup and keep the pan looking new) and, if you take care of it, will last you for years to come.

The sheet pan used at one of America’s best bakeries: Vollrath Wear-Ever Half-Size Sheet Pan

Librae Bakery culinary director Rebecca Newman guesses that her half-sheet tray is the most used item in her kitchen. In fact, she uses it so much, she advises people to get two to ensure you always have one on hand and to promote multitasking when you’re cooking multiple things in the oven at once. She likes Nordic Ware, but also uses commercial cooking equipment brand Vollrath.