The Best Sheet Pans for Your Everyday Baking and Cooking

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Generally, Rebecca prefers an aluminum pan because she thinks they’re less likely to warp. She also looks for things marked as “heavy-duty,” so she can make her purchase secure in the knowledge this pan will last her a long time. This Vollrath is made of a heavier gauge aluminum than the Nordic Ware above, putting it in that heavy-duty category. There’s also the matter of price. “There are certain things worth spending more money on,” Rebecca says. “This is not one of them.” Both baking pans are pretty affordable, though you can get the Vollrath for about $10 less than the Nordic Ware.

If we recommend a piece of cookware or kitchen appliance, it’s because we’ve got hours of testing and expert opinions to back that recommendation. To crown the Nordic Ware as the overall best baking sheet, we tested it up against 16 other uncoated and nonstick sheet pans over the course of seven years. To assess the uncoated sheets, reviewers heated up each pan in a 450ºF oven set to convection-bake for about 10 minutes, waiting to hear the loud pop that means it’s warped.

Leaving the oven at 450ºF, testers then cooked some lightly seasoned and oiled vegetables to assess how evenly it cooked and browned. Once each pan cooled, we attacked them with cellulose sponge, dish soap, and hot water. Of course, we’d be remiss to not bake cookies on each pan—so we heated the oven back up to 350ºF and baked sugar cookies for 17 minutes. Putting each sheet on a cooling rack, we inspected each cookies’ evenness, texture, color, and spread to see how well each pan baked.

We also consulted a few experts to hear about their favorite sheet pans, including our own test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic, and the culinary director from one of our favorite bakeries, Librae Bakery culinary director Rebecca Newman. Sheet pans get used an unbelievable amount, enduring searing hot ovens, and generally take a special kind of beating in professional kitchens and bakeries, so we knew they’d be able to speak to durability.

Generally, we advise people to proceed with caution when it comes to nonstick coatings on pans. With sheet pans, it’s a little more cut and dry: Steer clear. Both Shilpa and Rebecca advise against nonstick pans for durability reasons. When the coating on a nonstick pan scratches, it may allow harmful chemicals under the surface of the pan to escape (and these coatings shouldn’t be used with high temperature ovens, either). If you’re worried about your cookies sticking “parchment paper is your friend,” Rebecca says. “Spray it with some Pam spray, and your cookies are never gonna stick.”

We consider the following factors when looking for the best sheet pans:

• It should be made of aluminum or stainless steel: Remember that popping sound we mentioned earlier? You don’t want that. That means your pan can’t stand up to extreme heat and it’s warping. An uneven pan means unevenly cooked food. You also want a pan made of a material that will conduct heat well to achieve good browning on your roasted vegetables and chicken thighs. We generally recommend heavy-duty bare aluminum because it heats quickly and evenly and also cools down quickly. Stainless steel is also a highly durable option, but it doesn’t conduct heat as well.
• It should be light colored: You don’t want a dark pan or a brightly colored sheet pan, as cute as they may be. Color makes the pan absorb more heat, which causes uneven cooking or over browning.
• It should have rolled edges: A high rolled edge surrounding your pan will help reinforce the steel rim to prevent warping.
• It should be affordable: There are some pieces of cookware that are worth spending a lot of money on. A sheet pan is not one of those things. The Nordic Ware is the most expensive sheet pan on this list at $30, and that’s probably the most you should pay.