The best drill bit sets for home use

Before anything else: find out what your walls are

This is the step that decides which set you buy, and it takes about a minute. Push a thumbtack into an inconspicuous part of the wall, low down behind furniture.

• It goes in easily and comes out with white dust. Drywall. Almost anything drills it; the hard part is finding something solid behind it, which is what a stud finder is for.
• It goes in with effort and the dust is gray or sandy. Plaster, usually over wood lath in a pre-war building. Twist bits work but chip the surface; a masonry bit run slowly makes a cleaner hole.
• It will not go in at all. Brick, block, concrete or tile. Nothing in a standard twist-bit set will touch it. You need carbide, which means the BM5000 or the masonry bits inside the MS4091.

In apartments, the answer is frequently both — drywall on the partition walls, masonry on every exterior wall. That combination is the reason our top pick is a mixed set rather than the better-made DEWALT drilling set. Our guide to hanging things without damaging walls covers what to do when the answer is “masonry, and I would rather not drill it”.

How we picked: four things, in this order

1. Material coverage, not piece count. A set either contains carbide masonry bits or it does not, and that single fact determines whether half the walls in a typical building are drillable. Second is whether there are brad-point wood bits, which make a clean-edged hole in a stud or a shelf instead of a torn one.
2. Diameter range, with the common sizes doubled. Most home drilling happens between 1/16 and 1/4 inch, and that is also where bits snap. A set with two 1/8 inch bits is meaningfully better than a set with one, and a set that stops at 3/16 inch cannot drill the hole a standard drywall anchor needs.
3. Whether the case tells you the size. Bits are unlabeled past about 3/16 inch, and a loose bit whose diameter you cannot read is a bit you will not use. An index case with a printed size per slot is worth more than ten extra pieces.
4. Whether it stores somewhere you will find it. Our scoring metric for this hub is “stores small” for a reason: in a first apartment, the tool that lives in a kitchen drawer gets used and the tool that lives in a box under the bed does not.

What we deliberately did not weight: brand loyalty, and “impact ready” labels. Impact-rated driver bits matter if you own an impact driver — see drill versus impact driver — but for a drill/driver they are a packaging term.

The six sizes that do almost everything

Open any used bit set and you can tell which bits the owner needed: four slots are empty and the rest are factory-fresh. These are the ones that go missing.

Two practical consequences. First, if a set stops at 3/16 inch — and the small mixed sets do — it cannot drill for the 1/4 inch anchors that hold anything heavier than a picture frame. Second, every size on that list below 1/4 inch is a size you will snap at some point, which is why duplicates matter more than the headline count.

For the specific case of a wall-mounted television, the bit sizes are decided by the mount hardware rather than by you — our guide to mounting a TV goes through the lag-bolt diameters and the depth-stop trick that stops you drilling through a stud into a pipe.

Matching the bit to the material

There are only four kinds of bit in a home set, and using the wrong one is how people conclude their drill is underpowered when it is working fine.

The failure people describe most often is pressing a twist bit into a masonry wall. Nothing happens, the bit goes blue, and the tip rounds off in about forty seconds — because high-speed steel is softer than fired brick. The reverse mistake is gentler but still wasteful: a masonry bit in wood will make a hole, but a ragged one, because the carbide insert is wider than the spiral behind it.

Speed matters as much as bit choice. Masonry wants slow and steady with firm pressure; metal wants slow with a drop of oil; wood and drywall want fast and light. A drill with a two-speed gearbox has that selector for this reason, and most people never move it — see corded versus cordless for what the gearbox and clutch settings on a home drill are really doing.

Black oxide, titanium, cobalt: what you are paying for

Bit sets are sold on their finish, and the differences are real but small at the scale a home uses them.

• Black oxide. A surface treatment on high-speed steel that reduces friction and rusting. The cheapest finish and completely adequate for wood, drywall and plastic. This is what is in the Bosch MS4034.
• Titanium nitride (TiN). The gold coating. It is harder than the steel underneath and lets the bit run cooler in metal, so the cutting edge stays sharp longer. Both DEWALT sets here are TiN-coated. The honest caveat: the coating is microns thick and wears off the cutting edge first, so a bit that looks half-gold is not half-worn.
• Cobalt (M35 / M42). Not a coating — the cobalt is alloyed through the steel, so sharpening does not remove it. Genuinely better in stainless and hardened steel, and genuinely unnecessary in a house. Cobalt sets in this size cost three to five times what the sets on this page do.
• Carbide. A separate tip brazed onto a steel body. The only thing in a home kit that cuts masonry, and it is brittle — drop a carbide bit on a concrete floor and the tip can chip.

In plain terms: for wood and drywall, finish is irrelevant and you should buy on range and case. For metal, titanium is worth a few dollars. For masonry, nothing but carbide will do. Cobalt is a trade purchase.

Why 91 pieces is not five times 20 pieces

The piece count on the box counts every item in the tray, and in a mixed set most of those items are one-inch screwdriver tips. The Bosch MS4091 is a fair example, and its published contents list is worth reading as a lesson in how these numbers are built:

So of 91 pieces, 30 actually make holes. That is still more hole-making capability than any other set on this page, and it is why the MS4091 wins — but it is not three times the 34-piece set, and a 300-piece “mega kit” is not ten times anything. It is the same thirty bits with two hundred more screwdriver tips.

The same arithmetic applies to the 100-plus-piece accessory sets bundled with cheap drills. They are not bad; they are mostly driver bits, and they almost never contain masonry. Our tool kit roundup covers the same trap in general-purpose kits.

Five ways a new set gets ruined in its first month

1. Drilling masonry with a twist bit. Covered above, and it is the one that wrecks bits fastest. If the dust is not coming out, stop.
2. Too much speed in metal. Heat is what kills a bit, and speed is what makes heat. In metal, run slow, lean on it steadily, and put a drop of any oil you have in the hole. A bit that turns blue has been annealed and will never cut again.
3. No pilot hole. Driving a screw into a stud or a piece of furniture without a pilot hole splits the wood and strips the screw head. A pilot hole should be roughly the diameter of the screw’s shaft, not its thread.
4. Leaving bits loose in a drawer. They rust, they blunt against each other, and you cannot tell the 7/32 from the 1/4. Put them back in the index.
5. Pulling out before the drill stops. A spinning bit yanked sideways out of a half-finished hole bends, and a bent small bit snaps the next time you use it.

So which one

Three honest routes, depending on where you live and what you will be doing.

• A first house, mixed walls, no bits at all. The Bosch MS4091. It is about thirty-six dollars, it is the only set here that does masonry and wood and metal and driving, and it is the set that means you do not place a second order mid-job.
• A rental where the drill is mostly a screwdriver. The Bosch MS4034 for the driver bits, plus the DEWALT DW1354 if you want a real range of hole sizes for under twenty dollars more. That combination costs about the same as the 91-piece set and gives you better twist bits and no masonry.
• Brick, block or plaster walls. Buy the Bosch BM5000 first, before any general set. It is the only box on this page that will get a shelf onto an exterior wall, and a general set will not.

If you are assembling a whole kit from nothing rather than just the bits, our first-apartment tool kit lists the dozen tools that matter and what the whole lot costs.