The Best Ski and Snowboard Gloves (2024)

I’m a staff writer covering travel and outdoor gear, including thermal underwear and trekking poles. I ski tour and resort ski about 60 days a year, mainly around Mammoth Lakes, California. I’m blessed with many mild, sunny ski days, but Mammoth storm days are notoriously windy and cold.

Before spending my ski season wearing two different gloves at any one time—prompting confused looks and questions in the lift lines—I did the following:

• Via email, I quizzed Mike Kreis, a product specialist at REI, about what makes good ski or snowboard gloves.
• I watched dozens of online videos on what other professional and customer reviewers had to say about gloves.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

If you’re downhill skiing or snowboarding, you’ll benefit from having gloves that are appropriate for the weather.

Mountain weather varies across the US, and altitude differences influence temperature, precipitation, and wind.

This guide is for those who mostly ski in temperatures between zero and 40 degrees Fahrenheit (sometimes warmer in the spring).

Gloves you might already own, like work gloves or more-casual cold-weather winter gloves, may keep your hands warm and dry at first, but ski gloves will last longer and have sport-specific features.

(The gloves we tested can be used both for skiing and for snowboarding, and in this guide we refer to them as “ski gloves” simply for brevity.)

This guide does not cover gloves for cross-country skiing or backcountry skiing and splitboarding. Those activities are more heavily aerobic and cause people to generate more heat, so most downhill skiing gloves will be too warm.

These are the things that I found make a good ski glove:

Enough warmth for the day: To provide warmth, ski gloves primarily use synthetic insulation, such as fleece and lofty “synthetic down” options, as well as wool. In humid and wet environments (including the microclimate between your hand and the outside of the glove), synthetic insulation and wool insulate effectively—better than down or other natural materials like cotton. More insulation generally means more warmth (a glove can be too warm); companies typically express the amount of insulation in grams.

Many ski companies lump gloves, mittens, and hybrid mittens, including split-finger or “lobster” styles, into one glove category. The differences are usually in how many fingers move independently, but sometimes companies put more insulation in the mitten version. We tested both traditional gloves and mittens for this guide.

Water resistance: When you’re skiing, you’re more likely to face wind and snow than rain, but some regions in the US will see more rain than others. If you’ve ever fallen or had to sit in the snow when you’re snowboarding, you’ll realize the importance of having protection against the cold, often wet snow.

Leather is water-resistant, and you can effectively make leather gloves waterproof by routinely applying waterproofing treatments. Many gloves combine nylon or polyester with leather and add water-resistant coatings. There is also often a waterproof membrane between the liner and the shell of the glove, to keep outside moisture from infiltrating the inner insulation. A ski glove doesn’t necessarily need to be waterproof, though.

Waterproofing is helpful if you often ski in storms, especially rainy ones, but a glove without a waterproof barrier will be more breathable, allowing sweat to escape more easily.

Durability: Leather is the most durable material for a glove’s shell, but polyester, nylon, and synthetic leather can last several ski seasons. Sturdy stitching and reinforced high-abrasion areas also make a glove more durable. It can be difficult to assess whether or not stitching is sturdy, though. So we’ve also studied long-term owner reviews (when applicable) to identify problem areas. All of our picks are double-stitched in critical areas.

If you ski only a few weeks a year, all of the gloves and mittens we recommend should last you several seasons. If you’re a ski-mountain local, consider our top pick, which will last you several seasons.

Secure wrist closures: Ski gloves come in either a low-profile wrist-cuff style or a gauntlet style. A wrist-cuff-style glove tucks into a ski jacket sleeve, whereas a gauntlet-style one fits over a jacket sleeve and reaches farther up the arm.

Gloves with wrist cuffs reduce bulk and are easier to stow in a pocket. But if you fall or it’s snowing, or if you’re skiing hard in deep powder, these gloves may allow snow to enter a sleeve.

Gauntlet-style gloves, especially ones with longer cuffs, are intended to help battle the wind chill of cold snowstorms.

Here are some other characteristics that differentiate good ski gloves from great ones.

Good dexterity: Though good dexterity in a glove is not as necessary as warmth and water resistance are, it does feel more important the more you ski. It’s always a plus when you don’t have to take off your gloves to adjust your boots, check your phone, remove your goggles, and perform other essential tasks.

Some leather gloves are supple right out of the box, while others take longer to break in. Many leather pairs have fabric inserts at the knuckle to make bending fingers easier, so you can grip your poles with less effort. We found that cheaper leather gloves typically had a sloppy fit in the fingers, so they were less precise when we were handling gear—regardless of how supple the leather was.

Synthetic gloves with soft synthetic fingers are usually easier to bend. Still, we found that most fully synthetic gloves almost always had a sloppier fit in the fingers than similarly warm leather gloves.

Heavy insulation also contributes to bulk, and that results in a less nimble glove. Mittens, which are already inherently less dexterous than gloves, are often made with more insulation than their glove equivalents. For instance, our top pick is available in a mitten style, with more insulation in the palm than the glove version.

Removable liners: Skiing is a demanding physical sport despite gravity being on your side. Even if gloves keep you dry from the elements, your hands will likely sweat inside them if they have more insulation than you need. We prioritized gloves with removable liners, testing how easy they would be to remove, dry, and re-insert between ski sessions.

Other useful features: It might sound gross, but on really cold days, we found a soft nose-wipe patch of fabric to be a welcome reprieve for our leaky fountains.

Wrist leashes have undoubtedly saved thousands of gloves from being dropped off of chairlifts. Leashes also keep your gloves out of the snow when you’re removing them for tasks that require more finesse than even the most dexterous pair can provide.

Some gloves have a pocket on the back for storing a hand warmer or your ski pass (this makes swiping your card at the chairlift easy).

Some gloves have touchscreen-compatibility patches on one or two fingers (usually the thumb and index finger). But if you’re doing anything other than answering a call or checking the ski-resort map, you usually have to remove your glove anyway.

We recommend the Black Diamond Guide Gloves for skiing from opening to closing day in most places. These gloves are also available in a split-finger style.

They’re warm yet still pretty nimble. Apart from our other two picks, the Guide Gloves have, on paper, more insulation than all of the gloves we tested. But during testing, we found that only our pick for the coldest days was warmer.

More insulation means more bulk and less dexterity. Among the gloves we tested, the Guide Gloves were somewhere in the middle for dexterity, but the fingers were more flexible for warmth than those on any other glove. The insulation on the back of the glove, intended to protect your hand from cold wind, is a very warm synthetic insulation that mimics down. It’s a little bulky, but it doesn’t get in the way of handling gear.

For warmth, the palm uses fleece, which provides good tactile connection with the pole and other gear. Fleece is not as warm as the loftier synthetic insulation on the back of the glove, but it’s still warm enough. Fleece also wicks and dries faster.

The glove will keep snow out. The long gauntlet omits insulation for the half of the glove that’s closer to the elbow, where jackets already provide warmth. Therefore, the wrist retains pretty good mobility, but it is also protected from snow getting in during a fall or on snowy days.

They’re reinforced for abuse. These gloves should hold up for anyone who’s hard on their gloves. The stitching is more redundant than on any other glove we tested, and leather patches overlay the high contact points. Rather than having a polyester shell, like our other picks, these gloves feature woven nylon with some stretch; in our experience, this should make them more resistant to tearing.

These gloves keep out the elements. The leather is some of the most water-resistant we tested. And with a few applications of a leather DWR cream throughout the season, the leather remained water-resistant enough to keep snow from entering the gloves. They also have a waterproof layer, which protected our hands from outside moisture after prolonged exposure to heavy wet snow and even rain. We occasionally sweat in them, but with most gloves, that’s difficult to avoid if you're working hard.

They have most of the critical ski-specific features. Those features include a soft, suede nose wipe (which is easy to clean after use) and padding on the back of each hand. This type of padding is more common on downhill ski-racing gear to protect racers from the plastic gates, but it also helps protect against knocking your hand on tree branches, or it can soften a fall.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

These gloves don’t have leashes. Gloves that cost this much should include leashes. The glove cuff does have a lashing point, and we made our own out of some stretchy cord. (If you prefer a ready-made pair, these Hestra leashes are the nicest ones we’ve used.)

You can’t buy replacement liners. The liners are durable, but we would love to be able to replace them after a few years or have the option of swapping in a fresh, dry pair of liners when our hands get sweaty.

The fingers aren’t touchscreen-compatible. Almost all warm ski-glove fingers are too bulky to do anything other than swipe to answer a phone call. Still, answering a phone call and looking at a ski map may be all you need from your phone when you’re skiing.

They’re expensive. These gloves aren’t the priciest ones we tested, but they cost above average.

We recommend The North Face Montana Ski Gloves, available in men’s and women’s versions, for new skiers or for people who ski only a few weeks each year. These gloves are also available as mittens for men and women.

They’re the warmest gloves we tested at this price. These gloves are an excellent value, and they nail the most important feature: warmth. On paper, they use more insulation (measured in grams) than our top pick, but in our real-world use, our top pick was a little warmer. These are the third-warmest gloves we tested, though, and we recommend them for temperatures down into the mid- to upper teens Fahrenheit.

They should last several ski vacations. After using these gloves for around 12 ski days, we saw very minor wear in the synthetic leather palm from our ski poles, but we have not noticed any wear on the leather palms of our other picks. So far, we haven’t seen any stray stitches or ripped fabric on these.

This is our only pick that comes with a leash. Leave the leashes on these gloves, and use them. At some point, you’ll fumble your glove on the chairlift, and you’ll be glad it’s attached. Every season, I see at least one lost glove nestled into an inaccessible cliff below the lift.

This is our only touchscreen-compatible pick. It’s handy to be able to check your ski map or answer a call. These gloves have phone-compatible tips on the index finger and thumb. They worked well when dry, but we had mixed results when it was snowing or after we’d just put our hand in the snow.

These gloves have other useful features, too. Like our other picks, these gloves have a soft nose wipe and a long gauntlet.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

You can’t remove the liners. Unlike the liners on our other picks, the liners on these gloves are sewn in. That means you may not want to use these gloves on warmer ski days. They also take longer to hang-dry. (Some resorts have low-heat boot or glove dryers, which we recommend using.)

They’re clunky. Unlike our other picks, these gloves had no lines of stitching (apart from those on the thumbs) to create contours mimicking the natural lines of the hand. That means you cannot fully open your hands in them. After a couple of hours—especially if I’m gripping my poles a little too tightly—I want to be able to fully open and relax my hands. To do that in these gloves, I had to remove them. The North Face added extra stitching in the model just released for the 2024–25 season, which we used in this guide’s photographs; we’ll test them as soon as we can and report back.

The fingers are also more squared-off than the fingers on our top pick, which have more rounded, nimble tips. (This pair is also available as a mitt, and we’ll be testing it this season.)

It takes longer to put them on and take them off. Unlike the wrists on other picks, the wrists on these gloves are less tapered, so they don’t seal heat in and keep cold out as well as the other gloves. But each glove does have an adjustable strap, to tighten or loosen the wrist. This adds a step when you are putting the glove on and taking it off, but you can adjust the wrist to get a precise fit.

The Black Diamond Mercury Mitts, available in men’s and women’s versions, are our pick for bitterly cold days.

They’re the warmest gloves or mittens we tested. On the coldest day that we wore these mittens, the temperature was 14 degrees Fahrenheit on a windy, cloudy morning. We had to remove these mitts periodically, for a minute or so at a time, just to cool and dry off our hands. When we wore these gloves in temperatures above 20 degrees Fahrenheit, it felt as if we were using chemical hand warmers. Other reviewers claim to use these gloves in temperatures far below zero.

These mittens have more insulation than the gloves we tested, and since they’re mittens, your fingers can share the warmth.

They use the same synthetic insulation as our top pick, just a lot more of it—wicking fleece on the palm and lofty, synthetic-down–style insulation on the back of the hand.

They’re durable enough for extended use. Like our top pick, these gloves have a tough leather palm and finger cap. After about 12 days of use, the leather on these gloves was unscathed. On the back of the hand, the polyester material is as tough and easy to bend as that on our budget pick, but it's a little more stretchy, with fewer stitch lines to snag. An extra leather patch is sewn where the ski pole meets the thumb, but there’s not one in the palm—we’ll see how that holds up over the long term.

They have good water resistance. In our testing, we found that water will eventually saturate the mitten’s outer shell, though the waterproof membrane separating the shell from the lining did keep our hands dry. On the palm, there’s no extra waterproof barrier between the leather palm and the mitten liner. But after we applied one layer of wax to the leather, we didn’t notice any moisture finding its way through to the liner.

The features are basic but well executed. Like our top pick, these mittens have a liner that’s easy to remove, dry, and reinsert; this is especially important if you want to wear them on mild days. Since the liner is also a mitten style, putting an extra liner glove in it is easier than in our other picks. The nose wipe is soft. These mittens are not touchscreen-compatible, but it’s unlikely you’d be using a phone with them anyway.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

You have to remove them more frequently than our other picks. Because of all of the insulation in these mittens, and because they are mittens, you’ll probably have to remove them to eat, drink, or fiddle with gear.

They’re dextrous enough to let you get in and out of snowboard bindings and to close and open ski boots. The tacky leather palms hold onto a ski pole really well.

The liners aren’t replaceable. These mittens are more affordable than our top pick, and the liner seems resistant to packing out (that is, when synthetic insulation compresses with use and becomes less effective at insulating). But we’d still like to see additional liners available for purchase.

You may need a second pair of gloves. Even though their liners are removable, they are still mittens, and we liked having the added freedom of independent fingers on warmer days.

If you want something less warm than our budget pick: Consider either the Burton Gore-Tex Gloves for men and women or the Dakine Titan Gore-Tex Glove (they’re essentially the same glove). They’re similar in price, warmth, and their synthetic materials, and each one includes a high-quality liner glove, which we recommend keeping on hand for any ski gloves to add warmth. They’re the only gloves we tested that have a pocket on the back. The Dakines have one extra feature, a goggle wipe, but we never used it. We decided to recommend The North Face Montana Gloves as our budget pick since they offer more value for the price in terms of warmth. But these gloves are a good alternative, and they cost about the same, if you don’t need that much warmth. They don’t use leather, so we don’t expect them to last as long as some similarly priced (but less warm) leather gloves, but like our budget pick, they should last you several seasons if you ski only a few weeks a year.

If you generally ski in warmer weather: Consider the Flylow Magarac Gloves—they’re some of the least warm gloves we tested, but they were perfect for skiing in spring once daily temperatures were sunny and consistently above freezing. The durable leather palm is grippy and nimble, and the softer polyester on the back of the hand adds more dexterity. They’re plug-and-play, too—pre-softened and treated with a DWR. The fingertips feel a little sloppy when handling gear, but the gloves are thin and still plenty operable for basic tasks. The cuff provides no weather resistance—water and snow go right through it—but that’s not a problem on sunny, warm ski days. The gloves—more commonly known as the Kinco 901s—are a good substitute for the Flylow Magaracs, if you want to save a few more bucks and don’t mind softening the leather and the longer break-in period. Like the Flylows’ liners, the Kinco 901s’ liners aren’t removable.

If you run warm or plan to do a lot of ski touring: We recommend the Hestra Fall Line, which is the best-fitting, most-dexterous glove with the most comfortable liner we tested. These features will cost you, though. And the gloves were only warm enough for us at around 25 degrees Fahrenheit and up, in the sun, or above freezing on more cloudy days. Adding a separate glove liner can boost the warmth, but then you’d lose touch with what makes these gloves shine: the liner’s comfort and the leather’s suppleness. If you want a more-protective, gauntlet-style pair that’s similar to the Fall Line, look at the Hestra Army Leather Heli Ski Glove.

After our picks, the Arc’teryx Fission SV gloves are the warmest gloves we tested, and they are much more dexterous and compact than our picks. We couldn’t justify the price for downhill skiing, however, especially considering the integrated, non-removable liner.

The Dakine Excursion Gore-Tex Gloves for men and women have a similar construction to our top pick, the Black Diamond Guide Gloves, just less robust. They’re not as warm as our top pick (but they’re still one of the warmest gloves we tested), they have a shorter gauntlet cuff, and the liner isn’t removable. These gloves also have a smaller fit than other gloves we tested.

The REI Co-op Guide Gloves are similar in warmth to the Flylow Magaracs. Although these were more dexterous than the Flylow gloves, they felt flimsy. We’ll continue testing the REI Co-op Guide Gloves for durability.

The Black Diamond Spark Gloves for men and women are most similar to the Hestra Fall Line in warmth and style, but they don’t have a removable liner.

Dakine Baron Gore-Tex Gloves for men and the women’s mitt (the women’s version comes in a mitt only) were similar to the Black Diamond Spark and Hestra Fall Line in warmth and construction. But the leather palm was surprisingly slick and made removing the first glove difficult. The cuff is also short for a gauntlet style, and it doesn’t fit very well under or over a jacket cuff.

This year, we plan to test gloves from Free the Powder, Oyuki, and Gordini, as well as more mittens.

This article was edited by Christine Ryan and Ben Frumin.

1. Mike Kreis, product specialist, REI, email interview, February 5, 2024