The 4 Best Neck Fans of 2024 | Reviews by Wirecutter

By Thom Dunn

Thom Dunn is a writer focusing on home heating and cooling. He once blew up a power strip with a space heater and a Marshall half-stack.

After new testing, we’ve added recommendations to this guide: the Gulaki Neck Fan, the Hotsales Neck Fan YP-06, and the Egopp 1S Cool Down Neck Fan with cooling chips.

It’s no substitute for air conditioning, but if you’re desperate for a respite from unrelenting heat, a portable neck fan can help keep you cool—even if you don’t necessarily look that cool when you’re wearing one.

This comfortable, durable neck fan has enough battery to last most of the day—plus some color-changing lights, just for fun.

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A sleeker-looking model with an even bigger battery, this neck fan can get a little loud on the highest settings.

Thermal chips effectively improve this fan’s cooling performance, but its battery lasts a fraction of the time of its more basic competitors.

With thermal chips that heat as well as cool, plus Bluetooth connectivity and a fancy carrying case, this is the priciest—but clearly the nicest—neck fan we’ve tested.

This comfortable, durable neck fan has enough battery to last most of the day—plus some color-changing lights, just for fun.

May be out of stock

The Gulaki Neck Fan has everything you need to make your personal climate bubble just a little more comfortable: With easy-to-use controls and three fan-speed settings, it offers a wider range of power than most competitors yet isn’t excessively loud. Last but certainly not least, it offers an optional LED light show on the side.

It’s also durable enough to withstand a few falls from a fast-moving bicycle, as we learned.

The Gulaki fan doesn’t dramatically stand out from competitors, and its generic craftsmanship is unlikely to win any design awards. But this competitively priced, reliable performer is a good entry point into the neck fan world.

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A sleeker-looking model with an even bigger battery, this neck fan can get a little loud on the highest settings.

The Hotsales Neck Fan YP-06 has the best battery life we’ve found on any neck fan, so it should be able to get you through a whole day.

The battery life is not so great when it runs on high, but you probably wouldn’t want to do that anyway, because at that speed it gets annoyingly loud.

Otherwise, this neck fan is reliable and durable, and if you don’t require LED lights on your neck, you could argue that it’s slightly cooler-looking than our top pick.

Thermal chips effectively improve this fan’s cooling performance, but its battery lasts a fraction of the time of its more basic competitors.

If you really want to feel your body temperature drop, the Egopp 1S Cool Down Neck Fan will get the job done thanks to a pair of thermoelectric semiconductor cooling chips. These small metal plates press against your skin like a cold can of soda, offering almost instant relief from the heat.

They also eat up the battery: Whereas our fan-only picks lasted all day on a full charge, this model was good for only a few hours of cooling action.

Although it can last much longer on its fan-only setting, it doesn’t cool you down nearly as well like that, and its fan performance isn’t as strong—in airflow or battery life—in comparison with our other picks.

The user interface is also pretty frustrating, so you’ll probably want to find your setting and stick to it.

With thermal chips that heat as well as cool, plus Bluetooth connectivity and a fancy carrying case, this is the priciest—but clearly the nicest—neck fan we’ve tested.

If you happen to have an extra $200 earmarked for personal climate control, the Torras Coolify 2S Neck Air Conditioner is by far the nicest neck fan we tested.

It’s easy to use, with a handy digital display that shows the setting and battery life, and a cooling-chip coverage area that’s three times larger than what you get with the Egopp fan.

It has Bluetooth connectivity too, so you can control the fan settings through your phone.

You can even use the thermal chips for heating purposes if you need to warm your nape on a cool autumn night.

These are distinct differences. Do they make this neck fan absurdly expensive? Yes. Do they possibly make it worth the price? Also yes. But it isn’t a risk-free investment.

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I’m a staff writer at Wirecutter covering home HVAC devices. (Also, Christmas lights and karaoke machines. It’s all basically the same.) Since 2017, I’ve tested about two dozen air conditioners and nearly twice as many room fans, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours heating, humidifying, and cooling my home. (I’ve also spent roughly as much time singing in front of lights, which, again, is basically the same.)

Over the years, I’ve covered UN climate-change conferences and interviewed experts ranging from HVAC installers to heat-pump manufacturers to electrification advocates and sustainability scientists, and I’ve combed through hundreds and hundreds of pages of energy regulations and research.

For this guide in particular, I’ve spent more than 20 hours studying dozens of product listings and testing 15 different neck fans firsthand.

Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete independence, in accordance with our editorial standards. I have no knowledge about the business implications of any of my editorial recommendations. I don’t own any stock or have any other financial interest in any of the companies that I cover (or am likely to cover), and I don’t hold on to any “freebies,” always donating products after I’m done testing them, unless I need to hold on to them for long-term observations.

Right now, there’s a good chance you’re living through the hottest summer of your life. It’s so hot, in fact, you’re considering the benefits of a neck fan.

To be clear: These things are not, as some models claim to be, “cooler than an air conditioner.” If you have an air conditioner that you can use, we absolutely suggest that you start there, and we recommend pairing an AC source with a good room fan before looking to a neck fan.

But if you work outdoors, need to stay cool while in transit, experience hot flashes, or find yourself coping with an AC outage (as I was, on a train, while writing this guide), a portable neck fan can be a comfort, if not a literal lifesaver.

Efficiently circulate air and rely less on your HVAC system with a powerful, compact room fan.

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The first things we looked for in researching potential neck fan recommendations were reliable manufacturers and good warranties. We found neither. We did find some models with decent owner reviews. And a few neck fan companies have definitely tried to up their professionalism since we started reviewing neck fans in 2023. At the same time, we’ve also seen plenty of companies seemingly disappear as soon as they cleared out their initial stock. Despite the branding differences—and there are many—we quickly realized that most neck fans come from the exact same assembly lines, which is to say that while there are plenty of perfectly fine neck fans, there are very few remarkable ones.

We settled on two basic fan types and price ranges:

Once we zeroed in on a couple of potential standouts in each class, we bought them and wore them to barbecues, beaches, bike rides, and other events where we thought we might work up a sweat. We also wore them around the house sometimes, usually while cleaning or working out or installing our many, many window air conditioners. We even tried to see if they could work as substitutes (or at least, low-energy alternatives) for actual air conditioning. Spoiler alert: They could not.

Along the way, we took notes on the controls, design, and general user experience of each fan. We also did our best to test their ruggedness against city streets and curious kids alike. And we took a few objective measurements, including:

Finally, we looped our friends and neighbors in to see how different people interacted with the fans, and whether they actually made a difference for anyone. We’ll admit: We were skeptical at first, but we were pleasantly surprised to find how many people seemed to enjoy that soft, gentle breeze upon their nape.

This comfortable, durable neck fan has enough battery to last most of the day—plus some color-changing lights, just for fun.

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The Gulaki Neck Fan is a simple but effective cooling device that sits comfortably around your neck, directing gentle wafts of wind up toward your head. With three speed settings and a ring of 72 air slots for the fan to exhaust through, it can cover everything above your neck without blowing directly into your face (which would be annoying).

Plus, you can hold down the power button and turn each end of the neck fan into a fun color-changing LED light show. Who wouldn’t want that?

It has one of the best fan-speed ranges we’ve seen. With three power settings, the Gulaki fan can go from a subtle breeze at 1.3 mph to a powerful gust at nearly twice that speed. It’s one of the most powerful fans we’ve tested, tied with our upgrade pick, the Torras Coolify 2S. By contrast, the fan on our also-great pick, the Egopp 1S Cool Down, maxed out at 1.3 mph.

It’s also especially easy to use. The Gulaki fan has only one large button, on the front right side to cycle through the fan speeds. The button is recessed just enough that most people should be able to find it by feel without having to remove the neck fan and look for the spot to press. Most of the other models we evaluated had small rectangular buttons, often hidden on the underside or back of the fan, that were difficult to locate and activate without our taking the fan off to look for them.

The fan’s streamlined style is both subtle and comfortable. It has a discreet design that doesn’t attract much more attention than if you were wearing a pair of over-the-ear headphones around your neck; in fact, several people mistook the Gulaki fan for a pair of Beats headphones when they saw it.

It weighs only about a half a pound. You’ll barely even notice it while wearing it, and its 8.5-inch diameter should allow it to comfortably fit around most necks without sticking to sweaty skin. It’s available in a variety of colors as well.

The rechargeable battery should have just enough juice to get you through the day. Like most of the fans we tested, the Gulaki fan comes with a 4,000 mAh lithium-ion battery that can last up to 16 hours or so, depending on the fan-speed setting. It’s a particularly good companion for a full workday, especially if you work outdoors.

It usually costs around $30, about the same as other, similar neck fans. Plenty of other brands sell nearly identical (or maybe even entirely identical) devices for around the same price—including the Penkou Portable Neck Fan, which we previously recommended as our top pick. Like those other models, the Gulaki fan doesn’t come with a warranty. But if it’s any consolation, our test unit was durable enough to survive several drops off a moving bicycle and onto the pavement. (Oops.)

Did we mention that it also has color-changing LEDs? Hold down the power button on the Gulaki fan, and the circle at each headphone-style rounded end illuminates in a fun, ever-shifting LED light display. Yes, it’s sort of silly. But so is wearing a fan around your neck. You may as well go all the way and have some fun with it. Unless you hate fun, in which case, you can just not turn the lights on. (Our previous top pick, the Penkou fan, looks and performs identically to the Gulaki model, minus the LED option. It doesn’t save you any money, though.)

Neck fans in general can sound sort of annoying, but the Gulaki fan is the quietest model we found. In our tests, we measured the volume of the Gulaki fan at 46 decibels on the lowest setting and up to about 56 decibels on high—quieter than any other fan we tested, and comfortably below “normal” conversation levels. The noise isn’t particularly bothersome, either, even though the fan is essentially blowing straight at your ears. If you wear headphones with it on, as I did while walking or working, it’s basically unnoticeable.

That said, the volume of the fan at higher speeds can interfere with conversations a bit. I already have some auditory-processing problems to begin with, so sometimes it would take me a moment to realize that the problem was the fan, not just me. Keep it running on low, however, and you should be fine.

It is still a relatively low-cost neck fan. We hope that anyone shopping at the low end of the neck fan market is not bringing a discerning eye for high-quality craftsmanship. You’ll find no impressive feats of design or engineering here to celebrate. The Gulaki fan has tested well for us and outperformed other models in its price range. We’ve seen an uptick in quality since these devices debuted, but their longevity in general remains a question mark, and at this price, there’s a chance that the Gulaki fan’s components won’t last.

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A sleeker-looking model with an even bigger battery, this neck fan can get a little loud on the highest settings.

If the Gulaki fan isn’t available, or you favor a slightly sleeker design, the Hotsales Neck Fan YP-06 performed almost as well as our top pick. It comes with a higher battery capacity too, so it should last you a bit longer. The small rectangular button on the side is a little harder to find, however, and the opening doesn’t stretch quite as wide, which could be uncomfortable for someone with a larger neck.

It’s the longest-lasting neck fan we tested. With a 6,000 mAh battery, the Hotsales fan has 50% more battery life than our top pick and our also-great pick. In practice, that means it should last around 18 hours running on low, although that capacity diminishes pretty quickly as you crank up the speed.

It looks good for a neck fan. Neck fans are not particularly stylish accessories, but the Hotsales fan makes an effort. A curved cutaway on the back helps it rest more evenly against your neck, and a chrome outline frames the pill-shaped panel with the logo. While it doesn’t come in quite as many color options as the Gulaki fan, its limited palette is definitely trying to lean into the iPhone aesthetic—or at least, a cheap plastic simulacrum thereof.

But this model is noisier than our top pick. We measured the Hotsales fan at 62 decibels on high, just loud enough that the noise starts to encroach on casual-conversation volumes. If you keep it on the lower settings, though, the sound shouldn’t be too bothersome. (Doing so will also help you save some battery.)

It also costs more, usually. This model’s list price varies but has consistently been at least $20 more on average than that of our top pick. But it’s typically listed with various discounts and coupons that bring the price down a bit.

Thermal chips effectively improve this fan’s cooling performance, but its battery lasts a fraction of the time of its more basic competitors.

If our top pick resembles imitation Beats headphones with a three-speed fan, the Egopp 1S Cool Down Neck Fan looks more like Geordi La Forge’s visor from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But what really sets it apart are its thermoelectric semiconductor cooling chips, which provide even more cooling power than the (frankly mediocre) fan ports do.

This fan is also available under a bunch of different brand names, including Amailtom, Normia Rita, and the impressively unpronounceable Wqss Aoeiu. We’ve tested units from all of these brands and can confirm that they’re all exactly the same. So if the Egopp fan is ever out of stock, you should be able to find plenty of other options; as long as the product listing or the fan itself has the “F63“ model designation somewhere, you should be fine.

The cooling chips can really drop your body temperature. The fan’s interior—that is, the side that goes against your neck—is covered in about 5 square inches of metal thermoelectric semiconductors, which get very cold very quickly. Think of it like placing a wet compress or an ice pack against your neck. When activated, these little cold plates provide an almost instant cooling sensation.

During my tests, I took a 12-mile round-trip bike ride on a hot summer day with the cooling chips running the entire time, and I was amazed at how much less sweaty I was—while the battery lasted.

Those cooling chips use a lot more energy than the fan alone. I had completely charged the Egopp fan before that 12-mile bike ride—and it still ended up dying about halfway through my return trip, leaving me much, much sweatier when I got home. It ultimately lasted about three hours with the thermal chip running on full, in contrast to the eight or so hours it can run with just the fan on. In other words, it’s great for a quick cooldown, but it isn’t something you can rely on for an entire day.

Another thing to note: The longer the thermal chips run, the warmer the battery gets (which is not a problem we noticed on fan-only mode). This makes a certain amount of sense, considering the chips’ higher energy consumption, but it still leads to a strange mixed hot-and-cold sensation on the back of your neck.

The cooling chips also add to the cost. The Egopp fan usually costs more than our top pick and runner-up. You shouldn’t spend the extra money on this model if you don’t plan to use the cooling mode or if you’ll regularly need to use your fan for more than a few hours at a time.

The fan-only part isn’t that great on its own. The Egopp model has only half as many vents as our top pick, though they point both up and down, cooling your body and your neck at the same time. But even that isn’t enough to make up for the overall weakness of its wind.

In our tests, we measured the wind speed coming out of the Egopp fan at an average of 1.1 mph—about half the speed of our other picks. And the difference between the low setting and the high setting was only about 0.4 mph.

The sound is more annoying, too. We measured the fan noise from the Egopp fan at an average volume of 59 decibels—not terribly loud, but not great, either. This neck fan also emits a low electrical thrum from the thermal chips that is not unlike what you’d hear if you were to have a mini refrigerator wrapped around your neck.

That said, I have some auditory-processing issues, and the whirring tone of this fan sent me into a stupor. It isn’t necessarily loud, and it didn’t seem to bother any of the half-dozen other people who tried the fan, but that specific frequency triggered something weird in my brain, leaving me feeling unbalanced and unfocused. It didn’t bother me as much on the low setting or while I was wearing headphones.

Oh, the sound of it also made my 1-year-old nephew cry, but I’m pretty sure that was just a baby thing. Your mileage may vary.

The Egopp fan also has the absolute worst controls of any neck fan we tested. As much as we loved the experience of the thermal chips, the user interface on this neck fan is terrible. The small buttons are awkwardly placed all the way on the back and are nearly impossible to find by feel alone; even after a month of regular use, I only just started to get the hang of it. You also have to hold the buttons down to activate them rather than just tap them once to cycle through the settings. Once we found a setting we liked, we left it alone.

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With thermal chips that heat as well as cool, plus Bluetooth connectivity and a fancy carrying case, this is the priciest—but clearly the nicest—neck fan we’ve tested.

The Torras Coolify 2S Neck Air Conditioner is easily one of the nicest neck fans available, and it’s a genuinely solid device overall. It’s also the most expensive by far, with less warranty protection than we expect at this price. But when it’s working as designed, it truly is a nice device, with plenty of thoughtful features that helped it stand out from the other neck fans we tried.

It offers an excellent fan and even more cooling-chip coverage. The cooling chips on this neck fan cover a total area of roughly 15 square inches. That’s about three times more than on the Egopp fan, which means three times as much cold comfort on your nape. Unlike that fan, however, the actual fan function on the Torras model is awesome on its own, performing at least as well as that of our top pick on every setting.

It has some of the best controls we’ve seen on a neck fan. The fan itself looks much sleeker than the other options we’ve tested, with rounded edges and a glossy black finish. A small LCD screen on the right side of the fan displays the current setting as well as the percentage of battery power remaining; it’s a nice touch, even if you can’t actually see the screen while wearing the fan. The buttons are large and easy to find, with one on either side of the neck: power settings on the right, mode options on the left.

It even has an option for you to connect it to your phone and control the settings with an app. I initially thought this was an entirely unnecessary luxury: Why would I take my phone out when I can just tap a button on my neck? But it may be helpful for some folks, such as those with mobility issues. The app also offers a timer option, which could be useful for some situations.

It comes with a nice padded carrying case. If you are going to spend $200 or more for a neck fan, I can certainly understand why you might want to take better care of it. The competitors we tried lacked this perk.

It even has a heating mode. The built-in thermal chips on the Torras fan can work for cooling or heating. I wouldn’t trade a decent winter coat for it, but it can provide some nice supplemental warmth on a cool fall evening or a brisk spring day. I found that it also worked well as a sort of muscle relaxant after I carried a toddler around on my shoulders for a while, though I’m not sure that was the intended purpose.

But it fits a little more tightly than other neck fans we tested. The diameter of this neck fan is about 7.5 inches—roughly an inch less than the spread on our top pick or runner-up. But there’s a clear reason for that: The cooling chips work only if they can make direct contact with your skin. It could feel a little snug or uncomfortable for some people.

Did we mention it’s also really expensive? I cannot stress this enough: $200 is a lot to spend on a neck fan. But if you can afford it, and if your fan performs like ours has, I would begrudgingly admit that the Torras fan is worth the investment.

But it’s not without risk—and the warranty should be stronger. Our test unit has been fine, but of course that isn’t always the case with consumer electronics. The worst owner reviews, about 5% of the total, are a mix of unmet expectations as well as more concerning notes about battery life and charging issues. The Torras website offers a one-year limited warranty for purchases made directly from the company; if you buy from an online seller such as Amazon, you get only a “180-day quality guarantee.” We’ve reached out to the company for clarification, but either way, we think a product at this investment level should come with a clearer, firmer commitment from the company.

The thermal cooling chips on the Torras Coolify Cyber Neck Air Conditioner cover almost twice as much area as those on our upgrade pick, also from Torras. Unfortunately, this also means that the Coolify Cyber is even more expensive. It was slightly louder than our upgrade pick, too, and the controls weren’t as convenient, although it still gives you the option of app control via Bluetooth.

The Hotsales Neck Fan TY-01 performed only slightly worse than our runner-up, also from Hotsales. It is designed with a built-in carrying handle, though, which I guess is convenient.

The Civpower Neck Fan and the Penkou Portable Neck Fan are both essentially indistinguishable from our top pick, minus the fun LED-lighting option, yet somehow they still cost the same. Regardless, they’re both decent LED-less alternatives.

The Comlife Portable Neck Fan looks like two tiny room fans stuck on the end of a bendable stick. It also has half the battery life and half the power of our other picks. There’s no reason for this to exist.

We also tested the Torras Coolify Zone Wearable Waist Fan, which isn’t technically a neck fan—you wear it around your waist, sort of like a WWE championship belt. Also like professional wrestling, the cooling experience had a certain kayfabe quality, in that it was a complete fabrication designed to create the illusion of emotional satisfaction.

This article was edited by Harry Sawyers.

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Thom Dunn

Thom Dunn is a staff writer at Wirecutter reporting on heating, cooling, and other home-improvement topics. Sometimes his curiosity gets the best of him, such as when he plugged a space heater and a Marshall guitar amp into the same power strip. Pro tip: Don’t do that.

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