The 8 Best Drill Bit Sets of 2026

Three flats ground onto the base of the larger bits is the small piece of engineering that earns this set its place. From 3/16 inch up, the shank is machined with three flat faces so the chuck jaws have something to bite, and a bit that cannot spin cannot chew the hole or your knuckles. For a first drill, a small toolbox, or a gift for somebody who just bought their first driver, this is the set we point to: 14 bits, a 135-degree split point that starts without walking, and a black-and-gold finish that keeps rust off between jobs.

What you give up is breadth — 14 bits against 21 in our top pick, in a slimmer case that fits a drawer rather than a shelf. It is a wood, plastic, and light-steel set rather than a stainless one, and the shanks below 3/16 inch stay smooth, so the smallest bits rely on the jaws alone. What it does not give up is the edge: these have kept cutting through pine, PVC, and light steel without the point chipping, which is where inexpensive sets usually quit.

The Craftsman set is the cheapest way onto this list, and it is not a toy: 14 bits from 1/16 inch to 1/2 inch, split points, a gold oxide coating, and a metal case that latches shut. For a renter with a short list of jobs — shelves, curtain rods, a bracket that pulled out of the drywall — it covers the sizes you will actually chuck and leaves money in the budget for the drill.

Two details are better than the price suggests. The range runs all the way to 1/2 inch, which is usually the first thing a cheap kit drops, and the 1/8-inch bit is doubled, which happens to be the size you burn through first on pilot holes. The split points start cleanly in pine and plywood, the case holds the sizes in order, and at eight ounces the whole thing can live in a kitchen drawer. Buy it as the household set and it will earn its keep.

Cobalt is the word to look for when the metal is stainless, and Bosch puts 8 percent M42 cobalt in these bits. The duplicate sizes tell you what the set is for: two each of 1/16, 5/64, 1/8, 3/16, and 1/4 inch, because those are the ones that die first when you are pushing a hole through hard metal.

Stainless is a different discipline from pine. It work-hardens if you dawdle, so the bit has to keep cutting while the speed stays low; we ran these slow with a drop of cutting oil and watched the point rather than the clock, looking for an edge that survived once the hole was through. It did. Run the speed up and the tip will blue and rub no matter what alloy you bought.

This is the most expensive set on the list and the only one built for stainless, cast iron, titanium, and hardened fasteners, which makes the decision simple. If those materials are regular work — a shop, a boat, an old truck — the premium is the cost of not burning through three cheap bits per hole. If your holes are in pine and drywall, the DEWALT does more sizes for less.

If the hardware on your bench is metric, fractional bits are a compromise you feel every time: 5 mm falls between 3/16 and 13/64 inch, and a bolt that came off a European bike does not care what the nearest sixty-fourth is. This kit covers 1 to 8 mm in 19 titanium-coated high-speed-steel bits, adds four brad-point wood bits from 4 to 8 mm, and fills out the 75 pieces with insert and power driver bits.

The drill bits are the reason to buy it, and they are good ones. Brad points score the rim of the hole before the center bites, so shelf pins and cabinet work come out clean instead of torn, and having 3, 4, 6, and 8 mm on hand means you stop drilling the next size up and calling it close enough. For metric work, this is the set that does not ask you to convert.

Two things to know before you buy. The 75-piece count is mostly fastening bits — 23 of the pieces are drill bits — and the Phillips drivers are the part of the kit that gives out first. At a kilogram, the case is a shelf item rather than something you toss in a tool bag. If everything you own is imperial, skip it; if you have ever drilled a 5 mm hole with a 13/64 bit and hoped, this is the fix.

A ratchet screwdriver, a countersink, a magnetic extension, nut setters, masonry bits, and nine titanium drill bits from 1/16 to 3/8 inch, all in one case: the Bosch 91-piece is less a drill bit set than the box you grab when you do not know what the job is yet.

That is the honest case for a kit this shape — the shelf at the rental property, the flat-pack assembly that wants three different drivers and a pilot hole, the bracket that turns out to be going into brick. Having the countersink in the same box as the drill bits is the detail we appreciated most; countersunk pilot holes are exactly the thing that gets skipped when the countersink lives in another drawer.

Where it beats the other combos here is the layout: molded slots hold everything, the lid keeps it there in transit, and the removable pieces come out to travel with you. The drill bits themselves are decent general-purpose titanium — fine in wood, plastic, and light metal, nothing special. You are buying the range rather than a premium edge, and that is a fair trade at this price.

The limits are worth knowing. The drill bits stop at 3/8 inch, so this cannot be your only set if you bore pipe or cable, and roughly half the count is screwdriver bits. Neither is a fault in a kit designed for mixed work; both matter if what you actually do is make holes.

Most of us have an impact driver within arm's reach of the drill, and a round-shank bit in an impact collet is a bad pairing — it spins, or the collet chews the shank. Makita's answer is 14 bits on a 1/4-inch hex shank, 1/16 to 1/2 inch, titanium coated, with a 135-degree split point and an impact rating. The 1/8-inch bit comes doubled, which is the one that breaks.

The hex shank is the whole argument. It clicks into a quick-change collet and comes out the same way, so going from a driver bit to a drill bit costs a second rather than a chuck key, and the flats give the collet something to hold while the driver is hammering. In a keyed drill chuck that same shank sits on its flats rather than in the jaws, so it works but never runs as true as a round bit.

We have spent less time with this set than with the DEWALTs above, so our confidence rests on the geometry rather than a long track record: split points and a proper hex base are the two things that make impact drilling behave, and both are here. The listing also carries no manufacturer warranty, which is worth knowing before you plan on one.

If your kit includes an impact driver, this is the set that keeps you out of the adapter drawer and puts a drill bit in the tool you already have in your hand. If your drilling happens at a drill press or a keyed chuck, buy a round-shank set instead and get a truer hole for less.

A hundred and nine pieces sounds like every bit you will ever need until you count them: a good share are one- and two-inch screwdriver bits, and the drill bits — wood, metal, plastic, and masonry — are the smaller half of the case.

What the set is genuinely good at is the odd job. There is a masonry bit for the brick behind the mailbox, duplicates of the sizes that wear out first, a driver for every screw head in a flat-pack, and a hard case with spare storage, so the whole house's fastening problems live in one box on a shelf.

At 2.8 pounds and 12 by 8 1/2 by 2 1/2 inches, it is a shelf box rather than something that rides in a tool bag, and the count is doing more work on the packaging than in the drawer: you will use maybe a dozen of the 109 pieces with any regularity.

Buy it as the house set and it earns its place — one case, one price, and enough variety that a Saturday errand does not start with a trip to the hardware store. If most of what you do is bore holes, put the money into a drill-only set instead; the drilling half here is the weaker half.