The Best Roasting Pans of 2026

So, you've been told that you need a roasting pan to make a big holiday meal. You simply can't cook up a Thanksgiving turkey or a Christmas prime rib roast without one! But why should you buy an expensive roasting pan—like our winner, the Viking 3-Ply Stainless Steel Roasting Pan with Nonstick Rack (available at Home Depot for $249.99) —if you're only going to use it twice a year? Let me tell you why: A roasting pan can do so much more than cook your holiday dinner.

You see, a good roasting pan can sear meats like short ribs, chicken thighs, or pork chops on the stovetop and finish cooking them over a bed of vegetables in the oven. But, as we found out in our testing, not all of them are created equal. Thankfully, most of them proved to be worthy purchases, even if you only use them twice a year. If $200 for a roasting pan is out of your budget, there's no need to fear. Our runner-up nearly bested our top pick in many of our tests, and it's regularly on sale for $70.

How we tested roasting pans

The tester

I'm Lindsay Mattison, a professional chef and a big believer in the dinner party. There's nothing I love more than inviting eight or 10 people over to share a meal around my (sometimes too-crowded) table. Because I always invite more people than I intend, I've gotten used to supersizing the entree! That's where my roasting pan comes in handy: I can use it to sear and braise a ton of short ribs, cook a roast over a bed of vegetables, whip up an extra-large casserole, or make a larger-than-life batch of lasagna. I use it all year long, and I'd love to help you find one you'll use that often.

The tests

We chose 10 stainless-steel and nonstick roasting pans and put them to the test. We designed our tests to evaluate a few things, most notably each pan's performance in the oven and on the stovetop, as well as overall ease of use.

A roasting pan is a very, very large casserole dish, complete with a roasting rack. Like the casserole, it has tall sides that can prevent proper heat circulation if the pan is poorly designed. The pan's material can either deliver excellent heat distribution or leave you with less-than-stellar results. To see how these pans stood up, we roasted a chicken in each one to check whether the skin browned evenly, and we cooked a pork loin over a bed of vegetables. If the vegetables burned around the edges of the pan, we deducted points.

Once we were satisfied with oven performance, we moved on to the stovetop. Your pan should be able to straddle two burners on the cooktop and heat evenly without warping or causing burned spots. We deglazed the chicken drippings and made a batch of gravy (we also discovered that pans with flat bottoms are much easier to work with). Then, we cranked up the heat and seared all four sides of a pork loin, hoping for an Instagram-worthy, golden-brown crust on every side.

It's not all about performance, though, when it comes to something as heavy and bulky as a roasting pan, even if it has a well-shaped rack. It has to have comfortable handles that help distribute the weight as you carry around a 20-pound turkey. And those handles have to be well designed so they're just as easy to grip when you're gloved up with potholders! We also put the pans through other ease-of-use tests, like how easy it was to clean off those burned bits, whether the rack moved around wildly as it held a turkey, and whether it was easy to pour the gravy out of the pan.

What you should know about roasting pans

Keep a few considerations in mind when shopping for a roasting pan. First, let's talk size. For these tests, we focused on 16-inch roasters because they're large enough to hold a 20-pound turkey but small enough to fit inside a regular home oven. You might not regularly roast a turkey that size, but it's a good benchmark for the largest thing you might cook in a roasting pan. At that size, you can easily roast vegetables for a crowd without overcrowding the pan.

Next, materials: Our favorite pans are made from heavy-duty tri-ply stainless steel. They have an aluminum core for excellent heat conductivity and stainless-steel linings for durability. These pans worked best on the stovetop and in the oven. But our runner-up is made from carbon steel—similar to baking sheets—and it aced our tests. Hard-anodized aluminum pans performed well in the oven, but they produced a weaker sear on the stovetop. The worst-performing pans were made from stainless steel alone. They struggled to distribute heat evenly.

Finally, there's the rack. About half of the racks were stainless steel, and the other half had nonstick coatings. While the nonstick racks were significantly easier to clean after we let the chicken drippings cake on overnight, we know that nonstick coatings eventually wear off. Inexpensive replacement racks are available if that happens, and since all the racks are removable, we weren't too concerned. Most of the time, I don't even use that rack: I prefer to cook my roasts on a bed of vegetables to get a two-for-one meal!

How to pick a roasting pan

Other roasting pans we tested

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