The Best Stud Finders of 2026

If you’re hanging pictures in your home or apartment that are heavy enough to require a wall stud, the easiest way to find one is with a stud finder. It will help you find wood and metal studs faster, and more accurately than tapping on the wall or hunting and guessing with a drill. Like a tape measure or level, it’s a core part of any new homeowner’s toolkit.

Which stud finder is best? Are electronic models worth the extra money? I spent over 30 hours researching and testing the best stud finders on different wall materials to find out. None were perfect, but some stud finders worked much better than others.

If you want a stud finder that’s accurate and easy to use, our favorite is the Zircon A150 (available at Amazon) . If you’re looking for something simple and inexpensive, the C.H. Hanson Magnetic Stud Finder is small and virtually indestructible. It’s easy to use, hanging in place on the wall after you find a stud, so you can make a mark or use the built-in holder for driving screws or nails.

How to find a stud in the wall

Finding a stud can be difficult without the proper tools. Before writing this guide, the stud finder in my house was a magnet on a string that my dad made for me. I love the DIY aspect, the simplicity, and the price: almost free. You can use this magnet-on-a-string method to find the braces and nails in or around the stud and then extrapolate where the stud must be.

With magnetic finders especially, but really any type of stud finder, it’s best to start with a general idea where to look.

Electrical outlets and light switches are almost always found adjacent to studs, so measure 16-inches on either side and that’s generally where you’ll find the next stud. Trim pieces, like crown molding and baseboards, are often secured to studs.

If you’re starting from the edge of a wall, the first stud away from the edge might be only 15.25-inches, then 16 from the center of that one for the rest of the wall (or until a window, another wall, etc). Sometimes studs might be 24-inches, center to center.

If you do get a hit, check other points on the wall up or down from that point to make sure you’re on a stud, not something else inside the wall.

You should know that, despite being called two-by-fours, modern studs are slightly smaller: 1.5 by 3.5 inches in size. If your house was built before the 1960s, it might have studs closer in size to their two-by-four name.

Older houses (say, built in the 1940s) may have plaster-and-lath walls instead of drywall. Plaster and lath will be more difficult to sense studs through than drywall, not least because the plaster alone could be upwards of one-inch thick. In my tests, the deeper the wall, the worse all the stud finders I tested performed.

If you know, or suspect, that you have a plaster-and-lath wall, it’s worth considering a more expensive electronic tester that can sense deeper than the 1.5 inches deep maximum depth offered by the majority of the devices profiled in this guide.

Zircon, the maker of our favorite tester, makes by our count eleventy quadrillion models all with nearly identical features and prices. Several more expensive models claim to sense to a deeper depth than the A150 we tested. We didn’t test them, but they’re a place to start looking if you have particularly deep or otherwise non-standard walls.

Most important, the adage of “measure twice, cut once,” is vital here too. Just because your stud finder swears it has found the center of a stud, drilling a small test hole to make sure it’s there is a good idea before you start drilling. Especially if the location is in a place where a miss would be obvious, catastrophic, or, in the presence of live electrical wiring, shockingly bad.

How to find a stud without a stud finder

In theory, any magnet placed on the end of a string will work for this DIY hack. However, the stronger the magnet, the better. All magnet-based finders seek out the braces and nails your wall’s studs, not the studs themselves.

It’s possible, if you’re doing a quick sweep horizontally across a wall, to miss these pieces of metal. The weaker the magnet in use, the more likely you are to miss the metal and, as in turn, the stud you’re looking for.

In order for your magnet on a string to be most effective, start by seeking out an easy metal landmark, like an electrical outlet or window ledge. In 16-inch horizontal intervals (the amount of space between wall studs), sweep the magnet vertically in order to find the metal associated with the stud.

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