The Best Earplugs for Protecting Your Hearing (2026)

The best earplugs are the pair you'll use, whether it's for sleeping, for catching live music, or both. Hearing damage from noise or age can't be undone, so it's important to take good care of your ears.

Earplugs aren't one-size-fits-all, though. If you're trying to muffle street noise or a snoring partner, you'll want something more occlusive than you would if you're trying to filter out intense highs and lows at a concert while still maintaining fidelity. We've tested earplugs for both scenarios (in both scenarios) and have plenty of recommendations below.

Our current top picks, the Loop Quiet 2 and Earpeace Pro, are both excellent passive pairs of earplugs with slightly different purposes. The Loop Quiet 2 are great for sleep, because they aim to entirely block out the outside world, while the Earpeace Pro are designed to evenly lower the sound of the world around you for when you're in loud environments but still want to hear.

Updated March 2026: We reformatted this guide and checked for accuracy throughout. We've removed some older picks and added new earplugs from Mack's, Eargasm, and Loop.

The Best Earplugs

Loop Quiet 2

The Loop Quiet 2 look almost identical to the Loop Experience earplugs, but there are two crucial differences: With no acoustic filter, they're capable of blocking out more noise—24 dB rather than 18—and they're made entirely from soft silicone, including the round protrusion that sits almost at right angles to the interchangeable tip. That means these silicone earplugs fit right inside the concha of your ear, entirely flush with your head, so when you lie on your side there is very little force applied to the earplug and also less chance of inadvertently knocking them loose. That makes the Loop Quiet 2 the most comfortable earplugs for sleeping.

Earpeace Music Pro

These NPR-backed earplugs fit perfectly in my ears and come with a small aluminum carrying case. They’re super comfortable and can pull a solid 13 decibels from noisy signals—often the difference between some hearing damage and none—in a way that doesn’t suck all the high end out of the sound.

Eargasm High Fidelity

These super-comfortable earplugs can reduce noise by up to 22 decibels, and they won't irritate your ears even if you wear them for 18 hours at a time. The silicone shell is easy to clean, and you'll get three sizes to ensure a proper in-ear fit, plus a handy metal keychain case where you can store them.

Loop Switch

You can toggle the outside of each bud between three positions for variable sound reduction. You can switch between a lot, a little, and nearly no noise, which makes these great for live festivals, where artists can vary in volume. Total noise reduction ranges from –20 dB to –26 dB.

Etymotic MusicPro Elite

They're not cheap, but these act like a limiter for your ears; anything above 90 dB gets filtered out to be lower via a pair of mics in the rechargeable buds, or you can even set them to make things louder (but not exceed 90 dB) when they're quiet, and still soften things up when they get loud.