The 8 Best Winter Work Gloves for Cold Months

This is a low-cost and semi-disposable cold-weather glove that’s great for wet winter work. It consists of three-part construction: a nylon shell, a rubberized PVC crinkle finish adhered to the palm and finger tips, and a fleece lining. For its low cost and thin insulation, its thermal profile wasn’t bad, but there’s no mistaking it for an extreme-weather product. What the glove does offer is the best dexterity in this test, which we appreciated when using our drill, pliers, hammer, and ratchet wrench.

This fully synthetic glove has a shell backed by 200-gram insulation, and a waterproof insert (like a glove within a glove) should keep your hands dry even in slushy weather. Though we haven’t tested these yet, we’ve worn IronClad gloves in the past and found them to be warm and dry. The glove also protects your hands with padding at the knuckles and reinforcing materials at the tips. The palms are lined with a coarse, high-traction fabric to help you hang on to the controls on the snow thrower or to the rope on your kid’s sled as the two of you go hurtling downhill.

While we don’t have any experience with this insulated version of the Cowhide Thinsulate yet, we have logged several years of use on the uninsulated version. It’s one of the most durable work gloves we have ever owned, so we think the addition of insulation and a fleece lining can only make a good glove better–especially for winter wear. The insulated version uses the same cowhide exterior, which makes for a perfect glove material. It’s tough, extremely long wearing, and retains its shape as the years pass, only improving with age.

This is another glove that does double duty or even triple duty. Wear it outside for a walk or when doing light work such as raking leaves. Mechanix Wear rates the glove as being capable down to 40 degrees F, and that aligns with our experience. But we also found that the synthetic fabric and close fit allows it to easily slide inside a baggy mitten, such as the SwedePro or the Choppers, to act as an effective liner. The thermal profile isn’t impressive, but the dexterity is, almost as good as bare hands. And it’s allegedly touchscreen-friendly, but our experience trying to operate a phone was uneven. Sometimes the glove worked, and other times it didn’t.

Outside of a baseball mitt, this is nearly as heavy a leather glove as you’re going to find. It’s thick, impregnated with a wax finish (optional), and has a double-layer reinforcement at the thumb, palm, and finger tips. Cold protection is accomplished with a 40-gram insulated lining. All that makes the gloves so stiff when new that the manufacturer recommends accelerating the break-in process by heating them in a 200-degree oven for two minutes and then wearing them while doing work. The thermal profile of the Give’r is very good, revealing some thermal breakout at the index finger and the cuffs but otherwise quite uniform.

The Give’r ads show people wearing the company’s gloves and mittens to pick up burning logs and plunging them into boiling water. We can’t vouch for those tests, but we can say that the Flir camera showed a nearly impeccable thermal profile. That’s thanks to a thick leather exterior and an interior sewed with a sophisticated multi-layer Hipora membrane coupled with Thinsulate insulation. The optional wax coating—which we recommend, by the way—helps the mitts shed water. A knit wrist band does provide a comfy seal where the Give’rs meet your shirt or coat. As to this mitt’s dexterity, we suspect it will improve with time or if you use the company’s recommended accelerated break-in method (heating the mitts in an oven for a couple of minutes at 200 degrees F.). We found the leather provided good grip on a hammer handle and also offered some help in manipulating a ratchet. As to using a cordless drill and pliers, don’t try it. You need a trigger finger mitt for those, we found.

We own a pair of these SwedePro chainsaw mittens and like them. They’re not as warm as heavily insulated mittens (they work down to about 30 degrees F or so), but they do provide good dexterity. For extra protection in cold weather, we slip wool liners into them (you have to size them a little large to do this). We also like them for using a circular saw in the cold. For added safety, there’s chain-stopping material sewn into the back of the left mitten; it’s a tough, synthetic warp-knitted material that, upon contact with a spinning chain, immediately winds itself into that chain, snarling it and the saw’s sprocket. The material’s high tensile strength and the winding action bring the chain to a stop, mitigating potential injuries. It’s difficult for your left hand to make contact with a chain on a modern saw because of the hand guard and chain break, but some people manage to do it anyway, as injury statistics bear out.

The most dexterous mitt in our test is the Chopper’s model, built in Vermont out of goatskin with tough nylon thread and a webbed reinforced joint at the thumb. We would rate these gloves for cold (but not too cold) weather, comfortable down to somewhere in the 20s based on our experience with them outside. Of course, that depends on your degree of physical movement. Doing heavy vigorous work like shoveling snow, you can probably wear these to a much colder temperature. What really sets the Chopper’s apart is that they’re sized and shaped to fit a lightweight but very warm wool glove liner. If you buy extra liners, you’ll be assured of staying warmer in soggy conditions by switching to a dry liner—a handy feature if you also happen to have sweaty hands. By separating the liner from the mitten, the two dry more quickly.