The 5 Best Outdoor Patio Heaters of 2025
Outdoor patio heaters come in many shapes and forms, from wall-mounted infrared heat lamps to permanently installed fire pits that run on the same natural-gas line as your stove. Seeking something versatile and ready for immediate use, we limited our search to more-portable options, which typically rely on one of two heat sources: electric or propane.
Electric patio heaters are pretty much the same as your standard indoor space heater; they even tend to produce about the same power, maxing out at 1,500 watts, or the equivalent of about 5,100 British thermal units (BTUs). The energy they produce is infrared, which means it works like direct sunlight and is absorbed straight into your skin and clothes, instead of the air around you. As you do with your average indoor space heater, you simply plug ’em into an outlet and flip ’em on, and you should be good to go.
However, electric patio heaters present considerations beyond the standard indoor heater safety practices. AZ Patio Heaters’s McMillen recommends an Ingress Protection Code (IPC) rating of 55 or higher, which means the unit should be protected from the ingress of dust and light water sprays. We did find a few decent-looking models that were rated IP 44 (safe from splashing water and solid objects larger than 1 millimeter, such as wires, slender screws, and large ants). Anything rated lower than that is an accident waiting to happen—including our indoor-space-heater picks, most of which have no IP rating at all (with one exception).
Propane patio heaters tend to put out more heat than electric heaters—about eight times as many BTUs on average. This radiant heat does more to warm the ambient air, instead of heating you directly. As the name suggests, this type of heater requires a propane tank. The tank you probably have under a grill will do fine, though you might want to invest in an extra tank. Propane heaters are usually made of aluminum or a similar lightweight metal, and they’re often pretty weather-resistant in winter temperatures. If you look at the safety data sheet of a tank manufacturer like Worthington Industries, for example, most of the warnings focus on excessive heat. Anecdotally, though, we found reports indicating that colder weather can cause some pressure problems for a propane tank, making it appear as if it has less fuel than it actually does.
Unlike electric heaters, however, propane heaters require a bit of maintenance. You should clean them at least once a year (before you put them away for storage at the end of the season), to remove any carbon buildup or other blockages in the burner or pilot area due to bugs, dirt, and debris. Because these heaters create actual fire, some of the parts may eventually start to wear out. “Your emitter screen up top is essentially burning, and then cooling, and then burning, and then cooling. Over time that will deteriorate,” explained McMillen. “If you can’t replace that, then the heater is useless after a few years.” Some companies (including AZ Patio Heaters) sell replacement parts in case anything does go wrong; if you buy an off-brand heater, however, you might have trouble finding parts that fit. Although this kind of maintenance may sound daunting, it means that a good propane heater will prove more resilient over time. (If anything breaks on an electric heater, the whole thing is pretty much shot.) You may also want to invest in a waterproof cover to protect your heater from the elements when it’s not in use. You can get along with one hot, but it could help to prolong the life of the heater.
We specifically looked for models of either heat source that were weather-resistant and offered some kind of safety feature, such as a tip-over switch, a thermocouple, or overheat protection. We also paid attention to warranty information during our research, too, although we found very few models that were guaranteed for more than a year. And finally, we factored in aesthetics, just to make sure our readers would have options that fit their specific patios and lifestyles.
In order to determine how well these different heaters worked, we followed a similar methodology to the one we use to test space heaters every year. We set up each individual heater on a 100-square-foot walled-in cement patio, with one Lascar data logger placed 3 feet away and another placed 6 feet away. We ran each heater for an hour, and the data loggers measured changes in temperature and humidity every five minutes. As with our normal space-heater tests, we focused our results on the overall changes in temperature; it’s difficult to control the outdoors and isolate every possible variable. We used an infrared thermometer gun to measure the casing, to see how hot it got to the touch after an hour. To see how long each heater retained heat, we let the data loggers continue measuring for another hour after the heaters turned off.
While running these objective tests, we also sat outside with the patio heaters operating, taking subjective notes about how warm they made us feel, what user interface features made one model or another easier to assemble and use, and what it was like to live with them overall.
