The best road bike mudguards (or ‘fenders’, for our friends across the Pond) make cycling a more pleasant experience in wet and changeable weather – and that’s much of the time in the UK – by preventing a lot of the spray created by your tyres from turning you into a soggy mess.
Best full-length mudguards: SKS Chromoplastics Mudguard Set 65mm 28
Best full-length road mudguards for easy fitting: M:Part Primoplastics mudguards
Best for gravel bikes and wider tyres: SKS Speedrocker mudguard set
Best clip-on mudguards: Flinger Race Pro Clip Mudguards
Best clip-on mudguards for length and coverage: Crud Roadracer Mk3 mudguards
Best clip-on mini rear mudguard: Ass Savers Win Wing 2 Gravel
If you've never used mudguards, you’ll probably be surprised at how much difference they make. A lot of the water that covers you when you ride in the rain doesn’t come directly from the clouds, it’s thrown up from the road surface by your tyres, especially in lovely British drizzle.
Mudguards are key to keeping dry – or drier than you’d otherwise be – in typical British conditions. That’s especially true in winter when water tends to stay on the roads for longer. If you’re riding year-round, make sure you have some of the best bike lights to keep you safe too.
Mudguards are also a vital courtesy on group rides. Sit directly behind a bike that’s not fitted with mudguards on a wet ride and you’ll soon realise just how much water tyres can spray up. A long rear mudguard, preferably with a flap, keeps spray out of the face of the rider behind you. Many clubs and riding groups demand mudguards over the winter.
Full-coverage bolt-on guards are the most effective option on any bike that can take them and that will be used all year round. If you want some of the best road bike mudguards and your bike lacks mudguard eyelets, there are lots of options from full-length guards designed to squeeze into the limited space to clip-ons that at least keep your bum drier.
How we review mudguards
road.cc reviewers keep hold of a product for at least a month before we publish their findings, and in the case of mudguards, that obviously means we send them out in less-than-perfect conditions! Usually that'll mean a lot of mudguards that come in get reviewed in the autumn and winter months, when the weather is the most unpredictable.
Mudguards are rated for performance, quality of construction, durability and how easy they are to fit. We'll always compare apples to apples, so won't be slamming a set of full-length guards because they take longer to fit than an ass saver. Likewise, an expensive product won't be compared to something much cheaper in the value section and marked down unfairly if there's a gulf between them in terms of quality and construction.
Why you can trust us
All the mudguards that feature in this guide got good, very good or excellent scores. If it doesn't score well it doesn't make it in, and we take plenty of steps to ensure no one influences our reviewer's opinion or decisions.
All our reviewers have plenty of riding experience, and those of us tasked with putting these guides together for you are avid riders too. You can be sure our recommendations are based on first-hand experiences, and the aim is to include our genuine picks of the best mudguards around; not just stuff we can make a commission from, or products that someone in sales was keen for us to push. Them's aren't the rules when it comes to road.cc buyer's guides, unfortunately for our sales team!
Now, to our selections. We've split our top picks into numerous categories: first off you'll find our very top choices in various styles and for different use cases, followed by full-length, clip-on and finally some mountain bike/gravel-style and micro mudguard recommendations. Some of these do cross over, in that one of our full-length picks doesn't actually require eyelets and a lot of our clip-on selections do provide quite a lot of coverage, so be sure to check them all out before deciding what's right for you.
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