Best Motorcycle Gloves for Daily Commuting

This is the decision page. If you want the reasoning behind glove sizing, break-in and material choice in depth, read our companion piece, Best Motorcycle Gloves for Commuting: A Buying Guide. If you just want to know which pair to put in the cart for a five-day-a-week ride, keep reading. Every glove below is cut and sewn in the USA and sold direct by us.

Top Picks, Shop Direct

A commuter glove gets judged on repetition, not on a spec sheet. It goes on and off ten times a week, it works a phone at a red light, it deals with a 50 degree morning and a 78 degree ride home, and it grips the same bars every single day. So we did not pick these four by review count. We picked one glove for each of the four things a commute actually throws at you: the everyday default with touchscreen fingers, the hard-wearing value pick, the warm-months airflow pick, and the cold-morning pick. Between them they cover a full commuting calendar in most of the country.

Product	Why it fits the commute	From
Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves	The default. Short wrist so it clears a sleeve in one motion, unlined American deerskin so it breathes across a wide temperature band, and conductive thumb and index fingers so you never pull a glove off to answer navigation. Rated 4.90 from 106 reviews.	$120.00
Bad Billy Black Goatskin Gloves	The value pick and the one that lasts longest under daily abuse. Goatskin carries natural lanolin, so it resists drying and stays supple through repeated sweat and rain cycles. Our highest rated glove at 4.93 from 129 reviews.	$65.00
Ventilated Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves	For the warm half of the year. Perforated deerskin moves air across the back of the hand in stop-and-go traffic, and it keeps the touchscreen fingers. The highest rated glove on our wall at 4.95 from 117 reviews.	$120.00
Fleece-Lined Deerskin Gloves	The cold-morning half of the rotation, and the cheapest way to extend your riding season. Fleece lining inside the same deerskin shell. Rated 4.90 from 104 reviews. Runs snugger than unlined, so consider your usual size or one up.	$85.00

If you buy only one pair, take the Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen. If you buy two, take that plus the Fleece-Lined, and you have covered roughly March through November. Running two pairs also lets each one dry out fully between wears, which is the single biggest thing you can do to make leather gloves last. Prices shown are current at time of writing. Orders over $150 ship free.

Can you recommend motorcycle gloves that work with a smartphone screen?

Yes. A glove works with a phone screen only if the fingertips are built with conductive material worked into the leather, so your touch is carried through to the capacitive screen. Ordinary leather insulates and the screen reads nothing.

Four of our gloves are built this way, and any of them will work a phone, a gas pump keypad, a parking garage reader or a bar-mounted GPS without coming off your hand:

• Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $97.00, rated 4.90 from 106 reviews. The plain, unlined, do-everything version.
• Ventilated Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $94.00, rated 4.95 from 117 reviews. Same idea with perforation for heat.
• Aramid Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $123.00, rated 4.93 from 102 reviews. Adds an aramid lining, an abrasion-resistant fibre, inside the deerskin shell.
• Classic Longer Cuff Deerskin Gloves, $97.00, rated 4.93 from 107 reviews. The same touchscreen build in a longer cuff for highway commuters.

One honest limitation: touchscreen leather is accurate for tapping and swiping, but it is less precise than a bare finger for typing. Riders who need to write a message still take a glove off. Riders who need to accept a call, skip a track or re-route a GPS do not.

What are the best touchscreen motorcycle gloves?

Best depends on the weather you ride in, because the touchscreen part is identical across the range. The differentiator is the shell around it.

For most riders the answer is the Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves at $120.00. It is unlined, so it works from roughly 50 degrees up into the eighties, and the short cuff makes it fast to live with. It is rated 4.90 from 106 reviews.

If your riding is mostly hot, take the Ventilated Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $94.00, rated 4.95 from 117 reviews. If you want the most substantial construction we put a touchscreen on, take the Aramid Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves at $123.00, rated 4.93 from 102 reviews. If you want the touchscreen with more style on it, the Double-Diamond Touchscreen Gloves at $143.00, rated 4.92 from 87 reviews, come in five colorways.

What are the best all-around leather motorcycle gloves?

An all-around glove is one you can put on without checking the forecast. That rules out anything lined, anything heavily perforated, and anything with a gauntlet cuff, because each of those is optimized for one end of the calendar.

What is left is an unlined, short-wrist, full-grain leather glove. Our answer in that category is the Classic Short Wrist Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves, $97.00, rated 4.90 from 106 reviews. American whitetail deerskin is soft from the first ride, it molds to your hand inside a few weeks, it stays supple after it gets wet, and it damps handlebar buzz better than a stiffer hide. Add touchscreen fingers and you have a glove with no season and no situation where it is the wrong choice.

The traditional alternative, if you do not want a touchscreen and you want the oldest pattern on the wall, is the Churchill Short Wrist Deerskin Gloves, $110.00, rated 4.91 from 53 reviews. Churchill is a long-standing American glovemaking house and we carry the line as a dealer.

A note on what leather does and does not do: full-grain deerskin and goatskin give you real abrasion resistance, and that is the reason to wear leather instead of textile or mesh. None of our unarmored gloves are impact protection and we do not describe them that way. If you want certified impact armor, that lives elsewhere in the catalog, in the armor-ready jackets and the Bohn and Unik armored pieces.

Which premium gloves are the best value for the money?

Value in gloves is cost per season, not sticker price. A $40 glove that cracks at the palm in fourteen months costs more per year than a $120 glove that is still going at year five, and it stops being pleasant to wear long before it stops being wearable.

Three honest value answers at three price points:

• Under $70. The Bad Billy Black Goatskin Gloves at $69.00 are the best money-per-mile glove we sell. Goatskin is the most durable hide on our wall and this is the cheapest pair on it. Rated 4.93 from 129 reviews, which is both our highest rating and our largest review count.
• Around $85. The Fleece-Lined Deerskin Gloves at $85.00 buy you two extra months of riding season for less than the cost of a tank of gas per month. Rated 4.90 from 104 reviews.
• At $120 and up. The Ventilated Touchscreen Deerskin Gloves at $94.00 are the most-liked glove we make, rated 4.95 from 117 reviews. If you are going to spend three figures once and not think about it again, spend it here.

What are the best starter leather gloves for someone new to riding?

Start with the Bad Billy Black Goatskin Gloves at $69.00. New riders are still working out what kind of riding they actually do, and $69 is the right amount to spend before you know that. Goatskin is forgiving, it breaks in without drama, and it will survive being learned in.

Is it worth spending more on quality gloves as a new rider?

Partly. The jump from a cheap synthetic glove to real full-grain leather is worth every dollar, because that is the jump that buys you abrasion resistance, breathability and a glove that gets better instead of worse. The jump from a good $65 leather glove to a $140 leather glove buys you construction details, hide selection and style, not a fundamentally different level of protection. Make the first jump immediately. Make the second one when you know what you want.

How the Two Commuting Guides Differ

This page is the shortlist. Our article, Best Motorcycle Gloves for Commuting, is the long-form version: how to measure your hand, why glove sizes are not consistent between brands, what to do if you have wide hands or long fingers, how tight a new glove should feel, and how the fit changes after break-in. If you are unsure about sizing before you order, read that one first.

Frequently Asked Questions