Best LED Light Bulb for Every Room in Your House in 2025
If you have high ceilings, you’ll want floodlights that shine nice and bright in a single direction.
Lots of height? Make it super bright
If you have rooms with high ceilings or recessed lighting — an entryway, for instance, or maybe a staircase with overhead lights or a candelabra up above — you’ll want to prioritize brightness over softness in your light bulbs. After all, the higher up your light bulbs are, the brighter they’ll need to be in order to light up the room.
The most common products for overhead lighting are BR30-shaped floodlights. The “BR” stands for “bulging reflector,” and it means that the light inside the bulb sits above a reflective bowl, sort of like a little satellite dish. Screw a bulb like that up into your ceiling, and that bowl will catch all of the upward cast light, then reflect it back down and out the bottom, which bulges outward to produce the widest possible pool of bright light across the room. It’s the same trick your car’s headlights use to produce as much light output as possible out in front of you as you drive.
On the left, a bowl of M&Ms lit by a standard GE LED. On the right, the same bowl lit by a GE Reveal LED, which does a much better job at making colors look vivid and true.
Consider colors in your kitchen and your closet
I’m not talking about color-changing smart lights (though if you want to jazz your home up with them, don’t let me stop you). No, I’m talking about the colors that are already in your home — artwork, furniture, the clothes in your closet, the fruits and veggies in your kitchen, you name it.
Whatever it is, if it’s colorful, then it’ll benefit from light bulbs with high color rendering scores — bulbs that boost the color temperature and help colors look their best. This isn’t always the easiest thing to shop for, as manufacturers aren’t required to list their color rendering scores on the packaging, like they are with brightness and efficiency specs. Some bulbs that do claim to emit great colors are actually just so-so.
And that’s really the point — despite regularly taking them for granted, we use light bulbs more than just about anything else in our homes. They’re often the first things we turn on in the morning and the last things we turn off before going to bed. So don’t let the lighting aisle overwhelm you — whether you choose an energy-saving light bulb, a CFL bulb, a smart LED bulb or even a regular incandescent light bulb, finding the right light for each room in your house is well worth it, and much easier than you might think.
