Ski and snowboard helmets, chosen on what the maker publishes

There are two standards, and both are printed inside

A snow helmet sold in the US should carry a sticker inside the shell naming the standard it was certified against. There are two you will see:

• ASTM F2040 is the American standard for recreational snow sports. It specifies impact attenuation, the area of the head that must be covered, and retention-system strength.
• CE EN 1077 is the European equivalent. It comes in Class A and Class B. Class B covers slightly less of the head, particularly at the ears, in exchange for better hearing and ventilation, and it is what the large majority of recreational ski helmets are certified to.

Most helmets worth buying carry both. A helmet carrying neither is not a ski helmet regardless of what the listing photograph shows, which is the single most useful thing to know before buying one online. The full guide to what each standard tests goes through what those tests actually involve.

What the extra thirty dollars buys

The clearest price break in this category is between helmets with a rotational-impact system and helmets without one. MIPS, the most common of these, is a thin low-friction layer inside the helmet that lets the shell rotate a few millimeters against your head during an angled impact. Real crashes are almost never a clean straight-on hit; a skier who catches an edge arrives at the snow at an angle, and that angle produces a twisting force.

On this site the cheapest helmet with a rotational liner is about $70 and the cheapest certified helmet without one is about $40. Over five seasons at five days a year, that difference is about twelve cents a day. We think that is the easiest call in this entire category, and the explainer walks through the evidence.

Fit is the part that is actually hard

A helmet that is too big does not protect you, and buying a size up for a child to grow into does not work with helmets the way it works with a coat. The check takes ten seconds: put it on without the strap done up and shake your head. If it slides, it is too big.

Measuring first saves a return. Run a soft tape around the head about a centimeter above the eyebrows and around the widest part at the back, and compare that number against the maker’s own chart, not a generic one. Our fit guide has the full check, and the children’s helmet size chart maps head circumference to size for the brands most families buy.

Why a dial matters more than it sounds

Most helmets in this section publish a dial adjuster at the back, and one of them publishes how much range that dial covers: 6 cm inside a single size. For an adult that is a convenience. For a growing child it is roughly two years of head growth, which is the difference between buying one helmet and buying two.

When a helmet stops being a helmet

Two rules, both worth more than any feature comparison. Replace a helmet after any impact hard enough that you noticed it, even if the shell looks fine, because the foam liner works by crushing and a crushed liner does not crush twice. And do not buy a used helmet, for the same reason: you cannot see whether it has already done its job once.

What we rank these on

Four axes, all arithmetic over published figures: cost per day on snow, the protective standards and systems the maker publishes, how many sizes exist, and the published warranty. No axis rewards a helmet for looking good, and none of them requires having worn it. The full method is here, including the breakpoints, so you can disagree with a weighting and re-run it.

Before you buy any of these, it is worth reading whether you should buy at all. For helmets the answer is usually yes, and we say so for reasons that have nothing to do with the commission.