Even if you’re not a secret agent and you don’t think you have anything to hide, you need a paper shredder.
Garbage and recycling bins full of bank statements and credit card offers are treasure troves for identity thieves. Your best defense: a paper shredder, which chomps through sensitive documents and spits them out as confetti.
After researching more than 25 shredders and running more than 4,000 sheets of paper (along with staples, CDs, and credit cards) through nine of them, we recommend the Royal 14MC 14-Sheet Micro Cut Paper Shredder for most people’s personal and home-office use. If you tend to have novella-sized stacks of paper to shred, invest in the Aurora AU120MA 120-Sheet Auto Feed Micro-Cut Paper Shredder.
Our new top pick may be out of stock at Costco.com but is available in many Costco stores. We expect it to be available online again soon.
Our pick
This high-security shredder offers the best balance of ease of use, sheet capacity, and price. But the pullout bin isn’t as large as those of other models we’ve tested.
The Royal 14MC 14-Sheet Micro Cut Paper Shredder, a Costco-exclusive model (available for non-members for about $4 extra), has nearly twice the sheet capacity and a longer warranty than competing micro-cut shredders that cost the same. In other words, it offers more shredder bang for your buck.
Like other micro-cut shredders, the Royal 14MC shredder chomps documents into tiny shreds, making any sensitive paperwork all but impossible to reassemble. Through batch after batch of our paper-shredding tests, it ran jam-free and quietly (for a shredder), and we found the large buttons and indicator lights simple to understand.
Although the Royal 14MC doesn’t have the largest bin of the shredders we’ve tested, its pull-out bin is easier and safer to use than cheaper and smaller shredders’ lift-off tops.
Upgrade pick
With an automatic feeder that can handle tall stacks of paper, this quiet shredder saves time and eliminates hassle.
If you regularly have a ton of sensitive documents to dispose of, the Aurora AU120MA 120-Sheet Auto Feed Micro-Cut Paper Shredder is the model to get.
As the name indicates, it can handle up to 120 sheets in a single pass in its automatic feeder. Just place the stack of paper in the tray, close the lid, and less than two minutes later you have confetti. For smaller jobs, you can use the manual feed slot, which has a 10-sheet capacity and an auto-reverse mechanism that activates if you put too many sheets in at once.
In addition to being extremely easy to use because of the auto feeder and straightforward buttons, the Aurora AU120MA was the quietest shredder we tested.