7 Best Kids Bikes (2025): Mountain, Balance, Pedal, Coaster

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Featured in this articleBest Overall

Woom 4 MicroShift

Read moreBest for Older Kids

Priority Start 24-Inch

Read moreMost people think I bike with my kids because I like exercise or because I want to combat climate change. Neither is true (or the entire answer, at any rate). No, it’s just that sitting in pick-up or drop-off lines in a car makes me want to yeet myself straight into the path of an oncoming 18-wheeler. Now that my kids are 7 and 10 and old enough to bike with me, it’s also much more fun to watch them hop curbs and swing their legs and shout, “We live in a jungle!” than it is, again, to wait for traffic lights to change.

The WIRED Gear team has many children, and we enlisted many of them to test so we could pick the best kids’ bikes for rides to school, on the trails, or around the park. These are our top picks for every age and size. You will note that there are no electric bikes, because children do not belong on electric bikes. And if you’re looking for a bike for yourself, check out our Best Electric Bikes, Best Cheap Ebikes, and Best Electric Cargo Bikes for Families guides.

Updated March 2025: We added two kids mountain bike picks, the REI Co-op Cycles Rev Drt and the Prevelo Zulu Four. We also removed out-of-stock picks and updated links and prices.

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Bikes are expensive. It’s tempting to future-proof your purchase by buying a bike a size or two bigger, for your child to grow into. Do not fall into this trap! Not only is it uncomfortable, it’s unsafe. How would you expect to control a bike that was two sizes too big for you?

Sizing by age range is also risky; for example, my 10-year-old daughter is half the size of some of her peers (sorry, sweetie). To find the correct size, you’ll either have to measure your kid’s height or their minimum inseam length. Children’s bikes are measured by wheel size, so a 12-inch bike refers to a bike with 12-inch wheels, and so forth. When you get the bike, see if your child can stand over the frame with flat feet comfortably on the ground. Make sure your child can get on and off easily and that their hands can reach the brakes and shifters if the bike has them.

Other Factors to Consider

Brakes: Most kids start with coaster brakes, also known as pedal brakes. They let you stop by pedaling backward. An older kid might want hand brakes so they can pedal backward like Mom or Dad. Rim brakes are cheaper, but a disc brake will help them stop faster.

Shifters: Once your child is big enough to comprehend basic physics, an intuitive twist shifter will help them keep up with Mom or an older sibling. I can always hear my 7-year-old’s shifter frantically clicking behind me and his sister on our way to school.

Suspension: Are you planning on dragging your kid mountain biking with you? Then you might be considering a bike with shocks. However, these will add considerable weight and expense to the bike. Kids are also usually light enough so suspension might not work. I would suggest prioritizing bigger wheels and better brakes first.

While I think around $400 is a reasonable price for a brand-new kids’ bike, that’s a lot of money. Do not get the cheapest brand-new bike at the big box store; I have done this before and ended up carrying tiny bikes to the nearest shop for replacement parts. There is a healthy secondary market for kids’ bikes that children have outgrown. You might want to check Craigslist, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or ask your neighbors.

If you want to teach your little kid to ride a bike—especially one that’s trying desperately to keep up with an older sibling—it’s very tempting to just screw some training wheels on and figure that you’ll teach them later. It’s even more tempting because you don’t want your kid to get turned off riding bikes altogether.

However, if you’re a child that’s learned to bike with training wheels, it’s very frustrating to have them taken off and learn how to balance from scratch. I highly recommend skipping the training wheels entirely and letting your kid figure out that they can coast on two wheels all on their own. This video is a good summary of the process (although they call the bunny hop the “frog hop,” which I disapprove of, as bunnies are much cuter than frogs). A properly fitted bike also goes a long way to ensuring that your child feels comfortable.

Best OverallWoom 4 MicroShift

Woom is my favorite bike brand for children. You can start with a 12-inch Woom balance bike and upgrade to bigger models from there, all the way up to the Woom 6, which is a 26-inch bike that even I can ride. The build quality is excellent—no cracked pedals, no wobby handlebars, nice Schwalbe tires—and it’s so much lighter than many other available bikes, especially in the smaller sizes. Kids are small. It’s hard to learn to ride on a cheap, heavy bike that weighs 30 pounds when you yourself are only 40 pounds.

At 5, my son sized into the 20-inch Woom 4, which is when children should start learning how to shift. The standout feature on the Woom 4 is MicroShift, which is an intuitive twist shifter to cycle between seven gears. My son shifts so rapidly on his way to school that it sounds like he’s calculating on an abacus, but in a year of riding, the chain has never fallen off the gears or gotten stuck. That’s amazing. Something to note is that Woom’s sizing might be a little optimistic; my now 7-year-old son sized into a Woom 4 when he was 5, and the ergonomic grips were just a little too big for his hands.The Woom 4 starts for kids who are 45 inches tall (3.75 feet), and Woom also provides a bike sizer tool.

Best for 6 to 8 years old

Best for Older KidsPriority Start 24-Inch

The Priority Start fills the gap between children’s bikes and adult bikes and has everything you could ask for on a bike for an upper-elementary-age kid. The geometry of the bike promotes effective pedaling, and at roughly 23 pounds, it’s a lot lighter than most competitors. The Priority Start’s best features though are its components, starting with the hassle-free Gates belt drive. Often found on commuter bikes and ebikes, this carbon band takes the place of a chain but won’t rust over, crust up with dirt, or slip off. That belt drive connects to an internal hub gear with three speeds. This also helps avoid maintenance issues, though my 9-year-old daughter complains she’d like a few more speeds. (It does seem like the lowest gear could stand to go a little lower.)

The Priority Start is great for kids starting to take on longer rides like commuting to school, occasions where its worry-free reliability is massively appreciated. My daughter has grown far more confident in her riding in the 8 months since she started on the Priority Start, which is the main thing you want from a bike bridging the gap between a traditional kids’ 20-inch bike and a standard adult 26-incher. —Martin Cizmar

Best for 7 to 13 years old