Your Engine Deserves the Best Oil Filter, and It Doesn't Have to Cost a Lot (2024)

Your engine's oil filter has a critically important job. The soup-can-size filter at the bottom of your engine needs to remove contaminants and particles from your hard-working engine's oil so they don't cause internal damage and costly repairs.

That's why you should be sure to replace your oil filter every time you change your vehicle's oil. If you're a DIY sort of person who changes the oil yourself, it pays to spin a top-quality oil filter into place while you're doing the job. Almost every car manufacturer recommends you do exactly that. They know best how to protect the engines in their vehicles because they want to keep expensive warranty repairs to a minimum.

How do you find the best oil filter for your vehicle? And how much should you spend on it? The answers aren't as complicated as you think. Here's how to find the best oil filter for your ride—at a great price.

Engine Oil Wears Out

Engine oil has an incredibly tough assignment. To properly protect your highly complex, expensive-to-repair engine, oil is pumped through a multitude of tight passages that lubricate dozens of fast-moving metal parts. It must flow throughout the engine almost instantaneously upon startup. And it needs to maintain flawless performance through temperatures ranging from subfreezing to hundreds of degrees, over a period of many months and thousands of miles.

While doing that job day after day, the oil inevitably accumulates microscopic particles of abrasive soot, dirt, metal shavings, and other contaminants that slowly reduce its lubricating quality and effectiveness. Old, filthy oil can actually damage your engine's bearings and other internal surfaces, causing the engine to fail. So your engine absolutely needs a top-quality, highly effective oil filter.

Oil-Filter Prices

The good news is that a quality oil filter does not need to be expensive. You can find excellent quality, brand-name oil filters in the $7–$15 price range from such well-known brands as Mobile1, Bosch, Fram, Motorcraft, and more.

We did a quick check on Amazon for oil filters for one of our staffer's cars, a 1999 Mazda MX-5 Miata, and found filters from such trusted names as Fram, Purolator, K&N, Wix, and Mazda ranging from about $5 to $15. We'd put any one of those brands on a personal car.

K&N offers a helpful feature on what it calls its Performance Wrench-Off filters: a large nut on the filter's outboard end that lets you to tighten or remove it with a standard wrench or socket. Most other filters, which lack this feature, will require you to use a low-cost filter wrench to loosen them if they're on too tight to remove by hand. (The wrench is the circular tool on the left side of the photo that leads this story.)

Oil-Filter Replacement

Most oil filters are easy to change, so there's no reason for you to shy away from doing the job yourself. You will have to be able to get underneath your vehicle's engine—either with the vehicle on a lift or on tall-enough jack stands that allow you to safely see, reach, remove, and replace the filter without a struggle. (Some filters are accessible from the top of the engine compartment.) Here's a Car and Driver video showing the steps to changing your oil and filter.

Oil filters are generally easy to locate on the engine and easy to remove, simply by unscrewing them counterclockwise. And please, be kind to the environment; have a basin to catch the oil you're draining during an oil and filter change. If you can't handle doing the job properly or don't have the right location or tools available, then you should pay a professional shop.

The best oil filters are designed to retain 99 percent effectiveness for at least as long as your oil does (check your owner's manual for recommended change intervals). Some filter brands tout filtration capability for 7500 or even 15,000 miles, but we recommend replacing the filter every time you change the oil. Why run clean oil through a dirty filter?