The Best Foot Spa Is a Bucket of Warm Water

If you’ve ever had a professional pedicure, you know the indulgent delight they bring: the warm water circulating between your toes, the tingly feeling of epsom salts dissolving, the sinister satisfaction you derive from watching a blizzard of dead skin fall off your feet.

After trying four popular at-home foot spas, I concluded that they are generally not worth the roughly $50 investment: A bathtub or a bucket of heated water will work just fine to soothe and soften your feet.

Some experts advise against a water soak before painting fingernails or toenails, since water makes the nail swell and can lead to the varnish chipping when the nail dries back to its normal size. For many people, though, the best part of the pedicure experience is the soak, for pampering tired feet at the end of the day or for softening corns and calluses before a good buffing.

You can use any large-enough vessel to soak your feet, no specific equipment required (you probably have a bucket at home that will work just fine). However, some people prefer a dedicated foot-soak bucket.

I tested four top-rated models, including Amazon’s three top sellers: the Conair Foot and Pedicure Spa with Vibration and Heat, the MaxKare Foot Spa Massager (four rollers), and the MaxKare Foot Spa Massager (14 rollers) (which the company has since discontinued but replaced with a new, 16-roller model). I also tested the Kendal All-in-One Foot Spa Bath Massager, which The Strategist and The Spruce both recommend. I used each model for up to three hours, evaluating the (subjective) usefulness of features such as water circulation, heating, and vibration or massage.

The best feature these baths can offer is sustained heat and the fleeting thrill of some bubbles. But of the four I tested, only the MaxKare models were able to genuinely produce heat, whereas the Conair and Kendal foot baths could only maintain the initial water temperature. The MaxKare models’ heating mechanisms, located in the middle of the basin, can get very hot within minutes, which can be uncomfortable—if not searingly painful—on the insides of your feet. Both foot baths can reach 118 °F, but I tapped out at 105 °F, which is plenty hot for my taste,  even with the bubbles circulating the water more evenly. According to MaxKare, the minimum heated water temperature is 95 °F.

If you know you’ll enjoy a continuously warm soak at home, you don’t want to be tied to a tub or other source of hot water, or you want to give one of these devices to your most calloused loved one, MaxKare’s Foot Spa Massager (16 rollers) might be worth the investment. It provides consistent water heating and a halfway-decent foot massage, which the bucket you might also use to mop with likely does not.

MaxKare Foot Spa Massager (16 rollers)

For a relaxing at-home foot soak

If you’re sold on a foot spa, this powered bath provides consistent water heating, pleasant bubbles, and a halfway decent massage. It’s fairly noisy, though.

Buying Options

$42 from Walmart

I struggle with plantar fasciitis and was personally seeking a solid set of massage rollers that could offer intense pressure. This MaxKare foot spa is the only option I tried that offers the best of both worlds: a legitimate heater that keeps the water warm and a decent set of rollers to engage the muscles in your foot. (The MaxKare model with four rollers I tested offers the same heat settings but fewer rollers, and none of them are ideally situated.)

Although the rollers on the Kendal model also offered decent pressure on the muscly parts of the sole of the foot, each foot bath’s removable rollers can be attached in only one fixed spot; if your sore feet aren’t the exact right size for the rollers to hit that sweet spot, you’re out of luck.

If you can handle trading in the ethereal spa music of your local salon for a laughably loud hum (video), and you want a shallow basin perfectly shaped for feet, go for a full foot spa massager. For now, though, I’m holding on to my money and sticking with my cheap bucket.