The Best Power Strips With USB Ports

The outlet count is what most people actually run out of. Twelve is more than a desk usually needs, which is the point — you'll grow into it. Belkin mixes tight spacing along the bar with wider gaps at the ends, so a laptop brick or a monitor transformer doesn't blank out the socket beside it. Owners who swap in this strip keep coming back to that layout. If you've ever left an outlet empty because a plug was too fat, you know why it matters.

The cord matters more than it sounds like it should. A flat plug lets a desk, dresser or couch sit flush to the wall instead of bowing out an inch. Six feet reaches across most rooms without a second extension cord. And Belkin includes a mount, so you can screw the strip to the underside of a desk and keep it off the floor, away from the vacuum and the dog.

The protection here clears the bar for a computer. Belkin rates the strip at 3,480 joules, comfortably past the 2,000 that makes sense for a home office running a monitor, a printer and a backup drive. It's UL certified, which isn't a formality: the NFPA estimates that roughly 49,000 home fires a year in the US involve extension cords, power strips and similar accessories. A master switch kills everything at once.

The USB ports are a convenience, not a replacement for your laptop charger. One USB-C and two USB-A cover the daily stuff — the phone on the desk, earbuds, an e-reader, a game controller. That's two or three wall bricks you don't have to plug in, which leaves the AC outlets free for the things that genuinely need them.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Belkin doesn't publish a wattage for the USB-C port, and nothing in the listing points to Power Delivery. Plan on phone-and-tablet speed. If you were hoping to leave the laptop charger in a drawer, this isn't the strip that gets you there.

It's also a big bar, close to a foot long and heavier than it looks. Under a desk or behind a TV, that's fine. On a nightstand it's absurd. And like every surge protector, its joules burn down with each hit, and you won't get a clear signal when they're gone.

Eight feet of cord is the quiet reason to buy this one. Most strips give you six, and those last two feet decide whether you reach the outlet behind the entertainment center or give up and move furniture. The cord is braided and flat, so it lies down behind a couch instead of kinking, and the plug sits flush to the wall.

The surge rating is the highest among our picks, and the certifications behind it are the right ones. Tripp Lite lists both UL 1363 and UL 1449, and the fourth edition of 1449 requires a thermal cutoff and caps residential clamping at 500 volts. The 4,200-joule rating leaves room for a home office full of gear. There's a resettable 15-amp breaker built into the switch, plus LEDs that confirm the outlet is grounded and the protection is still live.

Six of the eleven outlets face sideways, which sounds minor until you own three wall warts. Bulky transformers hang off the edge instead of covering the socket next door, so you get eleven usable outlets rather than eight. Keyhole slots on the bottom let you mount it under a desk or on a wall, which keeps the whole tangle off the carpet.

EMI and RFI filtering is the other reason IT folks stick with this line. Line noise from a motor, a dimmer switch or a cheap LED driver shows up as hum in speakers and occasionally as flaky behavior on older gear. It won't fix a bad circuit. But it's sensible insurance between your wall and a mixer, a router or a small home server.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The USB is the weak spot. One USB-C and one USB-A share four amps between them, so you're looking at phone speed, and it drops further when both ports are busy. There's no Power Delivery here, so your laptop still needs its own charger.

Owner feedback on this exact model is thin, so our read leans on the spec sheet and Tripp Lite's long track record with surge gear. It's also 13 inches long, which is a lot of strip for a small desk.

Eaton covers the TLP118DBUC with a lifetime limited manufacturer's warranty.

A three-sided block beats a long bar in most of the places you'll actually put one. The eight outlets face three directions with about 1.78 inches between them, wider than the 1.5 inches you usually get. Plugs stop fighting for space. Behind a nightstand or a couch, you're setting down something the size of a sandwich instead of threading a foot-long bar into the gap.

Four USB ports, two of them USB-C, is more USB than anything else here. In a dorm room or a guest room, that's the whole ballgame — four phones charging while the lamp, the fan and a laptop brick occupy the AC outlets. Nobody has to go hunting for a wall charger at midnight.

The small details are thought through. The plug is flat and right-angled, the cord is six feet, reusable ties keep the slack tidy, and two keyholes on the back let you mount it under a desk or inside a media cabinet. It's ETL listed, which is a real third-party safety listing rather than a claim the brand made up.

Owners tend to buy a second one. The recurring theme in feedback is people working through the house replacing older strips room by room, which is about the strongest signal you can get on a budget strip. It's also the smallest and lightest of our surge-protected picks, so it travels well to a hotel or a rental.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The USB ports are slow. USB-A runs at 5 volts and 2.4 amps, USB-C at 5 volts and 3 amps — about 15 watts, with no Power Delivery. That's fine for a phone overnight and hopeless for a laptop, which will slowly drain while it's plugged in.

POWRUI doesn't publish a joule rating anywhere in the listing, and that's the number we most wanted to see. ETL listing covers construction and overload behavior, but without joules you can't tell how big a spike this strip will absorb. Owners also flag the indicator light as bright — no problem in an office, annoying in a bedroom.

POWRUI backs the strip with a 12-month warranty and a 30-day return window.

This one replaces chargers instead of just adding outlets. A single USB-C port pushes up to 140 watts, which is genuine laptop territory — Anker's own figure has it filling a 16-inch MacBook Pro in about an hour and a quarter. With two AC outlets, two USB-C and two USB-A, a laptop, a tablet, a phone and a couple of plugs all run off one wall socket. The wall brick stays home.

The reason it's this thin is gallium nitride. GaN semiconductors switch ten to twenty times faster than silicon, which lets a charger hit the same wattage in a package 40 to 60 percent smaller while running cooler. This one is roughly three-quarters of an inch thick and weighs about a pound, with a pop-up AC outlet that folds flat when you're not using it.

It's built for travel, and that's where it earns its keep. Hotel rooms hand you one usable outlet next to the bed. This turns it into six places to plug in, out of a bag, with a detachable cord you can leave behind when you don't need the extra reach. A small display shows what each port is drawing, which is oddly useful when you're wondering why the laptop is charging slowly.

Anker's ActiveShield 2.0 monitors temperature continuously, and the company adds a connected-equipment guarantee that runs for the product's full service life. That isn't surge protection in the joule sense. But it's a meaningful commitment for something you'll leave charging a laptop unattended on a hotel desk overnight.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Two AC outlets. That's the whole story, and it's why this can't be your desk strip. It's a charger that happens to have outlets, not a power strip that happens to charge.

Anker doesn't publish a joule rating, so don't lean on it to protect a TV or a desktop from a spike. And some owners report a faint electrical hiss under heavy load, though plenty of others describe theirs as silent.

It also costs several times what the budget pick does. That's easy to justify if it replaces two laptop chargers in your bag, and hard to justify if it just sits on a desk.

Anker covers the Prime 6-in-1 with a 24-month warranty.