Tom's Guide Verdict
The Oura Ring 5 is the smallest smart ring in the world, and probably the best for most people. It no longer looks like a fitness tracker, and it proves good things really do come in small packages, with more powerful LED’s for more accurate tracking, and a longer battery life than its predecessor, the Oura Ring 4. The monthly subscription might still put some people off, but this ring is the screenless tracker to beat.
Pros
- +
40% smaller than Oura Ring 4
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Available in many sizes and finishes
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Longer battery life than Oura Ring 4 (up to 9 days)
- +
Upgraded sensors for more accurate readings
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Upgraded scratch-resistance
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Completely waterproof
Cons
- -
You’ll still need to pay a monthly subscription
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The Oura Ring 5 just changed the smart ring game. Oura’s flagship ring has undergone a physical transformation, with the brand completely reengineering its smart ring to make it 40% smaller and even lighter than before. Forget the chunky rings of the past; the Oura Ring 5 looks like jewelry for discreet, comfortable fitness tracking.
Proving that good things really do come in small packages, the new ring has about a day longer battery life than its predecessor and four times more powerful LEDs, repositioned for better accuracy.
But should you be tempted to upgrade your ring if you already own an Oura Ring 4? And how does it compare to some of the best smart rings on the market? Read my full Oura Ring 5 review to find out more.
Oura Ring 5: Cheat sheet
- What is the Oura Ring 5? The Oura Ring 5 is a smart ring that has health tracking sensors within. As well as doing the basics, like counting your steps and reading your heart rate, the Oura Ring 5 can track your sleep, tell you when you ovulate, look at your overall stress levels throughout the day, and give you actionable insights based on your body’s resilience.
- When is the Oura Ring 5 release date? The Oura Ring 5 was released on May 28, 2026 and is available to buy now.
- Who is the Oura Ring 5 for? The Oura Ring 5 is for anyone who wants to be more informed about their health and wellness, without wearing a smartwatch or activity band on their wrist.
- What is the difference between the Oura Ring 4 and the Oura Ring 5? The main differences between the two smart rings are in the design. The Oura Ring 5 is 40% smaller than the Oura Ring 4, as well as being lighter. The Ring 5 has more powerful sensors for more accurate measurements and longer battery life. The Oura Ring 5 is also fully waterproof up to 100m, whereas the Oura Ring 4 is water resistant.
- How much does the Oura Ring 5 cost? The Oura Ring 5 starts at $399/£399 for the ‘base finishes’, which are Silver and Black. The premium finishes are — Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose, and cost $499/£499.
- Is there a subscription fee for the Oura app? Yes, the Oura membership costs $5.99 / £5.99 per month or $72 / £72 per year.
- Is there a size difference between the Oura Ring 4 and the Oura Ring 5? Yes, slightly. Oura recommends using the Oura Ring 5 sizing kit to re-test your size with the smaller ring.
- Does Oura offer any trade-in deals? At the time of writing, no. You can send your old Oura ring back to Oura to recycle, but you do not get any money or credit for trading your old ring in.
Oura Ring 5: Specs
| Header Cell - Column 0 | Oura Ring 5 | Oura Ring 4 |
|---|---|---|
Starting price | $399 | $349 |
Sizes | 6-13 | 4-15 |
Colors | Gold, Deep Rose, Brushed Silver, Stealth, Black, Silver | Gold, Rose Gold, Silver, Brushed Titanium, Black, Stealth |
Sensors | PPG (heart rate + SpO2), skin temperature, accelerometer | PPG (heart rate + SpO2), skin temperature, accelerometer |
Weight | From 2 grams (depending on ring size) | 3.3-5.2 grams |
Thickness | 2.28mm | ~ 2.88mm |
Battery life | Up to 9 days | Up to 8 days |
Subscription | $5.99/month | $5.99/month |
Oura Ring 5 review: Design
The Oura Ring 5 is noticeably smaller and lighter than its predecessor, the Oura Ring 4. Oura says they completely redesigned the ring to achieve the dramatic shrinkage, re-engineering the internal architecture to ensure it was smaller but just as powerful.
Oura hasn't followed the tech trend of making slight tweaks to launch a new product — it has completely rewritten the blueprint for what invisible tech can do.
The width of the ring has dropped to 6.09mm from 7.9mm, and the thickness is now 2.28mm, with the ring weighing 2 grams. The exact weight and size of the Oura Ring 5 will depend on the size you’re wearing. The Oura Ring 5 comes in sizes 6-13.
Speaking of which, Oura recommends you use a new sizing kit for the Oura Ring 5, even if you’ve got an Oura Ring 4 on your finger. I found my size hadn’t changed — I’m wearing an Oura Ring size 7 in both rings, and the fit is similar, if not a tiny bit smaller on the newer ring. My colleague Sam, on the other hand, had to go up a size in the Oura Ring 5, so it’s worth checking.
The Oura Ring 5 comes in six different colors, and they’ve changed slightly from the Oura Ring 4. The cheapest options, Silver and Black, cost $399/£399. The more premium options include Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose, and cost $499/£499. Compared to the Oura Ring 4, the Gold color is a brighter gold to better match jewelry. Deep Gold replaces the Rose Gold colorway on the Oura Ring 4. In person, it’s a more coppery gold.
All of the Oura Ring 5 colors are made from a thicker, more scratch-resistant coating, aiming to minimize the damage from daily wear and holding weights in the gym. I've been wearing my gold Oura Ring 5 for a month, and so far, not a scratch in sight.
The Oura Ring 4 will still be available in Gold, Stealth, and Silver, and ceramic in Cloud and Midnight in sizes 4-15 for $349. At the time of writing, Oura doesn’t have a trade-in program, so if you have recently bought an Oura Ring 4, you won’t get any money back for upgrading to an Oura Ring 5.
Oura Ring 5 review: Oura app
A screenless tracker is only as good as its app, and Oura’s app makes understanding your health data a dream. When you open the app, there are three tabs: Today, Vitals, and My Health. Today shows you a breakdown of changing information based on what might be relevant to you at a given point in the day. At the top of the page, there are shortcut tiles that allow you to see key information at a glance.
The Vitals tab has expanding and collapsing cards covering all your daily metrics, including your readiness score, sleep score, activity progress, menstrual cycle status, and daytime stress chart.
The Oura app tells me my sleep health has declined over the past 90 days, which is feedback I’ll pass on to my two-year-old, who has decided it’s his nightly mission to escape from his crib.
My Health is a zoomed-out picture of your overall wellness, looking at long-term insights like stress resilience, heart health, sleep chronotype, and cardiovascular age. My app tells me my sleep health has declined over the past 90 days, which is feedback I’ll pass on to my two-year-old, who has decided it’s his nightly mission to escape from his crib.
There are a few new features in the Oura Ring app added via a software update. Firstly, you’ll now be able to use your ring for live activity tracking. When starting a live activity from your Oura app, you’ll be able to see your live data from a lock screen widget on your phone. This can track your pace and distance live during workouts like runs, cycles, and strength training sessions. I've been testing the Live Activity Tracking alongside Garmin and have been impressed.
Oura has also added two new Women’s Health features: Menopause Insights and Hormonal Birth Control. Menopause Insights asks you structured questions about how well you’re sleeping, your mood, cognition, and daily functioning, helping Oura ring wearers to really understand how strongly they feel perimenopause is affecting their daily lives.
The Hormonal Birth Control Feature is an update to the ring’s current Cycle Insights tool, and will support pills, patches, IUDs, implants, and other hormonal methods. It will be able to help women see at a glance how their biometrics shift across hormone and hormone-free days.
There’s also a new Locate feature on the app. This allows you to connect multiple devices to the app, as well as an Oura Charging Case, allowing you to keep track of your devices in one place. Locate is available for Oura Ring Gen3 and all future generations.
Oura Ring 5 review: Battery life
Oura says they’ve been working on the new device for over two years, and they didn’t want the smaller size to affect battery life. They’ve done the opposite, improving the battery life on the newer ring to 6-9 days per charge, compared to 5-8 with the Oura Ring 4. During my month of testing, I’ve found this to be accurate — I’ve had to charge my ring around once a week.
From what I've experienced, the batteries in these rings do seem to deteriorate over time, so I’ll be paying close attention. But for now, I’m very content not to have to worry about charging the Oura Ring 5 for several days at a time.
You still charge the ring on the same charging dock, but if you have an Oura Ring 4, the charger won’t work with the Oura Ring 5.
Launching alongside the Oura Ring 5 is the new Oura Ring 5 charging case, which costs $99/£99. It holds up to five ring charges and supports wireless charging. There’s an action button that makes it easier to see the charging status, and you can now add the charging case to Oura’s new Locate feature.
Oura ring 5 review: Sleep
Frances Daniels is a Senior Staff Writer at Tom's Guide. She tests a wide range of sleep tech and products, from best mattresses of the year to the best sleep headphones.
We crowned the Oura Ring 4 as the best sleep tracker of the year, so I was eager to get my hands on its successor. After using the Oura Ring 5 every night (and day) for four weeks, here are my thoughts on its sleep-tracking performance.
First, the Oura Ring is the most comfortable sleep-tracking wearable I've ever worn to bed. Its custom-made, pinch-free fit is perfect if you find it difficult to fall asleep while wearing chunky armbands or watches to bed.
I was worried that the ring might slip off during the night (it's happened to me before while wearing the sleep-tracking Fitnexa Somnipods 3 earbuds) but I always wake up to find it still nestled comfortably on my index finger.
However, the fit isn't important if its sleep tracking is subpar — but I'm happy to report that the Oura Ring 5's performance is anything but. Like most sleep trackers, the Oura Ring 5 supplies you with sleep scores, breakdown of your sleep stages and duration, bedtime reminders, and resting heart rate and blood oxygen measurements.
However, no two sleep tracker is alike, so here's a look at how well the Our Ring 5 tackles each core sleep metric compared to other leading sleep trackers.
Sleep score
Let's start with the most digestible, at-a-glance sleep metric that the Oura Ring 5 offers: your sleep score. Condensing all your sleep data into a rating between one and 100, your sleep score is the first thing you see when you tap the Sleep tab on the Oura app's homepage.
The score is split into four categories: Optimal (85–100), Good (70–84), Fair (60–69), and Pay Attention (0–59).
I've been using an Apple Watch Ultra as my go-to sleep tracker for the past couple of months, and I consistently earn a High (81-95) sleep score on less than 7 hours of sleep. With that in mind, I thought that earning Oura's Optimal sleep score would be a piece of cake.
However, from the first week of using the Oura Ring 5, I realized that this feat would be a lot tougher to achieve than I thought. The Oura Ring is quite a strict scorer compared to the Apple Watch. For example, on June 25th, I wore both the Apple Watch and Oura Ring to bed (while ensuring that the Oura and Health apps weren't synced up) to make it easier to compare their data.
The Apple Watch awarded me a High score of 87 on 6 hours and 22 minutes of sleep. The Oura Ring 5, on the other hand, awarded me a Good score of 70 on 6 hours and 13 minutes of sleep. This difference is due to the Oura Ring using more key sleep metrics than Apple to aggregate a sleep score.
While the Apple Watch generated a sleep score from three points (interruption, duration, and bedtime), the Oura Ring's sleep score is a combination of seven "Contributors."
This is made up of total amount of sleep, efficiency (how much time you spent asleep compared to the time spent in bed awake), restfulness (how many times you moved around or woke up during the night), REM sleep, deep sleep, sleep onset latency (how much time it takes you to fall asleep), and timing of your sleep.
This makes the Oura Ring a much stricter critic, which is pretty much what I need as it's clear that I don't get enough sleep.
You can see your average sleep scores by going to Trends in the main menu and selecting Sleep Score. For instance, I currently have an average score of 73 over the week and 71 over the last month.
Sleep duration and stages
The Oura Ring 5's sleep duration and sleep stages breakdown is presented as both a horizontal bar chart in the Contributors section and as a hypnogram in the Details section.
In the Contributors section, the hours and minutes I spent asleep is displayed under a Total Sleep subheading. REM Sleep and Deep Sleep time is also included under the Contributors section, and the graph displays what percentage of your total sleep time is spent in each sleep stage.
This also includes time you spent asleep during the day, which I found out when it recorded an accidental nap I took the day after a red-eye flight. You can also see how many minutes it took you to fall asleep under Latency.
The great thing about the Contributors section is that each contributor has an information box that tells you why each contributor is important for your sleep hygiene and what duration or percentage is optimal.
For instance, I recently spent 1 hour and 16 minutes in REM sleep — the info box tells me, however, that the optimal amount for healthy adults starts at 1 hours and 30 minutes.
The Details section is a more visual breakdown of your sleep stages and duration, using different colors to represent each sleep stage in a detailed graph. It also includes the amount of Light sleep I'm clocking up, the time I fell asleep and the time I woke up, and what times throughout the night I moved around or had a nighttime awakening.
One thing I also want to briefly touch on is the Sleep Debt section; sleep debt is a deficit between the amount of sleep you need and how much you actually get. My debt is currently labelled High (I owe more than 6 hours, apparently) and the section explains how you can repay it.
Overall, the Oura app presents a much more detailed breakdown of my sleep than other sleep trackers, displaying a clear, panoramic view of my sleep architecture in an intuitive app.
Bedtime reminders
Next up is bedtime reminders, which are basically notifications reminding you that bedtime is approaching so it's time to commence your nighttime routine.
When I used the Apple Watch as my primary sleep tracker, I could manually set when I'd like to receive my bedtime reminder. I set it at around 10.30 p.m. and 11 p.m., giving me around 1 hour to 30 minutes to get ready for bed.
However, with the Oura Ring, I didn't get an option to set a reminder time. Instead, I got frequent reminders at around 9 p.m. during my first week of use, which horrified me as the last time I went to bed as early as 9 .p.m I was a child.
However, I started to notice that these reminders were gradually alerting me later and later. That's because the Oura Ring's Bedtime Guidance (what Oura refers to bedtime reminders as) are automatically determined using my sleep data for a more personalized recommendation.
Basically, the more you wear your Oura Ring, the more it knows about what bedtimes work for you.
Heart rate and breathing
Tracking your heart rate during sleep is important as it can tell you how much your body is working overnight to recover. Your resting heart rate (RHR) is measured in beats per minute (bpm); the lower your resting heart rate, the stronger the recovery.
As for heart rate variability (HRV), the measurement in milliseconds (ms) should be higher. Curiously, the Oura app doesn't tell you how many bpm or ms is the optimal or even typical amount, which is likely because they vary significantly from individual to individual.
However, for the blood oxygen saturation level (SpO2), the Oura Ring does tell me what the typical range is and what category (Steady, Mostly steady, Varied, or Highly varied) my nighttime breathing falls into.
Luckily, my average SpO2 over the last week is 96% (Oura says that the typical range is 95%-100%). However, temporary things such as allergies or a stuffy nose can lower your levels, so Oura recommends that it's best to "focus on your long-term trends rather than a single night". As for my nighttime breathing, Oura describes it as "Steady".
Oura Ring 5 vs Oura Ring 4: Should you upgrade?
If you’re already one of the millions of people with an Oura Ring on your finger, does it make sense to upgrade to the Oura Ring 5?
Firstly, it’s worth noting that from a software perspective, everything mentioned above is available to you, as Oura has rolled the updates out to previous rings.
After a month of testing, however, I do really love how small the ring looks on my finger. It completely disappears, and compared to the chunky ring I’ve worn for years, I don’t think anyone would even notice the smart ring on my finger. If I’d just bought an Oura Ring 4, I’m not sure it would be enough to make me splurge for the new ring, but if I were wearing an Oura Ring 3 or earlier, I’d definitely consider the upgrade.
Oura says the Oura Ring 5 is more accurate than the Oura Ring 4, thanks to more powerful LEDs, but I haven’t noticed any differences in the tracking, and it would be impossible to say which is more accurate for some metrics without lab tests. I do find the ring more comfortable to wear, and while I’m never diving down to 100m, as a swimmer, I do appreciate the fact that the Oura Ring 5 is fully waterproof, rather than just water-resistant.
Oura Ring 5 review: Should you buy?
After wearing the ring for a month, I’m confident that this is the best Oura Ring to date. The Oura Ring 5 has set new standards for the world of smart rings, and I think it’ll be a race between Samsung, Ultrahuman, and Luna to create smaller, thinner rings to compete.
Sure, there are cheaper and subscription-free smart rings on the market, but with Oura you are buying into a platform that just keeps on getting better. The Live Activity tracking is excellent, and the Oura experience is second to none. If you’re looking for a fitness tracker that allows you to gain deeper insights into your overall health without looking like you’re wearing a tracker, the Oura Ring 5 is the way to go.
After a month of continuous testing, I’m genuinely struggling to find a flaw or a missing feature in the Oura Ring 5. By chopping 40% of the bulk while actually extending the battery life, Oura hasn't followed the tech trend of making slight tweaks to launch a new product — it has completely rewritten the blueprint for what invisible tech can do. That said, Oura, if you're reading, we need a trade-in service ASAP, please.
