The Best Waterproof Motorcycle Gear

The Klim Carlsbad, on published specs. The GORE-TEX is laminated into the outer shell as a Performance Shell rather than hung behind it as a liner, so there is no sacrificial outer fabric to saturate in front of the membrane in hour three of a wet ride. Klim certifies the garment to CE AA under EN 17092-3 and includes Rogue CE Level 2 armor at the shoulders, elbows and back. The honest limitations: Klim lists no thermal liner, so cold mornings depend on what you layer underneath, it is the most expensive jacket we rank, and Klim prints 'CE Level 2' for the armor without the EN 1621 clause.

It means the waterproof membrane is bonded to the outer fabric rather than hanging behind it. With a drop-liner — by far the most common construction at every price — the outer shell soaks up water in front of the membrane. You stay dry, but you are wearing a heavy, cold, wet jacket, and it takes hours to dry out. With a laminate there is no separate outer layer to wet out. It is the single construction detail that most changes how a jacket feels in hour three of rain, and it is almost never the headline spec on a listing.

Not yet, and we would rather say so than guess. Both boots in our registry — the Alpinestars SMX-6 V3 and the SMX-1 R V2 — state in their own specifications that the standard version is not waterproof. Alpinestars sells Drystar and GORE-TEX variants of both, and those are very likely the right answer, but we have not read their spec pages and we do not rank products from their names. In the meantime, the mechanical tip that matters more than the boot: wear the pant outside the boot, not tucked in, because water runs down your legs and into the top.

If you only ride in rain occasionally and you are happy stopping to pull a suit on, a rain suit is a perfectly rational answer and a much cheaper one. Two caveats. A rain suit is not an abrasion garment — almost none publishes an EN 17092 class — so it is a layer over your protective gear rather than a substitute for it. And it does nothing for your hands, which is the part of you that gets wet and cold first and the part where being cold and wet actually degrades your riding.

Gloves, and it is not close. Hands are the most exposed part of a rider, they get cold and wet before anything else, and cold wet hands blunt your inputs on the levers in a way a cold torso does not. A certified waterproof glove is also the cheapest item on this page by a wide margin. The order after that is jacket, then pant, then boots — the pant being the piece most riders skip and the one that matters most on a long cold ride, because your thighs shed heat faster than your torso.

On the published specs, what the GORE-TEX premium reliably buys is the construction rather than the membrane chemistry — in particular the bonded glove construction Gore calls GORE GRIP, which it describes as eliminating 'friction and movement between layers'. That is a real, feelable difference on a wet handlebar. Gore also attaches its own 'guaranteed to keep you dry' promise, which is a warranty position rather than a test number. Alpinestars publishes actual figures for Drystar on some products — a 5,000 mm water column and 5,000 g/m² breathability on one glove we list — which GORE-TEX does not for individual items. Both are real membranes; the money is in how they are built in.

No, and that is a structural fact rather than a quality one: a waterproof membrane is a layer air cannot pass through, so a genuinely waterproof garment cannot be a genuinely vented one. The jackets here manage it by adding vents that open in front of the membrane, which helps but does not make them mesh. Our summer gloves and summer riding gear pages cover the opposite build. Most riders in a wet climate end up with two sets, which is less extravagant than it sounds once you have ridden home soaked once.

No — armor and waterproofing are separate standards and separate decisions. EN 1621 covers the impact protectors, EN 17092 covers the garment's abrasion class, and nothing about a membrane changes either. What does change in the rain is that you are more likely to be wearing the garment zipped up with the vents closed, so a jacket with its back protector included rather than as an empty pocket is worth more here. Our CE armor guide explains the levels, and two of the four garments on this page include a back protector while the others leave the pocket for you to fill.