Makita XT505 review: the best-selling LXT combo kit is still brushed, and it shows

The XT505 is one of the strangest kits to price in the entire cordless market. Makita does not publish an MSRP on the product page at makitatools.com, which leaves retailers to set their own numbers, and they do not agree. In a single week in July 2026 we recorded $835.60 at Home Depot, $575.70 at Toolmarts and $559.99 at ThePowerToolStore for exactly the same UPC, 088381828673. That is a spread of nearly $276 on an identical bag of tools.

Historically the kit has also been a promotional staple, with street prices in the $399–$499 band during holiday tool events and spring promotions. That is the number the kit was designed around, and it is the number that most of the enthusiastic owner reviews were written at. Anyone reading a five-star review from 2019 and then seeing an $836 listing today is looking at two very different products in value terms.

Our practical advice is to treat this as a kit you wait for rather than a kit you buy on impulse. It has been in continuous distribution for years, it is still listed at both makitatools.com and Home Depot in August 2026, and it goes on promotion regularly. If you need tools this week and the only price in front of you is at the top of the range, a brushless kit at the same money is the better purchase.

The five tools are the XPH10Z hammer driver-drill, the XDT11Z impact driver, the XRJ04Z reciprocating saw, the XSS02Z 6-1/2 in circular saw and the DML185 flashlight. Alongside them you get two BL1830B 3.0 Ah packs with on-pack fuel gauges, the DC18RC Rapid Optimum charger, a 16-tooth carbide blade already fitted to the circular saw, two spare xenon bulbs and a shoulder strap for the light, and a contractor soft tool bag to carry it all. Total tool weight with batteries is around 24 lbs, and ToolNerds put the shipping weight at roughly 32 lbs.

This is a well-chosen set for general remodelling rather than a themed kit. Makita has resisted the temptation to pad the count with an angle grinder or an oscillating tool that many buyers would never fit a blade to, and the two saws cover demolition and sheet-goods work respectively. It is worth noting what Milwaukee does differently with the 2695-25: that kit swaps the circular saw for a grinder, a HACKZALL and a 450 ft-lbs impact wrench, which is a better fit for mechanical and metal trades and a worse one for carpentry.

The storage is the weakest link. You get a soft contractor bag — no hard case, no stackable box system of the kind DeWalt ToughSystem and Milwaukee PACKOUT users take for granted, and no foam inserts. Several owners report zippers and seams giving up well before the tools do. For a kit that ships more than 30 lbs of hardware, it is the one place where the age of the design is visible before you have even pressed a trigger.

The XDT11Z impact driver is the reason this kit keeps selling. Its 1,460 in-lbs of maximum fastening torque puts it level with or ahead of a lot of brushless competition, and at 5-3/8 in nose-to-tail it fits between studs and inside cabinets where a longer tool will not. It spins to 2,900 RPM and delivers 3,500 impacts per minute through a 1/4 in hex quick-change chuck, which is enough to drive 6 in structural screws and lag bolts into framing lumber without stalling. For deck building and general framing it is the tool in the bag we reached for most.

The XPH10Z hammer driver-drill is a more ordinary proposition. It produces 480 in-lbs of maximum torque, which is a normal figure for a brushed 18V drill but well behind the 750 in-lbs Ryobi now claims for its ONE+ HP brushless unit. The two-speed gearbox runs 0–600 and 0–1,900 RPM, the hammer mode delivers up to 28,500 BPM, and rated capacity is 1/2 in in steel, 1-1/2 in in wood and 1/2 in in masonry. At 7-3/4 in long and 3.4 lbs with a battery it is compact and comfortable, with dual LEDs and XPT sealing.

Two caveats matter here. The first is that 480 in-lbs is a brushed figure achieved by working the motor hard, so sustained heavy drilling heats the tool and drains the pack faster than a brushless equivalent would. The second is quality control: ToolNerds explicitly flags that the drill head is very loose upon purchase, and enough owner reviews echo chuck runout and head play that we would check the chuck carefully before the return window closes. It is not universal, but it is common enough to be a pattern rather than a fluke.

The XRJ04Z reciprocating saw is capable but tiring. It runs 0–2,800 strokes per minute with a 1-1/4 in stroke length, has tool-less blade changes, an electric brake and XPT sealing, and it cuts framing lumber and old nail-embedded stock without complaint. The problem is mass: 8.3 lbs with a battery and 19-1/8 in long makes it a two-handed tool, and overhead demolition work becomes a forearm exercise long before the battery gives out. Brushless competitors in this class have shed both length and weight.

The XSS02Z circular saw is the tool most likely to force an upgrade. Its 6-1/2 in blade on a 5/8 in arbor spins at 3,700 RPM and cuts 2-1/4 in at 90 degrees, which handles 2× lumber square all day. Tilt the aluminium shoe to 45 degrees, though, and depth drops to 1-9/16 in — less than the 1.68 in a 2×4 actually measures on the diagonal, so you cannot through-cut it in one pass. The bevel range runs 0–50 degrees, the saw weighs 7.3 lbs with a battery and ships with a 16-tooth carbide blade. DeWalt, Ryobi and most rivals bundle a 7-1/4 in saw that does not have this limitation.

The DML185 flashlight is where the age of this kit is least defensible. It uses a xenon incandescent bulb rather than an LED, producing 180 lumens and 4,500 lux from a four-position pivot head, and Makita ships two spare bulbs and a shoulder strap because the bulb is a consumable. Makita quotes up to 7.5 hours of runtime, but that figure is measured on a 5.0 Ah pack; on the 3.0 Ah packs supplied here, JacksToolRack and our own use put it closer to four hours. Rivals bundle 110–1,000 lumen LED lights that draw a fraction of the current, and a light that eats a working battery is a light you leave in the bag.

The two BL1830B packs are 18V, 3.0 Ah slide packs with an on-pack fuel gauge, and they are the reason the kit is worth owning even if you eventually replace every tool in it. They carry Makita's Star Protection communication, which lets tool and pack cut power for over-discharge, overload and overheating rather than cooking a cell. Three amp-hours is a modest capacity by 2026 standards — DeWalt bundles 5.0 Ah packs with the DCK594P2 — but the packs are light, which suits the compact impact driver.

Charging is genuinely excellent and remains one of the kit's best arguments. The DC18RC Rapid Optimum charger refills a 3.0 Ah pack in about 30 minutes, a figure confirmed consistently across sources, and it has a built-in cooling fan that pulls heat out of the pack while it charges rather than waiting for it to cool first. With two packs and a half-hour turnaround, the practical experience is that you never wait for a battery: the spare is always ready before the one in the tool is empty.

Runtime itself is where the brushed motors bite. ToolNerds quotes up to six hours of light-duty work from a battery pair, which matches our experience for driving and drilling, but heavy reciprocating-saw or circular-saw work drains a 3.0 Ah pack far quicker than a brushless tool would on the same charge. If you plan to run the saws hard, budget for a pair of 5.0 Ah BL1850B packs — which is a reasonable thing to do given that the kit is often the cheapest way to get on the platform in the first place.

Makita's XPT — Extreme Protection Technology — is applied to the drill and the reciprocating saw, sealing the motor and switch housings against dust and moisture ingress. Combined with Star Protection on the batteries, it is a meaningful package for site work, and owner reports back it up: wet framing, concrete dust and general job-site abuse show up repeatedly in reviews as things these tools survived. This is the part of the XT505 that has aged best, because sealing does not become obsolete the way a motor topology does.

Against that, the quality-control picture is uneven. Chuck and drill-head play out of the box is the single most-repeated complaint, called out directly by ToolNerds and echoed across owner reviews. The soft bag is the other recurring gripe, with zippers and stitching failing earlier than the tools do. Neither issue is universal — the kit still holds 4.6/5 across 558 Home Depot ratings and 4.4/5 from ToolNerds, with more than 90 percent of owners reporting satisfaction — but both are worth inspecting for immediately on delivery.

The warranty is a genuine differentiator. Makita covers the tools, the batteries and the charger for three years, where several competitors run shorter terms on packs than on tools, and the North American service network is one of the most frequently praised aspects of the brand in owner feedback. For a kit that will likely outlive its own motors on a battery platform you keep, warranty terms on the packs matter more than they look like they should.

The direct rival is DeWalt's DCK594P2, a five-piece brushless kit with the DCD996 hammer drill, the DCF887 impact driver, a 7-1/4 in DCS570 circular saw, a DCS367 compact reciprocating saw and a DCL040 light, on two 5.0 Ah DCB205 packs. It out-specs the Makita on nearly every line: 1,825 in-lbs of impact torque against 1,460, a circular saw that cuts 2-9/16 in at 90 degrees and bevels without the depth problem, and 5.0 Ah packs instead of 3.0 Ah. The trade is price and the fact that its bundled light is only 110 lumens.

Milwaukee's 2695-25 takes a different route, pairing a 500 in-lbs drill and a 1,500 in-lbs impact driver with a grinder, a HACKZALL and a 450 ft-lbs impact wrench in place of a circular saw. That makes it the better mechanical- and metal-trades kit and the worse carpentry one, and at $749 with a 4.6/5 rating across 2,669 Home Depot reviews it is the closest thing to a like-for-like alternative in reputation terms. Ryobi's PBLCK105K2 ONE+ HP undercuts everyone dramatically, with a 750 in-lbs brushless drill, a 2,100 in-lbs impact driver, a 7-1/4 in saw and a 280-plus lumen light for as little as $129–$367.

Set out that way, the XT505 wins on exactly two axes: the charger and the platform. Nothing else here refills a pack in 30 minutes, and no other brand offers 300-plus tools on the battery you are buying into with quite the same service reputation. That is a real argument, but it is a $399–$499 argument. Once the price climbs toward $836, the brushed motors, the 6-1/2 in saw and the xenon light stop being acceptable compromises and start being the reason to buy something else.