Are Security Cameras Waterproof?

The short answer

Outdoor security cameras are weather-resistant with a published rating, not waterproof. No maker in our registry uses the word waterproof, and the one that comes closest to it — eufy’s IP67 on the eufyCam S330 — still publishes a rating rather than a promise.

The ratings we can point at, all from the makers’ own product pages: IP67 on the eufyCam S330, IP66 on the Tapo C120 and the Tapo D225 doorbell, IP65 on the Reolink Argus PT Ultra, the Reolink 2nd-Gen doorbell and the Wyze Cam v4, and no rating at all published for the Aqara G410.

Why the number on its own is not the answer

We could line those codes up and declare a winner, and most roundups do. Here is the published fact that stopped us doing that.

TP-Link’s own product page for the Kasa EP40M — an outdoor smart plug, rated IP64, with an operating range of -4 to 122°F — carries this footnote: “Avoid water streams. Do not fully immerge. Place at least 8 inches from the ground.” It also states that the plug “must plug into GFCI receptacles if used outdoor or in wet locations”.

Read that carefully, because it is the whole lesson of this page. A product sold for outdoor use, with a published ingress rating, whose maker still tells you: no jets of water, no immersion, and keep it off the ground. The rating describes a test. The footnote describes what you are actually permitted to do. When the two are both available, the footnote is the more useful document.

We report the codes the makers publish and we do not translate the digits into pressures, depths or durations. Those definitions belong to the international standard the code comes from, we have not read it, and paraphrasing a standard we have not seen is exactly the kind of confident-sounding filler this site exists not to publish.

The spec that actually kills cameras: temperature

Water gets the attention; cold does the damage. And the operating temperature range is published much less consistently than the IP code, which tells you something about how brands think about it.

Blink publishes -4°F to 113°F for the Outdoor 4, along with two AA lithium cells rated up to two years, 1080p, a 143° diagonal view and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. Ring publishes 5 to 120°F for its wired doorbell — note that floor, because 5°F is not a cold winter in much of the United States, it is an ordinary January morning in plenty of it. TP-Link publishes -4 to 122°F for the outdoor plug. For several cameras, no range is published at all.

Two practical consequences. If you live somewhere genuinely cold, the temperature floor is a harder constraint than the IP code and should be the first spec you check. And in cold weather a battery is a liability — a wired camera writing to a card is the build that keeps working through a hard winter, which is one of the reasons it wins our wired vs wireless comparison on reliability.

Every published rating we can cite, in one place

The pattern in that table is worth saying out loud: the brands that publish an IP code often do not publish a temperature range, and the brands that publish a range often do not publish an IP code. Almost nobody gives you both. That is not a conspiracy, but it does mean a buyer comparing two cameras on “weatherproofing” is usually comparing two different measurements.

The three cameras we would mount outside

These are the picks from our main camera ranking with the strongest published weather information — chosen on the ratings in the table above, not on testing we have not done.

Mounting beats rating, every time

Four things that will do more for your camera’s lifespan than the difference between IP65 and IP67:

Put it under an eave or soffit. Direct rain off the lens and off the seals, less glare at night, fewer spiders in the housing. Free.

Point the cable run downwards. Water follows cables. A drip loop below the entry point is a two-minute job that keeps water out of the one opening the rating assumes is sealed properly.

Keep it off the ground. TP-Link’s eight-inch instruction for its outdoor plug is about splash-back, and the same physics applies to a camera mounted low on a wall near a path.

Clean it gently, and never with a hose. A damp cloth on the lens twice a year. No streams of water, no immersion, nothing sprayed into a grille — the same three rules TP-Link publishes for a product it rates for outdoor use.

If the camera is going somewhere genuinely hostile — an unheated garage, a boat, a north-facing wall that ices over — read our garage camera picks for the cold-and-no-outlet case, and our no-subscription ranking if you would rather the camera that survives also cost nothing to run.