Walk around Home Depot’s battery aisle, and three packs share one peg. All three read 18V. Two carry a 5Ah stamp. You’d expect the third to match. It doesn’t even try. Ryobi never put a 5Ah pack on US shelves, and that missing number is your first hint that the figure on the front sells the battery more than it measures it.

Check the receipts and the gap gets loud: about $60 for the Ryobi, roughly $110 for the DeWalt, close to $170 for the Milwaukee. I’ve broken down how the big three price their packs before, and this trio is the sharpest example I’ve found. Same voltage, same shelf, nearly triple the cost end to end.

The sticker number is the one spec you can’t compare

Why “5Ah” and “20V MAX” don’t mean what the aisle implies

Start with the voltage, because two of these labels are playing games. Milwaukee calls its system M18. Ryobi keeps it plain with 18V ONE+. DeWalt is the one bending the truth: it prints 20V MAX on the pack, then buries “18V nominal” in the spec sheet. Nominal is the number that counts. All three run at the same 18 volts under load. That 20V figure is a no-load reading DeWalt is allowed to advertise, nothing more.

Amp-hours measure how much charge a pack stores, not how hard it hits. A 5Ah runs longer than a 2Ah between charges. That’s all the number promises. It says nothing about how much current the pack can dump when a saw stalls mid-cut, and that answer lives in the cells and their wiring, not on the label. Two 5Ah packs from different brands can deliver very different output while showing the identical number on the sticker. For a shortcut through the noise, I sort every pack I buy by price per amp-hour instead of the headline figure, and I’ve laid out which Ryobi packs survive that math.

What you’re actually paying for with Milwaukee

Cells, construction, and a warranty that rarely goes on sale

Milwaukee’s M18 5Ah runs about $169 a pack at regular price. DeWalt’s 5Ah lands near $110 once you split the common two-pack. That’s a wide gap for two batteries wearing the same rating, and it isn’t random.

Some of the premium is the pack build. Milwaukee’s RedLithium construction and REDLINK electronics are tuned for heat and heavy continuous draw, the kind a plumber or electrician loads onto a pack all day. Some of it is the warranty and the service network, both aimed at the pro buyer. And some of it is plain positioning. Milwaukee sits at Home Depot as the tradesman’s brand, so it rarely runs the two-pack blowouts DeWalt and Ryobi cycle through most months.

You pay closer to sticker because the discounts don’t come as often.

This 5Ah is no exotic top-tier cell, either. At this capacity, most of what separates it from the DeWalt is the badge, the coverage, and the service, not the chemistry. What sits inside a pack drives its price more than the label does, a lesson I learned the hard way with cheap off-brand batteries.

Where Ryobi’s missing 5Ah stops mattering

A 4.0Ah pack at about $15 an amp-hour covers most home jobs

The US ONE+ lineup jumps straight from 4.0Ah to 6.0Ah, no 5 in the middle. The closest match on the peg is the 4.0Ah, about $60 a pack in a two-pack. Do the division and that’s about $15 an amp-hour. Milwaukee’s 5Ah sits near $34 an amp-hour. You’re paying more than double per unit of stored energy for the M18.

The honest caveat: a 4.0Ah Ryobi holds about 72 watt-hours against 90 for the 5Ah rivals, so it runs shorter between swaps. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I own more than 20 ONE+ tools, and the packs on my shelf live in a drill, an impact driver, a sander, and an inflator. None of those holds a motor under enough load to feel starved by a 4.0Ah pack. When I want more output for a brushless tool, Ryobi’s teal 4.0Ah HP at $129 still undercuts a single Milwaukee 5Ah and hands over roughly 30% more current than the green version.

For a homeowner, the battery is the real line item anyway, not the bare tool, which is why the pack you standardize on shapes the whole system.

Battery Type(s)

Lithium-Ion

What’s Included

2 Batteries

Buy the platform in your garage, not the number on the pack

The 5Ah label is a floor, not a promise. It tells you capacity and nothing about output, price, or how the pack holds up on a hot day three hours into a job. Milwaukee charges the most because it’s selling to the person who needs that headroom and the service behind it. DeWalt splits the difference.

Ryobi doesn’t field a 5Ah at all and still covers a weekend of projects for a third of the money. Pick by the tools already clipped to your bench and the loads you put on them. Run a pro platform hard and the Milwaukee premium earns its keep. Run a drill and a sander on Saturday, and the cheap pack isn’t a compromise. It’s the right answer.