How to choose new brake pads

9 April 2026
TAGS | Consumerism · Maintenance · Cycling Skills

When comes the time to change brake pads, you’d be surprised how user-unfriendly is the process of choosing them.

Only Sram’s “overview” takes up 12.5 thousand characters (seven pages) and almost fifty pictures (I counted). Shimano adds a table containing a couple hundred lines to this.

I’ll explain it in a simple way now.

1. Size/shape/kind — compatibility with the brake calipers

There are a lot of different shapes of pads, for example, here I made a quick demonstration:
Well, all these pads, loosely speaking, are of the same standard (small with a central hole) and, most likely, will fit your road/gravel brakes, unless you have some esoteric kind.

Why is everything so complicated? I think, to overwhelm you by the choice so you’d just buy exactly the shape of the pads/notches/radiators that the manufacturer of your specific brakes sells — this way it is more likely that you will bring money to them and not elsewhere.

Or vice versa, just to make the pads more exclusive — Absolute Black (bottom right) will gladly charge you extra for those radiators. Theoretically, they dissipate heat better, but this is mostly relevant for gravity-style riding (where the pads are completely different in size anyway).
The bottom line: take a look at the old pads and get ones where the size of the braking surface is roughly the same, and the mounting hole is located approximately in the same place relative to it. Tolerances are quite high, so all good as long as the pad physically fits into the caliper.

Seriously, how well the pad will be geometrically compatible with a brake disc, depends more on the disc itself than on the precise positioning of the pad inside the caliper. For demonstration, here is a picture I once drew.
(Of course, I cannot guarantee that your particular combination of calipers, rotors and selected pads will not turn out to be poorly compatible or even incompatible at all. That said, I myself have no problem installing the same kind of pads in my Shimano, Sram, Campag, TRP, etc.)

2. Compound/composition/type — that’s an easy choice with your drop bars

There exist organic (or resin), metallic (or sintered) and all sorts of combined ones — that is, with the addition of certain particles to the organic compound (semi-metallic, ceramic, graphene, whatever).

On road and gravel bikes, the first type, simplest and cheapest one, works best, and you don’t need anything else — as long as you know how to brake properly.

(This means: don’t ride downhill while dragging the brakes, which would heat them up until the discs turn red and the brake fluid boils. Brake in repeats — make a significant deceleration, then release the brakes for a few seconds, repeat. And then nothing will overheat.)
The pads also differ by the alloy from which the baseplate is made: steel, aluminium, titanium, carbon, etc. Again, for our bikes, take any — if you just want to ride, rather than become a braking pad sommelier.

As far as rim brakes, the pads are different for aluminium and carbon rims. Pads for aluminium melt if used on carbon. And if not new, they are likely contaminated with metal particles that will quickly wear out the carbon. And pads for carbon just don’t perform well with aluminium rims.

3. Compatibility with brake discs

That’s also simple — normally discs are compatible with any type of pads. There exist (very cheap) discs made of soft alloys that are officially compatible only with organic pads, since metal pads are too aggressive and will ruin the surface. I wouldn’t use that suboptimal kind anyway.

There are a couple more things about discs in this blog here and there. By the way, on the main page of the blog there is a convenient search by keywords: you type in, for example, “pads” or “brakes” — and it will find for you all the mentions in all posts. Use it for your reference.
4. What to keep in mind when changing pads

Don’t touch the pads and rotors — they are very sensitive to oils, and even clean hands have natural residues that can impair braking.

For new pads, it is advisable to wipe the discs with a special brake cleaner (one from an auto-moto shop is perfectly suitable) or alcohol, acetone, or other non-residue solvent.

Don’t be alarmed that new pads on a cleaned disc will brake poorly — you need to be patient a little so that they bed in (or do that intentionally — by a series of strong but soft decelerations from relatively high speed; avoid locking brakes until the bedding in is complete).
Last but not least, discs have a minimum permissible thickness. When they are worn out, they need to be replaced, otherwise the disc may suddenly disintegrate during braking.

Discs last a long time (especially with organic pads), but it makes sense to check the thickness every time you replace the pads. For this you will need a regular caliper.
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