How to Get Rid of Ants Indoors (Fast, For Good)

If you want to get rid of ants indoors and keep them gone, the single most important rule is counterintuitive: do not reach for the spray first. A trail of ants crossing your counter is annoying, but those visible workers are only a tiny fraction of the colony. Kill them and you have treated the symptom; the queen keeps laying and a fresh line of ants appears within days. The reliable fix is to let the foragers work for you, carrying slow-acting bait back to the nest, and then to close the door behind them.

Find the trail and the entry point first

Before you treat anything, spend a few minutes watching. Ants move along chemical scent trails, so follow the line in both directions. One end leads to what they are eating; the other leads to where they are getting in, usually a gap around a window frame, a crack in the baseboard, a utility penetration under the sink, or the threshold of an exterior door.

Knowing the entry point matters for two reasons. It tells you where to seal later, and it tells you where to place bait so foragers find it on their established route. Resist the urge to wipe the trail clean at this stage. You want the ants actively traveling it when you introduce the bait.

Bait beats spray almost every time

Ants are social insects that share food, so a bait the workers mistake for a meal gets distributed throughout the colony, including to the queen. That is why baiting is the standard recommendation for an indoor infestation. A contact spray, by contrast, only kills the ants it touches and often scatters the rest, splitting the colony and making the problem harder to solve.

You have two broad bait choices. Commercial ant baits (gel or pre-filled stations) are formulated with a slow-acting active ingredient precisely so the worker survives long enough to get home. A classic DIY option is a borax bait: a common ratio is roughly one part borax to three parts powdered sugar for a dry bait, or about two tablespoons of borax stirred into a quarter cup of honey or corn syrup for a liquid one, dabbed onto a scrap of card. Borax is a pesticide, so keep any homemade bait well away from children and pets, place it where only ants can reach it, and wash your hands afterward.

Where to put the bait

Advice differs on exact placement: some sources say set bait directly on the trail, others say ants avoid bait dropped right on the line. A sensible approach is to place it a couple of inches beside the trail near the entry point, then move it closer if the ants ignore it. Put out several small bait points rather than one large one.

Then do the hard part: nothing. Leave the ants alone for one to two weeks. Seeing more ants at first is normal and good, because foragers are recruiting nestmates to a food source you control. If you spray them now, you kill the delivery service and the queen never gets the dose.

Clean up and seal the doors

Once bait traffic has dropped to near zero, the colony is in collapse and you can switch to cleanup. Wipe every known trail with a vinegar-and-water solution or hot soapy water. This dissolves the invisible scent markers that would otherwise guide a new wave of ants along the same highway. Plain cleaning sprays smell clean to you but do not always break the pheromone trail, so vinegar is the better choice here.

Next, seal the entry points you identified. Caulk cracks in baseboards and around window and door frames, fill larger wall gaps and utility holes with expanding foam, and add weatherstripping or a door sweep where a threshold has a visible gap. This is ordinary home sealing work; if you are already chasing other pests, the same habits that help you deal with fruit flies in the kitchen apply here too.

Natural deterrents: what works, what doesn’t

Plenty of home remedies circulate for ants, and it helps to know which earn their reputation. Scent-based repellents such as diluted peppermint oil, cinnamon, or a vinegar wipe can discourage ants from a specific surface and are genuinely useful for breaking a trail or keeping them off a counter. What they do not do is kill the colony, because nothing gets carried back to the nest. Treat them as a complement to baiting, not a replacement for it.

A non-repellent spray is the one exception worth knowing about. Unlike a contact killer, ants walk through it without detecting it and transfer the product to their nestmates, so it can supplement bait when a colony has an entrenched indoor food source it refuses to abandon. Diatomaceous earth dusted into cracks and wall voids can also help over time by abrading the ants’ outer shells, though it only works while it stays completely dry.

Prevention: remove the invitation

Ants come inside for food and moisture, so take both away. Wipe counters after cooking, store sugar, honey, and pet food in sealed containers, rinse recyclables, take out the trash regularly, and sweep up crumbs under appliances. Fix the damp conditions ants love, too: a slow dripping faucet or a clogged drain gives them the water they need, so keeping plumbing tight genuinely reduces the draw. If you are the type who likes to stay ahead of problems, add an exterior perimeter check to your seasonal home-maintenance routine and seal new gaps before the warm season starts.

When DIY is not enough

Most pavement and odorous house ants yield to patient baiting and sealing. A few species do not. Large black ants that seem to wander alone, or faint crackling sounds inside a wall, can point to carpenter ants, which excavate wood to nest and can cause structural damage over time. Pharaoh and Argentine ants are notorious for budding into multiple colonies when sprayed, which makes DIY contact treatment actively counterproductive. If you suspect any of these, or if careful baiting has failed after a few weeks, bring in a licensed exterminator who can identify the species and target the nest directly.

Done in the right order, the fix is straightforward: watch, bait, wait, clean, and seal. Skip straight to the spray and you will likely be fighting the same trail again next week. For more kitchen and household fixes, browse the full home improvement section.