A systematic series of industrial-relevant polystyrene-based anion exchange resins that were functionalized with hydro- or fluorocarbon chains are compared regarding their adsorption behavior towards perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCA) in respect to their charge, chain length and type of chain. The results clearly show the dominance of electrostatic interactions in the adsorption process as uncharged adsorber materials showed no adsorption at all. In contrast, the charged adsorber materials showed in general an PFCA removal of 80 % to 30 % over the experiment depending on effluent fraction. Unexpectedly, for perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA) the highest removal rate was found with consistently > 90 %. Despite observing significant benefits in the adsorption of PFCA for fluoroalkylated adsorbers in comparison to their non-fluorinated counterparts, this effect of fluoroalkylation is comparatively small and could not be clearly attributed to fluorophilic interactions between the fluoroalkyl chains. These findings help clarifying that the introduction of fluorocarbon moieties in adsorber materials is not necessary in order to remove fluorocarbon molecules from the environment.