Air fryer conversion chart, cooking times and oven converter

Two rules, depending on what your recipe was written for. Most people only ever hear the first one, and it is the wrong one if you cook from UK recipes.

From a conventional oven (no fan)

Drop the temperature by 25°F, about 15°C, and cut the time by roughly a fifth.

From a fan or convection oven

Drop it by about 20°C, or 36°F, and cut the time by a fifth. That is a larger reduction than from a conventional oven, which surprises people: a fan oven already circulates air, so surely less adjustment is needed?

The reason is size. An air fryer basket holds three or four litres against an oven's seventy to a hundred, so the same kind of fan produces airflow several times faster. Moisture leaves the surface of the food far quicker, and browning runs ahead of cooking. It is not simply a small fan oven.

This is where recipes catch people out. A recipe printed as "180°C (160°C fan)" is giving you the same dish two ways. Take the 160°C figure and convert from that, using the fan setting above, and you land at 140°C. Take 180°C as a conventional number and you land at 165°C. Both are right for the question being asked - which is why the selector exists.

This matters more than it sounds. British and Australian recipes are usually written in fan temperatures, American ones usually are not. Check which yours is before converting.

Frozen food is different again

Keep the oven temperature as written and cut the time by roughly 30 to 50% instead. Frozen chips and nuggets need the high heat to crisp rather than steam, so dropping the temperature works against you.

Less authority than you would expect from how often it is repeated. We looked at what the manufacturers themselves publish.

So the “25 degrees and 20 percent” rule is a convention rather than a tested standard. It looks like a carry-over of the older convection-oven rule, which has been around far longer. No test kitchen appears to have published a methodology behind the 20% figure.

We have kept the rule because it is a reasonable starting point and it is what the calculator above uses. We would rather tell you where it came from than present it as settled science.

Sources: Cuisinart Air Fryer Conversion Chart; Ninja air fryer quick start guidance; Cosori published cooking guidance. Checked August 2026.

Starting points for a single layer in the basket, not a full one. Every figure in the last column is a food safety minimum, not a suggestion.

Published times for the same food differ between sources by as much as 40 to 50°F. That is not sloppiness on their part, it is because air fryers genuinely vary. Consumer Reports tested more than 80 models and found some running 67°F below their own set temperature. Which is why the next section matters more than this table does.

Times compiled from manufacturer cooking charts. Internal temperatures from the food safety authorities cited below.

This is the part of the page that is not a convention or a starting point. These are the published minimums, and they do not change with your model or your recipe.

The UK figure has equivalents that trade time against temperature: 60°C for 45 minutes, 65°C for 10 minutes, 70°C for 2 minutes, 75°C for 30 seconds, 80°C for 6 seconds. Any of those will do.

The broader point the USDA makes is worth repeating: air fryers vary in their cooking times, but the safe internal temperature is always the same. A chart tells you roughly when to start checking. A thermometer tells you when it is done. Only one of those two things keeps you safe.

Two more things from the same guidance. Do not overfill the basket, because crowded food cooks unevenly and can leave cold spots. And cook in batches rather than packing more in, which is also why the energy saving from an air fryer drops away sharply once you need more than one batch.

Sources: USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, including its Air Fryers and Food Safety guidance; UK Food Standards Agency; Food Standards Australia New Zealand; US Centers for Disease Control, MMWR, 2 December 2022. Checked August 2026.

It is worth knowing about, and the guidance is simple. Acrylamide forms in starchy foods cooked above about 120°C, which covers most of what people put in an air fryer. The European Food Safety Authority concluded in 2015 that it is a genotoxic carcinogen and reaffirmed that position in 2022.

The practical advice from the UK Food Standards Agency is to aim for a golden yellow colour or lighter when frying, baking, toasting or roasting starchy foods, rather than a deep brown. Their other tip is not to keep raw potatoes in the fridge if you plan to roast or fry them, because the cold increases the sugars that form acrylamide.

No food safety authority singles out air fryers here. This is general starchy-food guidance that happens to apply, and the colour rule is easy to follow.

Sources: UK Food Standards Agency acrylamide guidance; European Food Safety Authority Scientific Opinion on acrylamide in food, 2015, reaffirmed 2022.

Worth reading once if you cook meat in one. The short version: air fryers are fine, and one specific product is not. The US Department of Agriculture and the CDC both say raw frozen breaded stuffed chicken should not be cooked in an air fryer, because the breading looks done while the poultry inside is still raw.

The other finding worth knowing is that Consumer Reports tested more than 80 models and found some running 67°F below their own set temperature, which is why the times above are a starting point and a thermometer is the actual check.

Air fryer food safety: what the agencies actually say, with the published temperatures and the sources.

Yes, and here is the honest reason there are no brand presets on this calculator. Only one manufacturer publishes a full conversion rule, and the rest either publish half of it or nothing at all. A calculator showing different numbers per brand would be inventing a precision the brands themselves do not claim.

What genuinely differs between models is wattage and basket size. A small, high-wattage unit runs hotter and crowds sooner than a large drawer. That is exactly why checking a few minutes early on a first attempt matters more than any brand preset would, and why Consumer Reports found such wide variation between models at the same setting.