Air fryer versus oven

Questions this answers

• Is an air fryer cheaper to run than an oven?
• Is an air fryer faster than an oven?
• Should I get an air fryer if I already have a fan oven?

Where the saving actually comes from

It is not efficiency in any deep sense — both appliances turn essentially all their electricity into heat. The saving comes from heating a much smaller volume, and from not spending eight to twelve minutes preheating that volume before the food goes in.

For a full Sunday roast, the oven is doing work the air fryer cannot do at all, and the comparison stops being meaningful.

What has actually been measured

Until Mega Sprint C this page argued from mechanism and said plainly that nothing had been metered. A controlled comparison now exists and it is worth reporting precisely rather than in round numbers.

Which? metered a Morphy Richards Health Fryer 480003 against a Bosch Serie 2 built-in electric oven on four jobs, with preheating included in every figure and costs calculated at 26.11p per kWh — the average capped direct-debit rate for July to September 2026.

A 1.3–1.4kg roast chicken: 0.54 kWh in the air fryer, 1.157 in the oven. 320g of frozen chips: 0.287 against 0.863. One jacket potato of about 200g: 0.392 against 1.084. Roughly a third to a half, consistently, on small quantities.

Two things about those numbers. They belong to those two machines and are not a figure for air fryers in general. And they are all small jobs — one potato in a sixty-litre cavity is the least efficient thing an oven is ever asked to do, which is precisely where the air fryer's advantage is widest and where it says least about cooking for four.

The fourth row, which nobody quotes

The same test measured a sponge cake at 0.223 kWh in the air fryer against 0.71 in the oven — and recorded that the cake quantity had to be REDUCED to fit the air fryer basket.

That is not evidence that an air fryer bakes a cake for a third of the energy. It is evidence that it bakes a SMALLER cake for a third of the energy, and the publication was straightforward about it.

It is the most instructive line in the dataset because it makes visible what the other three rows hide: a large part of why an air fryer costs less is that it is smaller. Where the meal still fits, that is a genuine saving. Where it does not, the machine runs twice and the arithmetic changes — and no comparison in circulation, including the ones quoting these figures, accounts for that.

A second organisation, on the other side of the world

One test house measuring two machines is a finding. Two independent organisations, in different countries, using different appliances and different methods, and landing in the same place, is the beginning of evidence — and that is now what exists.

CHOICE, Australia's consumer organisation, cooked three real meals in a Breville Air Fryer Chef and in the writer's own ageing freestanding electric oven, both at 170°C, and read the consumption off a smart-meter app. Across a dinner, a tray of frozen snacks and a family-sized pie, the air fryer came in at roughly a quarter to a third of the oven's cost every time, and finished in around half the time. The three rows with their costs and durations are on the energy-use page with the rest of the measured evidence; what matters here is that they agree with the British laboratory in direction and in rough magnitude, having been reached by an entirely different route.

The agreement is the finding, not the precision, and the precision is genuinely poor: the writer says so herself, calling it “not the most precise way to measure energy usage”, and her oven is an old refurbished unit of unstated make whose seals and insulation are much of what the test is measuring.

It is weaker evidence than the Which? test and it is recorded as weaker. What it adds is independence. Two methods with different flaws, agreeing on direction and magnitude, is worth more than a fifth row from the same laboratory.

The one figure that isolates preheating

Preheating is where a lot of the difference is supposed to live, and almost no published comparison separates it out. One row in the Australian set does, incidentally: of the oven's fifty minutes, fifteen were spent heating an empty cavity before the food went in, and the air fryer had no preheat at all.

So nearly a third of that oven's running time — and a disproportionate share of its energy, because a cold cavity draws close to full power throughout — was spent before any cooking happened. In the Which? test preheating is included on both sides but never broken out, so it cannot be isolated there.

The general lesson is not that preheating explains everything. It is that a comparison which excludes oven preheat, as many do, is flattering the oven, and one that assumes every air fryer skips it is flattering the air fryer. Air-fryer preheat is not universal: this catalogue holds one model whose manual states preheating is unnecessary and another whose grill mode preheats automatically for thirteen minutes.

Where the oven simply wins

Quantity. A full oven shelf holds several times what a basket does, and cooking four batches sequentially in an air fryer takes longer and uses more energy than one oven load.

Anything large, anything that needs even gentle heat, anything baked in a tin that fills the chamber. And anything where you want the food not to dry out.

Where the air fryer wins outright

Reheating anything that should be crisp. This is the least-argued advantage and the most consistently useful one — a microwave cannot re-crisp a pizza base and an oven takes fifteen minutes to warm up to do it.

Small quantities of anything. One or two portions, on demand, with no preheat penalty worth mentioning.

Chicken wings, chips and anything else where the point is a dry, crisp surface. The airflow does something a domestic oven genuinely cannot.

What AirfryerHQ has not established

AirfryerHQ has metered nothing itself. Every figure above belongs to somebody else's appliances: four machines in total, two air fryers and two ovens, across two organisations. That is a second source rather than a sample.

The crossover point where an oven becomes cheaper. It exists — an oven heats its cavity once whatever goes in, while a small air fryer runs again for every batch — and nothing measured locates it. The arithmetic is easy to state and impossible to settle: at the Which? figures, a chicken costs 0.54 kWh in the air fryer against 1.157 in the oven, so somewhere around the second or third batch the advantage is gone. But a second batch starts in a hot chamber and costs less than the first, and nobody has measured how much less, so that estimate is not a crossover point and this page will not print one as though it were.

The energy cost of a second batch, which starts in an already-hot chamber and therefore costs less than the first. Nobody has measured that either, so this site's calculator counts every batch at full cost, which is deliberately generous to the oven's side of the argument.

Anything about gas ovens. Every figure here is electric against electric.

Evidence and confidence

Cooking pages this relates to

• Frozen chips
• Pizza (reheating)
• Jacket potato

Appliances

• Basket air fryer
• Built-in oven with an air-fry mode