Poultry must reach 70°C in its thickest part and stay there for two minutes, or an equivalent pair from the FSA's published table.
Requirement — Food safety (microbiological)
Poultry must reach 70°C in its thickest part and stay there for two minutes, or an equivalent pair from the FSA's published table.
Target: 70°C in the thickest part, or an equivalent from the table below.
How to tell, without a thermometer
- No pink meat anywhere, including next to the bone
- Juices run clear when the thickest part is pierced
- Steaming hot all the way through, not just on the outside
If it has not got there: Put it back in. Give it two to three minutes at the same temperature and check again in the thickest part. Do not judge by the outside: air frying browns the surface long before the centre is finished, and a well-coloured breast can be several degrees short.
Important: If poultry has been left at room temperature for more than two hours before cooking, cooking it thoroughly does not make it safe again — some bacterial toxins survive cooking. Discard it.
| Temperature | Held for | Measured at |
|---|---|---|
| 60°C | 45 min | the thickest part of the meat |
| 65°C | 10 min | the thickest part of the meat |
| 70°C | 2 min | the thickest part of the meat |
| 75°C | 30 sec | the thickest part of the meat |
| 80°C | 6 sec | the thickest part of the meat |
Why this is the rule
Chicken, turkey and duck carry Campylobacter and Salmonella, and cooking is expected to eliminate both. The UK standard is expressed as a time at a temperature rather than a single number, because holding matters: 70°C reached and immediately removed from the heat is not the same as 70°C held. In an air fryer the practical consequences are two. Carry-over during resting does real work, so a breast pulled at 70°C and rested keeps climbing. And the thickest part of a tapering breast is the only place worth measuring, because everywhere else finished several minutes earlier.
This outranks any cooking time on this site. Where a cooking recommendation cannot be reconciled with a rule like this one, AirfryerHQ does not publish the recommendation — not with a warning attached, not greyed out, not at all.
Evidence and confidence
- Applies to
- Specific to this food
- Why this rating
- The UK position is passage-verified from the FSA's own published guidance. The US position is NOT: retrieval of the USDA chart was blocked this sprint and the figure is described rather than read, which is why its citation basis is recorded as interpretation rather than direct support. The record stays disputed because a reader will meet both numbers and deserves to be told why they differ — including from a UK appliance manual.
- Last reviewed
- 2026-08-13
What this does not cover
- Does not cover whole birds, where the cavity and the joint between thigh and body are the slow points and a single measurement is not enough.
- Says nothing about stuffed poultry, which is a materially different problem.
- The US position in this record has not been passage-verified. Retrieval of the USDA chart was blocked and the figure is described from knowledge rather than read.
Sources disagree
UK guidance expresses the poultry target as 70°C held for two minutes, with a published set of equivalent pairs. US guidance expresses it as a single instantaneous 74°C. A reader who meets both concludes that one must be wrong — and a UK reader is quite likely to meet the US figure, because at least one UK manufacturer prints it in its own recipe.
- Food Standards Agency: 70°C held for two minutes in the middle of the food, or an equivalent pair from the published table: 60°C for 45 minutes, 65°C for 10 minutes, 75°C for 30 seconds, 80°C for 6 seconds.
- United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service: 74°C measured in the thickest part, with no hold time stated.
- Spectrum Brands (Russell Hobbs): Its own roast chicken recipe instructs the cook to finish to 74°C in the thickest part — the US figure, in a UK manual, from a company that is not a food-safety authority.
Why they differ: The two authority figures sit on the same lethality curve at different points. A single instantaneous number is simpler to communicate and harder to get wrong with a cheap thermometer; a time-and-temperature pair gives an attentive cook room to produce a better result at a lower temperature. Neither authority is describing different microbiology. The manufacturer's figure is a third case and a different phenomenon: appliance documentation is frequently written once for several markets, and the higher number is the safe one to print everywhere.
What AirfryerHQ does: AirfryerHQ is UK-first, so pages state the FSA position as the requirement and note the US figure alongside it. A reader who cooks to 74°C has satisfied both. A reader who cooks to 70°C and holds it has satisfied the UK standard and should know that US guidance would ask for more. Where a manufacturer's manual states a food-safety figure, AirfryerHQ reports that it does so and does not treat it as authority — a manufacturer is authoritative about its appliance and about nothing on this page.
Sources (3)
Food Standards Agency — UK food-safety authority (United Kingdom (England, Wales and Northern Ireland))
Relied on for: The 70°C-for-two-minutes target, the four other published equivalent pairs, and the sensory indicators — no pink meat, juices running clear, steaming hot throughout.
States this directly
Passage read and verified
Retrieved 2026-08-13 from gov.uk
USDA safe minimum internal temperature chart
United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service — National food-safety authority (United States)
Relied on for: The alternative US position of 74°C for all poultry.
AirfryerHQ's interpretation of what it says
Citation checked — the document exists and is described correctly
Russell Hobbs SatisFry Air Fryer & Grill Multi Cooker 5.5L — Instructions (PDF)
Spectrum Brands (Russell Hobbs) — Manufacturer manual (United Kingdom)
Relied on for: That the 74°C figure appears in UK consumer documentation, which is part of why readers meet both numbers.
States this directly
Passage read and verified
Retrieved 2026-08-13 from argos-support.co.uk
Retrieved from Argos's manual library for Argos product 206/6444.
Foods this governs
- Chicken breast — Lean, tapering and unforgiving: the cut with the narrowest window between cooked and dry.
- Chicken thigh — Fattier and far more forgiving than breast, and it wants to be cooked past its safety target rather than to it.
- Chicken wings — The cut air fryers do genuinely better than an oven, provided the skin gets long enough to render.