Take any oven recipe, drop 25°F, take 25 percent off the time, and bake it in your air fryer. That is the advice on every conversion chart I can find, including the version of this page I wrote before.
Do it and there is a good chance you pull out something that is dark on the outside and wet in the middle. Then you assume you did it wrong.
You did not do it wrong. The rule has a hole in it.
Quick answer: Drop the temperature by 25°F. Keep that part. Then do not also cut a fifth off the time, because the temperature drop was what removed the speed advantage in the first place. Expect the time to land somewhere between the same and 20 percent shorter, and only because you have almost certainly moved to a smaller pan. Then stop using the clock at all and bake to an internal temperature, which is the only number that survives the conversion intact.
The standard rule double-counts
Put the two halves of the rule next to each other and the problem is easy to see.
Why you drop 25°F: because moving air delivers heat to the surface of food faster than still air does. A 350°F oven and a 350°F air fryer are the same air temperature, but the air fryer gets that heat into the food harder. Dropping to 325°F is an attempt to make the two equivalent.
Why you cut the time: because an air fryer cooks faster. Which is true, right up until you drop the temperature by 25°F specifically in order to stop it doing that.
You get one or the other. If the 25°F drop has done its job, the two ovens are now roughly equivalent and the time should be roughly the same. If you cut the time as well, you are removing a speed advantage twice, and the bake stops before the middle has caught up. That is the whole mechanism behind the most common complaint about air fryer conversions.
None of which means an air fryer is not faster. It usually is. But the reason has almost nothing to do with the fan, and once you see where the time actually comes from, you can stop guessing at percentages.
What the fan actually changes
Fast moving air affects the outside of food far more than the inside. That distinction runs through everything on this page.
Much faster
Moving air strips away the layer of cooler, damper air that sits against food and replaces it constantly. Browning, crisping and drying all speed up noticeably.
Barely different
Once heat is in the food it travels by conduction, and conduction does not care how windy it is outside. The center of a cake takes the time it takes.
The gap widens
So the outside runs ahead of the inside more than it does in an oven. That is the real conversion problem, and the 25°F drop is the fix for it.
So where does the genuine time saving come from? Two places, and neither is the fan.
- The preheat. A cavity the size of a shoebox reaches temperature in about 3 minutes. A conventional oven takes 12 to 15. That saving is real, it is guaranteed, and it is most of what people are actually experiencing when they say the air fryer is faster. Whether you need to preheat goes into when it matters.
- The smaller bake. A 9-inch cake does not fit a basket, so converting almost always means scaling down into a 6-inch pan. A smaller, shallower bake genuinely finishes sooner, because heat has less distance to travel. That is a pan effect, not an appliance effect, and you would get the same saving baking a 6-inch cake in your oven.
The element sitting two to four inches above the food rather than eight also matters, and it pushes in the same direction: more heat at the top surface, no more heat in the middle. That is why nearly every recipe on this site ends up baking cooler than its oven equivalent rather than hotter.
How strongly all of this applies depends on which machine you own. A basket model is the extreme case: small cavity, close element, fast air. An oven-style unit sits somewhere between a basket and a small convection oven, and needs a gentler version of everything on this page. Our basket versus oven-style comparison goes through the differences that actually affect baking, and air fryer oven versus conventional oven covers the larger units against a full-size oven.
The rule that works
Three lines, in order of how much they matter.
| Step | Do this | Because |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Temperature | Take 25°F off | Stops the surface running ahead of the middle. Keep this part |
| 2. Pan | Scale down to what fits | This is where the real time saving comes from, not the fan |
| 3. Time | Start at the same time, check 20% early | Use the oven time as your outside estimate rather than your target |
| 4. Finish | Bake to an internal temperature | The only number that does not change between appliances |
Step 3 is the one that differs from every other chart. Rather than committing to a shortened time, start checking at 80 percent of the oven time and be prepared to go all the way to 100. On a 30 minute cake that means looking at 24 minutes and not being surprised if it needs 30. If you would rather have the arithmetic done for you, the air fryer calculator will convert a specific temperature and time, and the recipe scaler handles the quantities.
Temperature conversion chart
Oven temperature on the left, what to set the air fryer to on the right. This is the part of the standard rule that is worth keeping.
| Oven | Air fryer | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 275°F (135°C) | 275°F (135°C) | No change. See why |
| 300°F (150°C) | 285°F (140°C) | Only 15°F off at this end |
| 325°F (165°C) | 300°F (150°C) | Cheesecakes, custards, pound cake |
| 350°F (175°C) | 325°F (165°C) | The most common conversion by far |
| 375°F (190°C) | 350°F (175°C) | Muffins, quick breads, scones |
| 400°F (205°C) | 370°F (185°C) | Take 30°F here, not 25 |
| 425°F (220°C) | 385°F (195°C) | Take 40°F. Anything with a lid or a crust |
| 450°F (230°C) | 400°F (205°C) | Most machines cap here anyway |
The gap widens as you go up, which most charts do not show. At 450°F a flat 25°F reduction leaves you at 425, and by then the element is close enough and hot enough that the top of anything with height on it will be dark long before the middle is done. Our air fryer baking chart has the finished times and temperatures for specific bakes if you would rather skip the conversion entirely.
The two places the 25°F rule breaks
The flat reduction works well in the middle of the range and badly at both ends, for two different reasons.
Below about 300°F, do not reduce at all
Low temperature baking is mostly about gentleness and moisture: cheesecakes, custards, meringues, slow-dried fruit. At those temperatures the fan's drying effect matters far more than its heating effect, and dropping the dial further just extends the time the surface spends being dried out by moving air.
So at 275°F, keep 275°F. At 300°F, go to 285°F rather than 275°F. Our air fryer cheesecake bakes at 300°F, which is exactly where a 325°F oven cheesecake lands, and it goes no lower on purpose.
Above about 400°F, reduce by more
Two things stack at the top of the range. The element is only a few inches above the food, so radiant heat on the top surface is disproportionately strong. And sugar starts to caramelize hard around 320°F surface temperature, so anything sweet is already on the edge.
Take 30°F off a 400°F recipe, 40°F off a 425°F one, and treat 400°F as your practical ceiling for anything with a lid, a crust or a sugary top. A double crust fruit pie is the clearest case there is: oven recipes routinely call for 400°F or more, and the basket version wants around 320°F, because the lid is inches from the element and finishes long before the filling does.
If your converted temperature is above what your machine offers, use the maximum and add time rather than giving up on the recipe. But check what you are converting first. If it is a bake that genuinely needs 450°F, like a crusty artisan loaf that relies on a burst of very high heat, an air fryer is not going to reproduce it and no conversion will fix that. What you can and cannot bake in an air fryer is the honest list.
The pan is the real conversion
Almost every oven baking recipe assumes a pan that will not fit in a basket. A 9-by-13 tray, a 9-inch round, a full-size loaf tin. So before you touch the dial you have a quantity problem, and solving it changes the time far more than the fan does.
| Oven recipe calls for | Use instead | Batter to use |
|---|---|---|
| 9-inch round | 6-inch round, or two of them | About 45% per pan |
| 8-inch square | 6-inch round or 7-inch square | About 55% |
| 9 by 13 tray | Two 6-inch rounds, in batches | About 40% each |
| Full-size loaf tin | Mini loaf, or a 6-inch tube pan | About 50% |
| 12-cup muffin tin | 6 silicone cups, in two batches | Half at a time |
| Full cookie sheet | Four cookies at a time | All of it, in batches |
These are rough volume ratios rather than exact ones, because pan depths vary. Measure your basket before you buy anything: the pan size calculator will tell you what actually fits, and the recipe scaler will do the ingredient arithmetic so you are not multiplying three eggs by 0.45 in your head. Whatever pan you land on, fill it no more than half to two thirds, because things rise harder in a basket than in an oven and the element is right above them.
One thing worth saying plainly: a smaller pan is not a compromise, it is the reason the bake is quicker. If you converted a 9-inch cake into a 6-inch cake and it finished in two thirds the time, that would have happened in an oven too.
Time by what you are baking
Starting points rather than answers. Every one of these assumes you have already dropped the temperature and moved to a pan that fits.
| What | Oven | Air fryer | Start checking at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cookies | 10 to 12 min at 375°F | 7 to 9 min at 325°F | 6 min |
| Muffins | 18 to 22 min at 375°F | 13 to 16 min at 350°F | 12 min |
| Brownies | 25 to 30 min at 350°F | 20 to 26 min at 325°F | 18 min |
| 6-inch cake | 30 to 35 min at 350°F | 25 to 32 min at 320°F | 24 min |
| Quick bread, mini loaf | 45 to 55 min at 350°F | 35 to 45 min at 320°F | 32 min |
| Cheesecake, 6-inch | 45 to 55 min at 325°F | 28 to 34 min at 300°F | 26 min |
| Pound cake, 6-inch tube | 50 to 60 min at 325°F | 35 to 42 min at 300°F | 33 min |
Notice how uneven the savings are. Cheesecake nearly halves, cake barely moves. That is not inconsistency, it is the pan: the cheesecake row assumes going from a 9-inch to a 6-inch, while the cake row is 6-inch to 6-inch. Where the pan does not change, neither does the time by much, which is exactly the point of this page.
And every one of these gets faster as you go. When an air fryer beeps to say it is up to temperature, only the air is. The basket, the crisper plate and the walls go on absorbing heat for another ten minutes, and once they are saturated they radiate it back. So a second batch of anything runs roughly 1 to 2 minutes shorter than the first, and a third shorter again. On an 8 minute cookie that is a quarter of the bake. This catches people out constantly, and it is covered on our air fryer chocolate chip cookies and cupcakes pages.
Then throw the time away
This is the part that makes the rest of the page more or less optional, and the reason the version of this guide I wrote before was weaker than it should have been. It told you to use a toothpick.
Temperature and time both change when you move a recipe between appliances. The internal temperature at which a thing is cooked does not change at all, because it is a property of the food rather than the oven. Egg protein sets where egg protein sets. Starch gelatinizes where it gelatinizes. So if you convert the dial, then bake to a number rather than a clock, the conversion stops needing to be accurate.
| What you are baking | Pull it at | What is happening there |
|---|---|---|
| Cakes, cupcakes, muffins | 200 to 205°F | Starch has gelatinized and the egg has set |
| Pound cake and other dense cakes | 205°F | Slightly higher, or the base stays gummy |
| Quick breads and banana bread | 200 to 205°F | Same as cake. Deeper, so it takes longer to get there |
| Fudgy brownies | 165 to 175°F | Deliberately under a cake. Higher and they are cakey |
| Cookies | 185°F chewy, 200°F crisp | Fiddly to measure, but it calibrates your eye |
| Cheesecake | 150°F in the center | Past 160 the proteins squeeze out water and it cracks |
| Enriched breads, brioche, rolls | 190°F | Soft crumb, still moist |
| Lean crusty breads | 200 to 210°F | Needs to go higher to dry the crumb properly |
| Fruit pie filling | 200°F, or bubbling in the middle | Where cornstarch finishes thickening |
| Baked custards | 175 to 180°F | Set but not scrambled |
An instant-read thermometer costs about the same as two coffees and it is the single piece of equipment that makes converting recipes reliable. Every recipe on this site gives an internal target for exactly this reason. The toothpick test is not useless, but it only tells you the batter touching the toothpick has set, which on most cakes happens at around 205 to 210°F, several degrees later than you wanted to stop.
Converting a recipe, step by step
- Check it is worth converting. Anything that needs a very high burst of heat, a lot of steam, or a pan bigger than your basket is not going to work well. Everything else usually does.
- Sort the pan out first, before you look at any numbers. Find something that fits your basket with about an inch of air around it, and work out what fraction of the recipe it holds.
- Scale the ingredients to that fraction. Round eggs sensibly rather than trying to use 1.4 of one: go up rather than down and add a spoonful of flour to compensate.
- Take 25°F off the oven temperature, or 30 to 40 if the original is above 400°F, or nothing at all if it is at or below 275°F.
- Preheat for 3 minutes. Short bakes care about this most, because a cold start spends a big share of the cook time at an unknown rising temperature.
- Write down the internal temperature you are aiming for from the table above. This is your actual finish line.
- Set the timer to 80 percent of the original time, and treat that as your first check rather than the end.
- Look at it then, and if the top is browning much faster than the middle is cooking, tent it loosely with foil pressed down over the pan rim so the fan cannot lift it.
- Keep checking every 3 or 4 minutes until it hits the number. Do not open it more than you have to, because each opening dumps the hot air and the machine has to rebuild it.
- Write down what actually worked on the recipe. Converting is a one-time cost per recipe, and the second time you make it you are not converting anything.
Do the tenting properly. An air fryer fan moves air fast enough to lift a loose sheet of foil into the heating element, where it scorches and can catch. Press it down firmly over the rim of the pan rather than draping it, so there is no edge for the air to get under. The same applies to parchment: never put an unweighted sheet in a basket. Foil and parchment in an air fryer covers it properly.
What goes wrong
| What you got | Why | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Dark outside, raw middle | You applied both adjustments, so the bake stopped early. | Keep the 25°F drop, keep the time, bake to temperature. |
| Top burnt long before the middle set | Converted from a high temperature with a flat 25°F. | Take 30 to 40°F off above 400°F. Tent at halfway. |
| Dry all through | Baked to a clean toothpick, which is 5 to 10°F late. | Thermometer, and the number from the table above. |
| Overflowed onto the element | Pan filled like an oven pan. Things rise harder in a basket. | Half to two thirds full, no more. |
| Cheesecake or custard cracked | Reduced a low temperature that did not need reducing. | At or below 275°F, do not reduce at all. |
| Second batch overdone | The machine heat soaks and runs hotter as you go. | Take 1 to 2 minutes off each subsequent batch. |
| Dry ring around the edge | Small pan, close element, long bake. | Wrap the pan in a soaked cake strip. See avoiding dry bakes. |
| Nothing browned at all | Converted too far down, usually by reducing twice. | Take the reduction once, from the original oven number. |
| Batter leaked through the plate | No pan, or unlined perforated plate. | Vented parchment under anything loose. |
| It just did not fit | The recipe assumed an oven-sized pan. | Scale down. That is step two for a reason. |
For problems that are not really about the conversion, the troubleshooting guide covers the wider set, how to prevent burning deals with the top-heat issue in general, and how to bake in an air fryer is the place to start if you are new to the whole thing rather than converting a specific recipe.
The conversion arithmetic is worth doing once and then writing on the recipe. If you would rather have it done for you, the air fryer calculator converts a temperature and time, the pan size calculator tells you what fits your basket, the recipe scaler handles the quantities, and the running cost calculator works out what you are saving by not heating a full oven. All four air fryer tools are in one place, and the recipe index has everything already converted if you would rather skip the work entirely.
Frequently asked questions
QHow do you convert an oven recipe to an air fryer?
Take 25F off the oven temperature, scale the recipe down into a pan that fits your basket, and then bake to an internal temperature rather than to a time. The step most charts get wrong is the time: they tell you to cut 20 to 30 percent on top of the temperature reduction, and those two adjustments cancel each other out. The 25F drop exists specifically to remove the air fryer's speed advantage at the surface, so once you have taken it, the time should be roughly the same. Start checking at 80 percent of the original time and be ready to go all the way to 100 percent.
QDo you reduce both the temperature and the time for an air fryer?
Not both, and this is the single most common conversion mistake. Dropping 25F is an attempt to make a 350F air fryer behave like a 350F oven, because moving air delivers heat to the surface of food faster than still air does. If that adjustment has done its job, the two are now roughly equivalent and the time should be roughly the same. Cutting a further 20 to 30 percent removes the speed advantage a second time, and the bake stops before the middle catches up. That is why converted recipes so often come out dark on the outside and raw in the middle.
QWhy is an air fryer faster than an oven if you cannot cut the time?
Because the time saving comes from two places that have nothing to do with the fan. First, the preheat: a cavity the size of a shoebox reaches temperature in about 3 minutes against 12 to 15 for a conventional oven, and that saving is real and guaranteed. Second, the pan: a 9-inch cake does not fit a basket, so converting almost always means moving to a 6-inch pan, and a smaller shallower bake genuinely finishes sooner because heat has less distance to travel. That is a pan effect rather than an appliance effect, and you would get the same saving baking a 6-inch cake in your oven.
QWhat is 350F in an air fryer?
325F, and this is the most common conversion by far. It holds well through the middle of the range: 375F becomes 350F, 325F becomes 300F. It stops holding at both ends. At or below 275F do not reduce at all, because low temperature baking is about gentleness and moisture and the fan's drying effect matters more than its heating effect down there. Above 400F reduce by more than 25F, because the element sits only a few inches above the food and radiant heat on the top surface is disproportionately strong: take 30F off a 400F recipe and 40F off a 425F one.
QWhat internal temperature should baked goods reach?
Cakes, cupcakes and muffins at 200 to 205F. Dense cakes like pound cake at 205F. Quick breads and banana bread at 200 to 205F. Fudgy brownies much lower at 165 to 175F, which is deliberate. Cookies at about 185F for chewy and 200F for crisp. Cheesecake at 150F in the center. Enriched breads at 190F and lean crusty ones at 200 to 210F. Fruit pie filling at 200F or when it bubbles in the middle. Baked custards at 175 to 180F. These numbers are properties of the food rather than the oven, so they do not change when you convert a recipe, which makes them the only reliable finish line you have.
QWhat size pan should I use when converting a recipe?
Whatever fits your basket with about an inch of airflow around it, which for most 5 to 6 quart baskets means a 6-inch round. Rough substitutions: a 9-inch round recipe splits into two 6-inch pans at about 45 percent of the batter each, an 8-inch square goes into a 6-inch round at about 55 percent, a 9 by 13 tray becomes two 6-inch rounds baked in batches, and a full-size loaf tin becomes a mini loaf or a 6-inch tube pan at about half. Fill any of them half to two thirds and no more, because things rise harder in a basket than in an oven and the element is right above them.
QDo I need to preheat an air fryer when converting a recipe?
Yes, three minutes, and it matters most on short bakes. A cold start means the first couple of minutes happen at an unknown and rising temperature, which makes your converted time meaningless. On a six minute bake that can be a third of the cook time spent somewhere you did not intend. It also matters for anything leavened, because baking powder starts working the moment it meets liquid and a batter waiting on the counter for a machine to warm up loses some of its lift. The preheat is also where most of the air fryer's genuine time saving lives, so it is not a step to resent.
QWhy did my converted recipe burn on top?
Because the heating element sits two to four inches above the food rather than eight or more, so the top surface gets far more radiant heat than it would in an oven. Three fixes. Take a bigger reduction if the original temperature was above 400F, 30 to 40F rather than a flat 25. Tent the top with foil once it has taken enough color, usually somewhere between a third and halfway through. And press the foil down firmly over the rim of the pan rather than draping it loosely, because the fan will lift a loose sheet into the element where it scorches and can catch fire.
QDoes the same conversion work for an oven-style air fryer?
Mostly, but you can be less aggressive with it. An oven-style unit has a larger cavity, a shelf rather than a basket, and more distance between the element and the food, all of which make it behave more like a small convection oven. A 15 to 20F reduction is usually enough there rather than a full 25, and you have room for larger pans, so the pan scaling step often disappears entirely. Basket models are the ones that need the full treatment. Our comparison of basket versus oven-style air fryers goes through the differences that actually affect baking.
QCan I convert a recipe that needs 450F?
You can set most machines to 400F and add time, and for many things that is fine. But check what the 450F is actually for. If it is a crusty artisan loaf that relies on a short burst of very high heat and a blast of steam to get oven spring and a proper crust, an air fryer will not reproduce it and no amount of conversion arithmetic will change that. The same goes for pizza that wants a scorching stone. Those are cases where the honest answer is to use the oven. Most home baking sits between 325 and 400F, which is comfortably inside what a basket does well.
QWhy does my second batch cook faster than my first?
Because when your air fryer beeps to say it has reached temperature, only the air has. The basket, the crisper plate and the walls of the cavity are all still climbing and go on absorbing heat for another ten minutes or so, quietly taking energy that would otherwise go into your food. By the time batch one comes out, all that metal is saturated and radiating heat back rather than absorbing it, so batch two bakes in a hotter machine even though the dial has not moved. Take 1 to 2 minutes off each subsequent batch. On an 8 minute cookie that is a quarter of the bake, which is why third trays burn.
QIs there a conversion calculator rather than a chart?
Yes. Our air fryer calculator takes an oven temperature and time and gives you the air fryer equivalent, the pan size calculator tells you what will physically fit your basket, and the recipe scaler does the ingredient arithmetic when you scale a 9-inch recipe down to a 6-inch pan. All three are free and all three are in one place under tools. They handle the mechanical part well. The judgment calls on this page, whether a recipe is worth converting at all and what internal temperature to finish at, are the parts a calculator cannot do for you.
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