Meat Doneness Temperature Chart: Internal Cooking Temperatures in °F and °C

Real-world use cases

• Stop overcooking the chicken at a weeknight dinner

  You roast chicken thighs and they always come out either pink at the bone or dry as paper. Pick chicken, read the one number that matters, 165°F (74°C), and probe the thickest part. The moment the thigh hits 74°C it is safe and still juicy, so you pull it instead of leaving it in to a guesswork. No more cutting into it to peek and letting the juices run out onto the pan.

• Cook a steak to the exact doneness a guest asked for

  A guest wants medium-rare, another wants medium. Pick beef, read medium-rare at 130 to 135°F (54 to 57°C) and medium at 140 to 145°F (60 to 63°C), and pull each steak a few degrees early to let carryover finish it. You hit two different doneness levels off one grill without slicing into either steak to check, and nobody gets the well-done brick they did not order.

• Settle the pork chop argument with the current USDA number

  Someone at the table insists pork must be cooked grey and well-done. Pull up pork, show the USDA safe minimum of 145°F (63°C) with a 3-minute rest, lowered from the old 160°F back in 2011. The chop comes off slightly pink, juicy and completely safe, and the chart is the receipt that settles whether a faint blush of pink at 63°C is fine. It is.

• Hand a temperature cheat-sheet to a teen learning to cook

  A kid learning to cook does not know a burger from a steak when it comes to safety. Send them the link with the meat preselected: ground beef at 160°F (71°C), chicken at 165°F (74°C), steak at their preference. The page reads on a phone next to the stove, copies the target with one tap, and turns "is this done?" into a number they can check against a probe.

Common pitfalls

• Cooking a burger to the same rare temperature as a steak. Grinding spreads surface bacteria all through the meat, so ground beef needs 160°F (71°C), not the steak's 145°F. A rare burger is genuinely riskier than a rare steak.

• Trusting the finger-poke test or a timing chart instead of a probe. Touch and timing drift with cut thickness, starting temperature and oven calibration. Only an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part tells you chicken truly hit 74°C.

• Forgetting carryover cooking, so the meat overshoots while it rests. A thick roast climbs another 3 to 5°F after it leaves the heat, so pull beef and lamb a few degrees below target rather than at it.

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