Meat Doneness Temperatures: The Chart to Bookmark

Three numbers cover nearly every dinner you will ever cook: 145°F (62.8°C) with at least a 3-minute rest for whole cuts of beef, pork, veal, and lamb; 160°F (71.1°C) for ground meats; and 165°F (73.9°C) for all poultry. Those are the USDA’s safe minimum internal temperatures, and if you remember nothing else from this page, remember them. Everything below — doneness ranges, pull temperatures, carryover, probe placement — is refinement built on that floor, with the safety numbers and the preference numbers kept clearly apart so you always know which one you are holding.

The three numbers to remember

When the USDA simplified its guidance in 2011, Under Secretary for Food Safety Elisabeth Hagen put it plainly: “Now there will only be 3 numbers to remember: 145 for whole meats, 160 for ground meats and 165 for all poultry.” Here is the full safe-minimum chart, straight from USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov:

Two details from the FSIS chart that people miss: the temperature must be reached before the food leaves the heat source, and the agency notes you are free to cook to higher temperatures for preference. One detail people miss even more often: at 145°F, the 3-minute rest is not a serving suggestion. It is part of the safety standard — the time at temperature finishes the job the heat started. Never separate the number from the rest.

Safety floor vs. doneness preference: how to read this chart

Every table below has two kinds of numbers, and they answer two different questions.

The USDA safe minimums answer “is this safe?” They are deliberately conservative, they apply to everyone, and they are the only numbers on this page we present as a recommendation.

The doneness ranges answer “how do I like it?” Many of them — medium-rare steak at 130°F, salmon at 125°F — sit below the USDA floor. They come from thermometer makers, test kitchens, and food-science writers, and they are widely used by restaurants and home cooks. We report them with attribution, as the preferences they are; per our editorial policy, we never dress a preference up as a safety number. If you are cooking for older adults, pregnant women, young children, or anyone with a weakened immune system, cook to the USDA minimums. Full stop.

Beef, lamb, and veal: steaks, chops, and roasts

The USDA floor for whole cuts is 145°F with at least a 3-minute rest. Below it live the doneness ranges most steakhouses actually cook to. ThermoWorks publishes the ranges in the table below and notes the same temperatures apply to every cut — the proteins in a filet behave the same as the proteins in a strip steak. Serious Eats’ sous vide steak guide lands within a degree or two of the same bands, and adds a memorable data point from its testing: a steak cooked to 160°F lost more than ten times as much juice as one cooked to 120°F, with medium-well meat turning noticeably dry and cottony.

*Pull temps here use ThermoWorks’ baseline of roughly 5°F below target for thin-to-average steaks. Hot-and-fast grilling and thick cuts carry further — 10–15°F is possible. The carryover section below has the details.

One caveat that moves a cut from the 145°F column to stricter treatment: blade-tenderized or mechanically tenderized meat. ThermoWorks warns that undercooking — especially below 125°F — carries real risk for ground or mechanically tenderized meat, because the tenderizing needles do what grinding does: push surface bacteria into the interior. If the label says tenderized, treat it more like ground meat than like a steak.

Pork: the 2011 rule change, and why pink is fine

For decades, American home cooks incinerated pork to 160°F. Then, on May 24, 2011, the USDA lowered the recommendation for whole cuts of pork to 145°F with a 3-minute rest — the same standard as beef, veal, and lamb. The agency was explicit that pork cooked to 145°F may still be pink in the middle, and that is fine. A juicy, blush-centered pork chop is not undercooked; it is cooked to the modern standard.

Note the last row. The 2011 change applied to whole cuts only. Ground pork — sausage included — stayed at 160°F, for the reason covered next.

Poultry: the 165°F rule and the fine print

The USDA gives poultry one number with no exceptions in its chart: 165°F, for whole birds, parts, ground chicken and turkey, giblets, and stuffing. That number was itself a simplification — Food Safety News reported that the poultry recommendation came down from 180°F in 2006 — and it is built around salmonella, the most heat-resistant pathogen of concern in poultry. At 165°F, salmonella dies essentially instantly.

Two pieces of fine print, one in each direction.

Higher is better for dark meat. Thighs and drumsticks are safe at 165°F but genuinely better above 170°F, because their connective tissue needs higher temperatures to melt into gelatin. ThermoWorks and Serious Eats both point to 170–175°F and up; the Pitmaster Club forum consensus runs 175–185°F, with members describing thighs pulled at 165°F as unpleasantly rubbery. As one recurring forum framing puts it: 165 is about safety; everything above it is about texture.

Lower is possible — with time, and with caveats. Heat kills pathogens as a function of temperature and time. Per USDA FSIS Appendix A (as reported by Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen), chicken is pasteurized not only instantly at 165°F but also when held at lower temperatures — worst-case figures for fattier chicken:

This is how sous vide chicken works, and it is why some cooks pull breasts below 165°F. ThermoWorks even verified the math on a roast chicken with data loggers: a bird pulled at 145°F stayed at or above 145°F for 15 minutes during its rest — comfortably past the roughly 8.5 minutes it needed for pasteurization. A leave-in alarm thermometer with a low-temperature alarm, like ThermoWorks’ ChefAlarm, is what makes a hold like that verifiable rather than hopeful. Worth knowing: even among serious barbecue folks this is contested territory — BBQ Brethren threads on 145°F chicken are full of people who tried it and went back to 150–155°F because they disliked the texture. Lower-temperature chicken is a choice, not an upgrade.

The caveat that is not optional: hold-time methods demand accurate measurement and real time-keeping. ThermoWorks itself recommends plain 165°F for anyone cooking for high-risk individuals — older adults, pregnant women, young children, the immunocompromised. If that describes your table, use 165°F and skip the fine print entirely.

Fish and shellfish

The federal floor for fish is 145°F — at which point, nearly every test kitchen agrees, salmon is thoroughly overcooked. Fish proteins are different: Food & Wine notes they begin coagulating around 120°F versus roughly 140°F for meat, and ThermoWorks points out fish has almost no collagen, so it loses moisture faster than beef as the temperature climbs.

Chef Michael Cimarusti of Providence, quoted by Food & Wine, favors medium-rare salmon and pulls wild fish at 115–120°F to carry to 120–125°F. Serious Eats’ Kenji López-Alt puts medium-rare salmon at 110–125°F and describes 140°F-plus as steam-table territory; the white albumin that clumps on overcooked salmon starts forcing its way out between 125 and 140°F. As with chicken, held-time pasteurization exists for fish too — America’s Test Kitchen notes a 1-inch fillet held at 131°F for 5 hours (a sous vide scenario) is pasteurized — but the honest framing stands: anything below 145°F is a preference, and high-risk diners should get the floor.

Shellfish get visual cues from FoodSafety.gov rather than a practical probe target:

Ground meats, eggs, and everything else

Why does grinding add 15 degrees? Because bacteria live on the surface of whole muscle, and the surface is what sears. Grinding redistributes that surface bacteria throughout the meat — the explanation the USDA gave with its 2011 announcement — so the center of a burger needs the treatment the outside of a steak gets. That is the entire logic of the 160°F rule, and it applies to anything ground, no matter how premium the beef.

Carryover cooking: why you pull early

Meat keeps cooking after it leaves the heat. The outer layers are hotter than the center, and that stored heat keeps flowing inward while the meat rests — so if you cook to your target temperature, you will coast past it. Food-science writer Harold McGee, cited by ThermoWorks, puts the spread at anywhere from a negligible couple of degrees in a thin cut to about 20°F in a large roast.

ThermoWorks ran the experiment and published numbers, and they are worth staring at — the same food carries over twice as much or more from a hotter oven:

The working rules, per ThermoWorks and America’s Test Kitchen:

America’s Test Kitchen adds a heat-level nuance for thin cuts: off at 120°F over high heat, 125°F over moderate heat, for a medium-rare landing. Mass, oven temperature, and the type of meat all matter — which is exactly why a leave-in probe that watches the climb beats a single spot check on anything big.

Where to put the probe

A perfect chart with a badly placed probe still gives a wrong answer. You are hunting for the thermal center — the coolest spot in the food, usually the middle of the thickest part.

• Push through, then pull back slowly. ThermoWorks’ technique: insert the probe most of the way through, then withdraw it slowly, watching the display for the lowest reading. A fast instant-read like the Thermapen shows the temperature gradient in real time as the tip travels.
• Avoid bone. Bone conducts heat and reads high, telling you the meat is done before it is.
• Go in from the side on thin cuts. For burgers, chops, and chicken breasts, insert at an angle from the side so the tip sits in the center instead of punching through — the standard technique among the grilling community, echoed across Big Green Egg forum threads.
• Whole birds get two checks. The deepest part of the breast, avoiding bone, is the lowest-temperature spot — that is your 165°F check. Then check the thigh separately, where ThermoWorks targets 170–175°F for texture.

And placement only helps if the thermometer itself reads true. A probe that has drifted a few degrees quietly breaks every table on this page — our 5-minute calibration guide covers the ice-bath and boiling-point checks that catch it.

Resting: it is not optional

Resting does two jobs. The quality job: while meat rests, the steep temperature gradient between the hot exterior and cooler center evens out, and the juices that would have flooded the cutting board stay in the slice. (Serious Eats notes sous vide steaks barely need a rest at all — there is almost no gradient to settle.) The safety job matters more: at 145°F, the USDA’s 3-minute rest is load-bearing. The standard is 145°F and 3 minutes, time during which the temperature holds or climbs and pathogen kill continues. Skipping the rest on a 145°F chop is not skipping a nicety; it is stopping short of the spec.

The thermometer makes the chart work

Every number above assumes one thing: that you can actually measure it, quickly and accurately, mid-cook. Color lies, timing charts lie, and poking with a finger is folklore — the thermometer is the whole ballgame. For spot checks, a fast instant-read is the tool: ThermoWorks’ premium Thermapen ONE reads in under a second to a rated ±0.5°F, while its budget ThermoPop 2 gives up a little speed for a much friendlier price. For roasts, whole birds, and anything low-and-slow, a leave-in alarm probe like the DOT or ChefAlarm watches the climb so you catch your pull temperature instead of discovering you passed it. Our full guide to the best kitchen thermometers covers which type belongs in which kitchen, the Thermapen vs ThermoPop vs budget instant-reads comparison settles the speed-versus-price question, and the best leave-in probe thermometers roundup handles the set-it-and-watch-it category.

Bookmark the chart. Trust the probe.

Sources

• USDA FSIS: Safe Minimum Internal Temperature Chart
• FoodSafety.gov: Safe Minimum Internal Temperatures
• USDA: Cooking Meat? Check the New Recommended Temperatures
• NPR: A Little Pink Is OK — USDA Revises Cooking Temperature for Pork
• CIDRAP: USDA — 145 Degrees a Safe Temp for Pork
• Food Safety News: USDA’s New Recommended Pork Cooking Temp — 145°F
• ThermoWorks: Steak Temperature Guide
• ThermoWorks: Carryover Cooking — What Happens After You Cook
• ThermoWorks: Safe Chicken Temperature
• ThermoWorks: Thermal Tips — Simple Roasted Chicken
• ThermoWorks: Recommended Temperatures for Seafood
• Serious Eats: The Food Lab’s Complete Guide to Sous Vide Steak
• Serious Eats: Safe Chicken Temperatures — Time and Temp
• Serious Eats: Perfect Roast Chicken
• Serious Eats: How to Pan-Fry Salmon
• America’s Test Kitchen: All About Carryover Cooking
• America’s Test Kitchen: Is It Safe to Cook Chicken Below 165 Degrees?
• America’s Test Kitchen: Ideal Doneness Temperature for Wild Salmon
• Food & Wine: How to Cook Salmon Perfectly
• Pitmaster Club: What Is the Internal Temp for Chicken Thighs?
• Big Green Egg Forum: Thermapen technique and carryover reports
• BBQ Brethren: Thoughts on Pulling Whole Chicken at 145