Oil Smoke Point Chart

Every smoke point chart on the internet gives you one number per oil, and that number is wrong in a specific, predictable way. It is not wrong because the source was careless. It is wrong because the thing being measured is not a property of the plant. It is a property of the particular bottle in front of you, including how it was processed, how acidic it happens to be, how long it has sat in the cupboard, and how many batches of chips it has already fried.

I ran a restaurant group’s test kitchen for four years, which meant buying oil by the twenty litre box and watching what happened to it across a service rather than across a photograph. The single most useful thing I learned about smoke points is that the number matters enormously in two situations and almost not at all in the rest of them, and that nearly all the anxiety about it lands in the wrong place.

So here is the chart, because that is what you came for. Then the part no chart carries: why the sources disagree by two hundred degrees on the same oil, what actually produces the smoke, and which cooking methods the number genuinely governs.

The Chart

Canola or rapeseed sold as expeller-pressed and unrefined is quoted across a very wide band of 375 to 450°F, or 190 to 232°C, which tells you something on its own.

These figures are compiled from Gunstone’s Vegetable Oils in Food Technology (Wiley, 2011), the Culinary Institute of America’s The Professional Chef, ninth edition, 2011, the American Oil Chemists’ Society, Detwiler and Markley in Oil & Soap 17(2), 1940, the North American Olive Oil Association, and manufacturer spec sheets.

The Form column is the one that matters, and most charts do not have it. Look at sunflower: 225°F unrefined at the bottom of the table, 486 to 489°F fully refined near the top. That is the same seed with a 264 degree spread inside it. Coconut runs 350°F unrefined and 400°F refined. Safflower runs 225, 320 and 510°F across three processing states. If a chart gives you one line that says “sunflower oil, 450°F”, it has silently picked one of those states and thrown the rest away, and there is no way to tell from the bottle in your hand which one it picked. Read the Form column first and the temperature second.

Why No Two Charts Agree

Put four reputable sources next to each other on olive oil and you get four different answers. Extra virgin at 374°F in one, high quality low acidity extra virgin at 405°F in another, virgin at 410°F in a third, and refined light or pure anywhere from 390 to 470°F. That last one is not somebody’s sloppy estimate. It is the North American Olive Oil Association’s own published range for a single grade, an eighty degree spread from the trade body with the most reason to be precise about it.

Avocado oil is no better behaved. The 520°F refined figure that dominates search results traces to consumer sources such as What’s Cooking America. Meanwhile the American Oil Chemists’ Society published its own account of unrefined avocado oil, by Wong, Requejo-Jackman and Woolf in inform, April 2010, putting virgin at 392°F and extra virgin at 482°F. Three numbers, one fruit, and every one of them defensible.

The reflex is to assume somebody measured badly. Almost nobody did. These are different oils wearing the same name on a label, and the label is legally entitled to carry that name across a range of chemistry wide enough to move the smoke point by hundreds of degrees. Once you understand what the number is actually tracking, the disagreement stops looking like sloppiness and starts looking inevitable.

What Actually Makes an Oil Smoke

The smoke is mostly acrolein, and acrolein forms when the glycerol backbone of a triglyceride that has already been partially broken apart decomposes. That last clause is the whole story. An intact triglyceride is stable. One that has been hydrolysed, meaning a fatty acid has already come loose from the glycerol, is not. So the amount of free fatty acid floating in the oil is what sets the temperature at which visible smoke begins.

Wikipedia’s own caution note on the standard table, adapted from Gunstone, states it about as bluntly as a reference work ever does. Published smoke, flash and fire points “can be misleading: they depend almost entirely upon the free fatty acid content, which increases during storage or use.”

That claim was quantified properly in 2025. Díez-Betriu and colleagues published “Deciphering the Complexity of Smoke Point in Virgin Olive Oils to Develop Simple Predictive Models” in Foods, and found free fatty acid content to be the main determinant, in a strong inverse relationship. A Gaussian process model using free fatty acid content alone predicted smoke point with an R squared of 0.88. Saturated fatty acid content and oxidative stability index pushed the smoke point up; secondary oxidation products, measured as K268, pulled it down. And the detail that explains the olive oil mess specifically: EU rules allow virgin olive oil to carry up to 2 percent free fatty acids, which is a wide enough allowance that two bottles of the same legal grade can sit a long way apart on the chart.

Four consequences follow directly.

Refining is what buys the high number. Neutralising, bleaching and deodorising strip out exactly the free fatty acids, solids, water and minor compounds that decompose first. Same seed, different process, two hundred degrees of difference. That is why refined sunflower sits near the top of the chart and cold-pressed sunflower sits at the bottom.

The number falls as the bottle ages. Hydrolysis continues slowly in storage, free fatty acid content rises, and the smoke point drifts down. The chart is a fresh bottle ceiling, not a permanent property.

The number falls faster in a fryer. Every batch of food puts water into hot oil, and water plus heat is exactly the condition for hydrolysis. Frying oil is measurably closer to smoking after each use.

And the measurement itself is a person watching for smoke. This is the part that surprises people, and I have never seen it on a competitor’s chart. The AOCS procedure is a human observer looking for the first wisp of continuous smoke off a heated sample. The 2025 team had to reassess and optimise that procedure to get repeatable readings: they found the light source position specified by the Chinese National Standard gave clearer observation than the AOCS placement, and that using a 6500 K LED bulb significantly reduced variability. The published number depends in part on where the lamp sat in the lab. That is not a scandal, it is an honest limit on a visual endpoint, but it should adjust how much precision you read into a figure quoted to the degree.

Smoke Point, Flash Point, Fire Point

Smoke point is the first rung of a three-rung ladder, and the other two rungs almost never get mentioned, which leaves people assuming smoke means imminent fire. It does not. Considerably above the smoke point sits the flash point, the temperature at which vapour coming off the oil will ignite in air if there is an ignition source present, and above that the fire point, where the oil sustains a flame on its own. The gap between the first rung and the second is large, which is why a pan that has started smoking is a ruined dinner rather than an emergency.

Two things are worth taking from that. The first is that a smoking pan gives you real warning, so use it: pull the pan, do not push through. The second is that all three temperatures move together and for the same reason. The caution note attached to the standard table is explicit that smoke, flash and fire points alike “depend almost entirely upon the free fatty acid content”, so an old bottle or a tired fryer has lowered its ignition margin along with its smoke point. That is the actual argument for not frying in oil you have pushed past its useful life, and it is a better one than any number on a chart.

Smoke Point Is Not the Same Question as Stability

There is a well-known study arguing that the whole metric is the wrong one, and I want to give you both the finding and the reason to read it carefully.

de Alzaa, Guillaume and Ravetti published “Evaluation of Chemical and Physical Changes in Different Commercial Oils during Heating” in Acta Scientific Nutritional Health 2(6) in 2018. Their conclusion was that smoke point does not predict oil performance when heated, that oxidative stability tracked performance far better, and that extra virgin olive oil performed best of the oils tested.

Now the disclosure, because it belongs in the same breath and it usually gets left out. The authors are at Modern Olives Laboratory Services, an olive industry laboratory, and the finding is actively promoted by the North American Olive Oil Association. That is an interested party publishing a result favourable to its own product, in a journal most cooks have never heard of. Anyone citing it without saying so is not giving you the full picture, and I am not going to do that.

The underlying mechanism is nonetheless well supported independently. Polyphenols act as antioxidants and a high proportion of oleic acid, a monounsaturated fat with a single double bond, is genuinely more resistant to oxidation than the polyunsaturated fats that dominate many seed oils. So the finding is plausible and the source is not neutral, and both of those things are true at once.

The useful way to hold it is that smoke point and oxidative stability answer two different questions. Smoke point answers “when does this taste burnt and set off the alarm”, which is tonight’s problem. Oxidative stability answers “how fast does this degrade while it sits at temperature”, which is the problem for anyone running a fryer they refill rather than empty. A home cook mostly needs the first. A fryer needs the second.

Match the Oil to the Method, Not to the Biggest Number

This is the section that should replace most of what gets written about smoke points, because the chart’s relevance changes completely depending on what the oil is physically doing in the pan. Every chart online tells you an oil’s ceiling. None of them tells you what the floor under it looks like, which is the number you actually need to compare it against.

The stove top, deep frying and oven figures come from the standard reference table’s own notes on cooking temperatures. The 750°F wok measurement is America’s Test Kitchen’s, taken over a conventional domestic gas burner. Read down that table and the pattern is hard to miss: the three methods people worry about most are the three where the chart barely matters, and the one that outruns every oil ever measured is the one nobody frames as a smoke point problem at all.

Deep frying is the case where the chart barely constrains you. The oil is the cooking medium, so its temperature is simply the temperature you set, and that is 325 to 375°F for practically everything worth frying. Wikipedia’s own figure for the method is 160 to 180°C, or 320 to 356°F. Nearly every oil on the chart clears that with room to spare, so the decision comes down to cost, neutrality and how the oil holds up over repeated batches. Use long kitchen tongs rather than a slotted spoon for anything you want to lower in gently, because the thing that actually ruins a fry is food dropped from height into oil that then splashes and cools.

Pan searing is the case where the dial lies to you. Here the oil is a thin film pressed between metal and food, so it does not equilibrate with your burner setting or with the food. It equilibrates with the pan surface, and a cast iron or carbon steel pan preheated properly runs far hotter than the number on the knob suggests and far hotter than the food sitting in it. Wikipedia’s figure for pan frying and sautéing on stove top heat is 120°C, or 248°F, which is an honest description of a gentle sauté and nothing like the surface of a properly preheated skillet. This is the method where an unrefined oil will genuinely embarrass you, and where a refined one with a 450°F ceiling stops being overkill.

In a wok it is not close. America’s Test Kitchen measured wok bottoms exceeding 750°F over a conventional domestic gas burner. Nothing on the chart survives that. Not refined avocado at 520°F, not refined safflower at 510°F, nothing. This is why restaurant practice looks the way it does: refined peanut, soybean or rice bran oil for the cooking, and toasted sesame oil added off the heat as a finishing seasoning rather than a cooking fat, because at 350°F it is a flavouring that would simply incinerate in the bowl. The full mechanism, including what the smoke is contributing to the flavour, is in our guide to wok hei, and the practical batch sizes and stage timings are in how to use a wok. Two appliance exceptions are worth knowing, because they change the maths entirely: a sealed nonstick electric wok is thermostatically capped at roughly 400 to 425°F, which puts almost every oil on the chart comfortably in range, while induction wok cooktops run to about 575°F. A heavy cast iron wok holds heat rather than recovering it, so it spends longer at the high end of whatever it reaches, and carbon steel models in our wok roundup respond faster in both directions.

Roasting is the case people worry about needlessly. Oil on food in a hot oven is not at oven temperature. Food holds around 212°F or below until its surface has actually dried out, and evaporating water pins it there, so a 425°F oven does not put your olive oil at 425°F. Wikipedia’s figure for oven baking is about 180°C, or 356°F, and the thin film on a tray of vegetables tracks the food far more closely than the air. Extra virgin olive oil at 374°F is entirely serviceable for roasting, right up until the tray goes dry and the edges start to catch, which is the moment you see smoke. If you are prepping enough vegetables for that to be a regular problem, a food processor with a slicing disc gets everything to a uniform thickness, and uniform pieces dry out at the same time rather than one corner of the tray smoking while the rest is still steaming.

On a grill the chart is nearly irrelevant, and the oil still is not. Grate temperatures run well past any oil’s smoke point, so oil on the food is going to smoke, and that is part of the point. What matters there is not letting oil drip and flare, which means wiping food rather than dousing it and turning with grill tongs long enough to keep your forearm out of the flare when it happens.

Seasoning Reads the Chart Backwards

One job in the kitchen deliberately runs past the smoke point, and it is worth naming so the rest of this makes sense. Seasoning carbon steel or cast iron is polymerisation, where heat past the point of thermal breakdown generates free radicals that cross-link the fatty acid chains into a hard film bonded to the metal. There you want the oil to break down, and a low smoke point is an advantage rather than a defect, which is precisely the opposite of every other use in this article. The mechanics are covered properly in our guide to seasoning a cast iron skillet.

What Is Actually in the Bottle

Everything above assumes the label is true. For one oil in particular, testing says it frequently is not, and this is the second reason a chart cannot be trusted to the degree.

Green and Wang at UC Davis published “First report on quality and purity evaluations of avocado oil sold in the US” in Food Control in 2020. They found that 82 percent of bottled samples were either rancid before their printed expiration date or mixed with cheaper oils, with soybean oil adulteration turning up in bottles labelled “extra virgin” and “pure”. That is bottled oil, the thing you pour out of a bottle at home.

The Wang lab returned to the subject in July 2026, reported by UC Davis News on 15 July, with a different target: processed foods that advertise avocado oil on the front of the pack. Of 54 avocado-oil-labelled processed foods tested, 89 percent failed authenticity testing even with a 10 percent deviation margin allowed for cultivar and origin differences. Broken out by category, 93 percent of chips failed, 71 percent of mayonnaises, and 100 percent of salad dressings. The same team ran the same tests on 20 olive-oil-labelled products and only one failed. Their stated explanation is straightforward: olive oil authenticity has been scrutinised, standardised and enforced for decades, while avocado oil is new, expensive and unmonitored, with no enforceable US standard defining what the words even mean.

Keep the two studies distinct, because they are often blurred together. The 2020 paper is about bottled oil. The 2026 work is about processed foods carrying an avocado oil claim. Both point the same way, at different shelves.

The practical upshot for this page: a bottle that is rancid or cut with soybean oil does not have the 520°F smoke point printed on every chart on the internet, including the one above. Free fatty acid content is what sets the smoke point, rancidity is what raises free fatty acid content, and 82 percent of a sampled category was rancid or adulterated. If you want avocado oil, buy from a producer that publishes third-party test results. If what you actually want is the high ceiling, refined peanut, rice bran or high-oleic sunflower all sit at 450°F, cost considerably less, and come from categories nobody has found systematically faked.

The Rules I Actually Cook By

Match the oil to the method rather than to the biggest number on the shelf. The ceiling you need for deep frying is low, the ceiling you need for a wok does not exist, and most of the distance between those two is technique rather than shopping.

Refined and neutral for anything hotter than a sauté. Unrefined and flavourful either off the heat or at low heat, where the compounds you paid for survive to reach the plate.

Toasted sesame, extra virgin olive, flaxseed and walnut are finishing oils. They are expensive precisely because of the aromatic compounds and free fatty acids that burn, and heating them hard destroys the thing you bought.

If it smokes, it is already past useful. Pull the pan off the heat, do not push through it. The flavour is gone from that oil and it will not come back, and continuing to cook only moves the food toward the taste of the smoke.

And treat every number on the chart as a fresh bottle ceiling rather than a guarantee. It drops as the bottle ages on the shelf and it drops again with every batch that goes through a fryer, for the same reason in both cases. The chart tells you where an oil starts. What it cannot tell you is where yours is today.