Ask ten chefs what the legal maximum temperature for a commercial fridge is, and nine will say 5 °C. They are wrong, and the gap between what most kitchens think the rule is and what it actually says is where most of the trouble starts.
This is a short guide to the law as it stands in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2026, what Scotland does differently, and the small set of records that turns a fridge that is running hot into a problem you have already solved on paper before an Environmental Health Officer (EHO) walks in.
The legal maximum: 8 °C, not 5 °C
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 (and the equivalents elsewhere) require chilled food that supports the growth of pathogens to be held at or below 8 °C. That is the legal maximum, and it is the number an EHO will use against you in a prosecution.
It is not the number you should be running at.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) recommends operating at or below 5 °C as best practice. Two reasons:
- Headroom. A fridge sitting at 5 °C can drift by two or three degrees during a busy lunch service, when the door is opening every thirty seconds, and still be legal. A fridge sitting at 7 °C cannot.
- What the EHO expects to see. Inspectors are familiar with 5 °C as the working target. A line of readings hovering at 7 to 8 °C is technically compliant and practically a red flag. It tells the inspector your unit is at the edge of its working capacity, or your team is not checking it often enough.
Freezers, hot holding and the rest of the temperature rules
Fridges are the most common source of trouble, but they are not the only thing the law cares about.
- Freezers: at or below −18 °C. There is no official tolerance here. A unit creeping to −15 °C is not “close”, it is failing.
- Hot holding (bain-marie, hot cabinet, carvery): at or above 63 °C. There is a two-hour tolerance for display, after which food has to be used, cooled and stored, or thrown.
- Cooking and reheating: core temperature of 75 °C in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; 82 °C in Scotland. The Scottish rule is in the CookSafe pack, not SFBB.
- Cooling: food should reach room temperature within 90 minutes before going into the fridge, and reach 8 °C inside the fridge as quickly as possible after that. The 90-minute window is the bit most kitchens forget about.
These four numbers, plus the 5 °C / 8 °C fridge rule, cover the temperature side of about 80% of HACCP. Print them on the wall.
The Scottish exception
If you are operating in Scotland, the regulator is Food Standards Scotland (FSS), the inspection framework is CookSafe rather than Safer Food Better Business (SFBB), and the cooking and reheating threshold is 82 °C rather than 75. Otherwise the chilled and frozen storage rules are the same. If you are in Glasgow or Edinburgh and using a system written for the English market, double-check the cooking targets it is holding you to.
What “due diligence” actually means
Here is the part most owners miss. The Food Safety Act 1990 gives you a defence called due diligence: if you can show you took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid an offence, you have a defence against prosecution.
Due diligence is a paper-trail defence. It does not matter that you knew the fridge was running hot. It matters that you can prove, with dated records and a corrective action, that you noticed, you acted, and you verified the fix. Verbal assurances and “we always do that” do not count.
In practice, the records that make a due-diligence defence stick are:
- A temperature reading taken at a known time, by a named person.
- For any reading outside the target range, a corrective action: what you did about it (moved the stock, called the engineer, took the unit out of service).
- A verification reading showing the unit came back into range, or evidence you stopped using it.
- Calibration evidence that your probe and your fridge thermometers actually read what they say they read.
Notice that none of this is about the fridge itself. It is about the record around the fridge.
What an EHO is actually checking
When an inspector opens your fridge log, they are not really looking at the temperatures. They are looking at four things, and you can pre-empt all four.
- Are the timestamps real?A diary entry that says “Mon AM 4 °C, Mon PM 4 °C, Tue AM 4 °C, Tue PM 4 °C” written in the same biro on a Friday afternoon is the single most common reason a kitchen loses confidence-in-management points. Inspectors can spot it from across the room.
- Is somebody named on the entry?“Who took this reading?” is a question every EHO asks, and a record without an attributable person is almost as bad as no record.
- What happened when something went wrong? A perfect run of in-range readings for six months, with no out-of-range entries at all, is also suspicious. Fridges fail. Doors get left open. The honest log shows the failures and the fixes.
- Can you produce the last six months in under a minute?This is the question the inspector will not ask out loud, but it is the one that decides how much further they push. A kitchen that hands over six months of records cleanly gets a faster, friendlier inspection. A kitchen that says “let me find the diary” gets the long version.
A working setup for a UK kitchen
If you are starting from scratch, here is a sane configuration for a typical small restaurant:
- Main fridge / undercounter / prep fridges: target 0 to 5 °C. Two readings a day, AM and PM.
- Walk-in cold room: target 0 to 4 °C. Two readings a day. Pay extra attention in summer.
- Display chiller (front of house): target 0 to 5 °C, but expect higher swings during service. Three readings if it is a busy site.
- Walk-in freezer: target −22 to −18 °C. Two readings a day. The freezer is the unit nobody checks until the compressor goes, so put a reminder on it.
- Hot hold: target 63 to 90 °C. Reading at the start of service, every two hours during, and at the end.
Two readings a day is the minimum for cold storage. The closing reading is the one that tends to get missed (we wrote a longer piece on how often you should check fridge temperatures and why it matters). It is also the one that catches a fridge that started failing during service, before twelve hours of stock spoils overnight.
When something goes out of range
The right response to an out-of-range reading is not to take a second reading until you get one you like. It is to:
- Record the original out-of-range reading. Do not overwrite it.
- Take corrective action. Move the stock to another unit, throw what is already at risk, call the engineer, take the unit off line.
- Record what you did.
- Take a verification reading once the unit is back in range, and record that too.
This sequence (problem, action, verification) is HACCP Principle 5. It is also the single most powerful piece of paperwork you can produce in an inspection, because it shows the inspector exactly what they want to see: a kitchen that notices its own problems and fixes them.
How to actually keep the records
This is where most kitchens lose. Paper diaries get soaked, lost, filled in retroactively, or quietly improved on a Friday afternoon. Spreadsheets work for one month and then nobody opens them again. The closing team forgets the PM check because the diary is in the office and the chef is in the walk-in.
If you are starting from paper, the fastest way to set up a workable system is in Lemon, our app for UK kitchens. Each unit gets its own target range, AM and PM readings are timestamped at the moment of entry, and any reading outside its band automatically opens a tracked issue with a corrective action and a verification step. When the EHO asks for the last six months, you export it as a PDF in one tap. The 30-day trial does not need a card.
