How Long to Cook Pizza at 450°F (2026): Times for Every Crust, Plus 425, 475 and 500

All times assume the oven has fully preheated and, for stone and steel, that the slab has soaked for 45-60 minutes. Standard hand-tossed, homemade (12-14 inch): sheet pan 12-15 minutes, pizza stone 8-10, baking steel 6-8. Thin crust or New York style: sheet pan 10-12, stone 6-8, steel 5-7. Neapolitan-style (high hydration, thin center): stone 7-9, steel 5-7; skip the tray, which cannot crisp it. Deep dish, Chicago style: 20-25 minutes in its pan, lower rack. Sicilian, Detroit, or sheet-pan pizza: 15-20 minutes in its pan, middle rack. Frozen pizza: 12-18 minutes, use the box time, placed directly on a preheated stone or on the rack for the crispest base.

Why the range is so wide: the pizza's own thickness and moisture decide how long heat needs to reach the center, and the surface decides how fast the base crisps. A wet, thick, heavily topped pie at 450°F on a tray is the slowest combination in the chart; a thin dough on a preheated steel is the fastest. The oven rack position matters too: the lower-middle rack is the consensus for a stone or steel (closest to the bottom element without scorching), the middle rack for a pan pizza, and the top rack only for finishing a pie whose cheese is lagging.

Most recipes say 450°F because it is the highest round number most ovens reliably hit, but hotter is almost always better for pizza. At 425°F, add 2-3 minutes to every time above; it is the right choice only for deep dish and heavily loaded pies that need time for the center to cook before the top burns. At 475°F, subtract about 2 minutes and expect a noticeably crisper, more blistered crust. At 500°F (or 550°F if your oven offers it), subtract about 3 minutes; this is where a thin or Neapolitan-style pizza starts to resemble a pizzeria pie, with leopard-spotted edges and a base that crackles. On a steel at 500°F a thin pizza can be done in 5 minutes.

The rule the baking community has converged on: use the highest setting your oven has for thin pizzas, and 450°F for everything else. The reason high heat works is that it sets the crust's outside fast, trapping steam inside for oven spring while the base crisps before the toppings can dry out. The exception is a thick or wet pie, where 500°F burns the edge before the middle sets; those want 425-450°F and time. For the full picture of what temperature each style wants, including real pizza ovens at 700°F-plus, see our pizza temperature guide and the oven temperature chart.

An oven's thermostat reads the air, which reaches 450°F in 10-15 minutes. A pizza stone or steel is a slab of mass that needs far longer to saturate: the consensus is 45 minutes minimum, an hour for a thick stone. Put a pizza on a stone that has only had the oven's 15-minute preheat and you get the worst of both worlds, a slab that pulls heat out of the dough instead of pushing it in, and a base that comes out paler than it would have on a plain tray. This single mistake is behind most "my pizza stone doesn't work" complaints.

If you want to stop guessing, an infrared thermometer reads the slab surface in a second: at a 450°F oven setting, the stone should read roughly 430-450°F before the pizza launches, and if it reads 350°F it needs another twenty minutes. Steel saturates faster than stone, about 30-45 minutes, because it conducts heat through itself quickly. Our guide to pizza stone temperature and preheat times goes deeper, and how to use a pizza stone covers launch, rotation, and care.

Every time in this guide is a starting point; the pizza tells you when it is done. Cue one, the cheese: fully melted and bubbling across the whole surface, with at least a few browned spots. Melted-but-flat cheese means the pie needs another minute or two. Cue two, the edge: golden brown, with darker blistered spots if the oven runs hot. A pale edge is underdone; a uniformly dark brown edge with a pale center means the oven is too hot for that dough. Cue three, the underside: lift an edge with a spatula or peel and look. You want brown, with some char spotting on a stone or steel. A pale, soft underside is the signature of a tray bake or an unsaturated stone.

If the top is done and the bottom is pale, you have a surface problem that more time will not solve without drying the toppings; next time, preheat a stone or steel. If the bottom is done and the top is pale, move the rack up one position or finish 60-90 seconds under the broiler, the home-oven stand-in for a pizza oven's dome heat. Rotating the pizza 180 degrees at the halfway mark, with a turning peel or a big spatula, evens out the hot spots every home oven has.

Most frozen pizzas are formulated for 400-450°F and 12-18 minutes, and the box is usually right about time. Where the box is conservative is the surface: it will tell you a sheet pan is fine, and it is, but directly on the oven rack produces a visibly crisper base, and directly on a preheated stone produces the best frozen pizza your oven can make, often 2 minutes faster than the box says. The one caution with a stone is thermal shock from a frozen disc landing on a 450°F slab; a cordierite stone like the Unicook handles it, a cheap ceramic one may not, and a steel does not care.

For a frozen deep dish or rising-crust pizza, follow the box and use the middle rack on a tray; these need the slower, more even cook and will burn on a stone. For a thin-crust frozen pie, 450°F on a preheated stone or rack for 10-12 minutes is the move, and 475°F cuts another minute with a crisper result. Do not thaw first; a thawed frozen pizza goes soggy on the way to the oven. If you bake frozen or homemade pizza every week, the right stone or steel is the single upgrade that changes the result most, for less than the cost of three delivery pies.