Which Rack Position Should You Use in an Air Fryer Oven?

The short answer

Use the position your manual names for the function you selected — every oven on this page publishes one, and they are not the same across brands or even across models within a brand. If you have no manual to hand, the pattern the published figures share is: broil high, toast middle, bake and roast low, air-fry basket high-to-middle. That last one surprises people, and the bake one contradicts what a full-size oven has taught you.

Breville, three positions: the map is printed on the parts diagram

The Smart Oven Pro (BOV845) has three rack heights, and Breville prints the assignment on the labeled parts diagram at the front of the book rather than making you hunt for it:

• Top: BROIL.
• Middle: TOAST, BAGEL, PIZZA and COOKIES.
• Bottom: BAKE, ROAST, REHEAT, WARM and SLOW COOK.

Bake on the bottom is the line worth stopping at. In a full-size range you are taught to bake in the middle, because the cavity is tall and the middle is where the temperature is most even. A countertop oven is not tall: the top element is a few inches from the food, and baking in the middle browns the top of a cake long before the center is done. The bottom position is the countertop equivalent of the middle of a range. Breville adds the caveat itself — some baked goods, such as brownies or pastries, may be more suited to the middle.

The Smart Oven Air Fryer (BOV860) moves two of them

Same three heights, same chassis, and two assignments differ from its sibling. The air-fry basket goes in the top position — the book says so twice, and it is counter-intuitive for anyone expecting the basket to sit low over a drip tray. And BAGEL moves from the middle to the top, because on this model the function directs more heat on the top elements in order to brown and crisp one side more than the other, where on the BOV845 it crisps the insides of your cut bagel while only lightly toasting the outside.

Two ovens, one brand, one chassis, the same button, a different element behavior and a different published rack. That is the comparison this detail came out of.

The BOV900, eight positions, published per function

The Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro has four grooves and a reversible rack, giving — as the book puts it — two rack positions for each groove, eight in total, printed on the left-hand side of the door window. The book names one for nearly every function:

• Broil: position 1 or 2.
• Air fry: basket in position 3.
• Toast and Bagel: position 4.
• Bake, Roast and Cookies: position 6.
• Pizza: position 7, including when preheating a pizza stone.
• Proof, Slow Cook and the drip tray for dehydrating: position 8.
• Warm and Reheat: whichever position best suits the food, which is the book declining to specify.

Read the list and the numbering explains itself: broil — the function that needs to be nearest the top element — is 1 or 2, and proof and slow cook, the two that want to be furthest from it, are 8. Breville numbers from the top down. That is an inference from the assignments rather than a sentence in the book, because the diagram lives on the door window rather than in the text, but it is the only reading consistent with all eleven functions.

For two-rack cooking the book is specific and useful: in most cases, rack positions 3 and 7 or 4 and 8 will give the best results, with the instruction to avoid using the top rack position due to proximity to the heating elements — and the note that when you are using the air-fry and dehydrate baskets rather than pans, you do not need to leave space between positions at all.

Nuwave numbers from the bottom — and publishes a table

The Bravo XL Pro manual gives a rack position for every menu function, with a diagram numbered 1 at the bottom and 4 at the top:

• Toast: position 3, heat split 50/50 top and bottom, default 425°F.
• Broil: position 2 or 3, heat 100 percent from the top, default 500°F.
• Air fry: positions 1 and 3 — the basket at 4 and the baking pan at 3 in the accompanying diagram, with the pan catching drippings.
• Bake: position 1, 2 or 3. Roast: position 1. Cookie: position 2. Proof: position 2. Reheat: any.

So on a Nuwave, broil is at the higher numbers and roast is at 1. On a Breville, broil is at 1 and slow cook is at 8. The numbering runs in opposite directions, and Our Place makes it two against one: its manual states that the wire rack can be used in both rack positions 1 and 2 (bottom and top) — 1 is the bottom there too. If you have ever moved between two of these ovens and found a recipe instruction nonsensical, this is why.

The brands that publish only two or three lines

BLACK+DECKER's TO3250XSB manual gives three, and they are the three that matter: for optimal results use middle rack position for toasting, use middle or lower rack position for baking, and use top rack position for broiling — alongside the instruction to keep food or the baking dish at least 1½ inches from the top elements. That last one is the constraint that quietly decides the rack for a tall dish.

Most other ovens on this site publish nothing at all, which is one of the inputs to the Documentation score behind every ranking here. The rubric is published in full.

What to do with all that

Start from the element that is doing the work. Broiling and bagels want the top element, so they go high. Baking and roasting want even, indirect heat, so they go low, because low in a small cavity is what the middle of a big one feels like. Pizza wants bottom heat into the crust, which is why Breville puts it at 7 of 8.

Put the basket where the manual says, not where the drips would be tidiest. Air-fry baskets sit high on a Breville BOV860 and at the top of the Nuwave diagram, with a pan underneath to catch what falls. Putting the basket low and nothing beneath it is the arrangement that smokes. That page is here.

On two racks, rotate. Every book that permits two-rack cooking also tells you to swap them partway — Breville builds an alert for it into the BOV900, and Nuwave prints flip food or rotate pans halfway through the cooking cycle under most of its functions. No countertop oven is even enough between two levels to skip it.

Check the number of positions before you buy, not after. Three heights is a constraint you will notice; eight is not. It is also one of the few mechanical differences that separates otherwise identical ovens in a range, and it never appears in the headline specification.

The three ovens below are the ones whose full published rack maps are quoted above.