Free Kitchen Inspection Checklist: 25 Questions Before Your Food Hygiene Inspection

Our free kitchen inspection self-check asks 25 quick yes-or-no questions about your kitchen and turns every gap into a to-do list, with the posters, record sheets and free training that fix each one. It takes about five minutes, works for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and is available in 15 languages.

Written from Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland guidance, checked on 5 October 2026. Open the tool: free kitchen inspection self-check.

The Food Standards Agency describes a food hygiene rating as a snapshot of the standards found at the time of inspection. The officer judges what they find on the day. The businesses that do well are rarely the ones that tidied up the night before. They are the ones whose daily checks, cleaning and records are simply part of how the kitchen runs. This checklist helps you see, honestly and in private, where you stand before anyone else looks.

What a food hygiene inspector looks at

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, a food safety officer from your local council inspects your business and checks it follows food hygiene law. The Food Standards Agency says the officer looks at three things:

• How hygienically food is handled: how it is prepared, cooked, reheated, cooled and stored.
• The physical condition of the business: including cleanliness, layout, lighting, ventilation, pest control and other facilities.
• How you manage food safety: your processes, training and systems, which tell the officer how confident they can be that good standards will be kept up.

You then get a food hygiene rating from 5 (very good) to 0 (urgent improvement is necessary), at the inspection or in writing within 14 days. To get a 5, you have to do well in all three areas. How often you are inspected depends on the risk: from every six months for the highest-risk businesses to every two years for lower-risk ones.

In Scotland, inspections lead to a result under the Food Hygiene Information Scheme instead: Pass if the business meets the legal requirements for food hygiene, or Improvement Required if it doesn’t.

The 25 questions

The self-check follows the same three areas, so your to-do list lines up with what an officer will actually look at.

• Handling food and temperatures (10 questions): fridge checks, probing cooked food, reheating, hot holding, cooling, keeping raw meat and ready-to-eat food apart, hand washing, the 48-hour sickness rule, allergen information, and use-by dates and labels.
• Cleaning, pests and the building (7 questions): a written cleaning schedule, two-stage cleaning with the right disinfectant, pest checks, repairs, lighting, ventilation and sinks, cleaning cloths, and bins.
• Managing food safety (8 questions): a written food safety management system such as Safer Food, Better Business, keeping it up to date, daily records, staff training, deliveries and suppliers, the actions from your last inspection, someone on every shift who knows the system, and registering your business with the council.

How to use the self-check

1. Open the kitchen inspection self-check and choose where your kitchen is. Scotland has some different rules, and the questions change to match.
2. Answer each question Yes, No or Not sure. Be honest: “Not sure” is a useful answer, because if you can’t be sure, an inspector won’t be either.
3. Read your to-do list. Every No and Not sure becomes a task with a short fix and links to the free posters, record sheets, answer pages and training that help.
4. Download the to-do list as a PDF to work through with your team, and save the check to your account so you can compare next time. Downloading and saving need a free account; your answers are kept while you sign up.
5. Run the check again every month or so, and whenever something changes: a new menu, new staff or a new supplier.

If your kitchen is in Scotland

Choose Scotland at the start and the self-check uses Food Standards Scotland’s guidance where the rules differ:

• Reheated food must reach at least 82°C in the centre, unless that would spoil it.
• Hot-held food must be kept above 63°C.
• There is no fixed legal maximum fridge temperature, but CookSafe recommends running fridges at 5°C or below.
• The food safety management system it points to is CookSafe, Food Standards Scotland’s free pack, instead of Safer Food, Better Business.

What it is not

This is a checklist, not a rating. Only your council’s food safety officer can give a food hygiene rating or a Food Hygiene Information Scheme result, and no checklist can predict one. The self-check helps you find gaps. It isn’t legal advice, and it doesn’t replace your own food safety management system.

Checks in your team’s language

The self-check, the to-do list and the PDF work in English, Welsh, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Arabic. Every link on the to-do list goes to the poster, tool or course in the same language wherever we have one.

Sources

• Food Standards Agency: Food Hygiene Rating Scheme guidance for businesses
• Food Standards Scotland: Food Hygiene Information Scheme
• Food Standards Agency: Safer Food, Better Business