Oven Error Codes, Explained by Brand

Do not force the door. During a self-clean cycle the oven runs at 800°F or more and deliberately locks the door for safety; codes like Whirlpool F5, GE F9, Frigidaire F90–F94, and LG F10 are door-latch faults that usually appear because of that heat. The right move is to turn the oven off and let it fully cool — often an hour or more — because most latch mechanisms only release once the interior drops below a safe temperature. After it cools, try a power cycle at the breaker. If the door still won't unlock or the code stays, the latch motor or switch needs a tech. Forcing a locked self-cleaning door can damage the latch and burn you.

An over-temp code — GE F2/F20, Frigidaire F10, Samsung C-24, and on some older Whirlpool models F2 — means the oven measured a higher temperature than it should. The common cause is a welded bake relay that keeps feeding the heating element even after the oven reaches temperature. If the oven is actually still heating and climbing, that's the one situation where you should shut it off at the circuit breaker rather than just pressing cancel, then call for service. If it simply threw the code and cooled down normally, it's a control-board or sensor diagnosis rather than an emergency.

A temperature-sensor (RTD) fault is the single most common one that isn't self-clean-related. Whirlpool shows F3-E0, GE shows F3 or F4, Frigidaire shows F30 or F31, and LG shows F1 or F2 — all meaning the oven's temperature sensor is reading open or shorted. The sensor is an inexpensive part, but it lives inside the oven and has to be tested against spec (a healthy one reads roughly 1080–1100 ohms at room temperature) and replaced, which is a tech job. The good news is it's usually a quick, affordable fix rather than a new oven.

Some of them. A power cycle — shut the oven off at the breaker for a minute, then restore power — clears many one-off control glitches and stuck-state codes. A stuck-key or touchpad code (Whirlpool F2-E0, GE F0/F1/F7, LG F3) sometimes clears after you gently clean grease and moisture off the control panel and reset. And a self-clean latch code often clears on its own once the oven fully cools. What you should not do is open the control console, bypass the door latch, or keep running an oven that's overheating. Sensor, relay, latch-motor, and control-board codes are tech jobs.

Newer Whirlpool, KitchenAid, and Maytag ovens use a two-part Fx-Ey format — the F number is the fault family and the E number is the specific sub-fault (for example F3-E0 is the oven temperature sensor). Older units of the same brands used a single digit like F1, F2, F3. They overlap loosely but not perfectly, and one code can mean different things across model years — older single-digit F2, for instance, is documented as over-temperature on some models and a stuck key on others. Because of that, the safest read on any specific oven is its own model manual alongside the general meaning here.