Can You Put Knives in the Dishwasher? The Real Answer

Short answer: no. You can put knives in the dishwasher, but you should not. The heat, the detergent and the knocking against other items dull the edge, corrode the steel and wreck wooden handles. Hand washing a knife takes about twenty seconds.

What a dishwasher actually does to a knife

"Don't put knives in the dishwasher" gets repeated so often that it has started to sound like superstition. It is not. Four separate things go wrong in there, and they attack different parts of the knife.

Impact. This is the big one, and it is the one people underestimate. The water jets in a dishwasher are strong enough to move cutlery around. Your knife spends the cycle being knocked against forks, plates and the rack itself. A cutting edge is only a few microns wide at the apex — that is the part doing the actual cutting — and it bends and chips on contact with anything harder than food.

Heat. Dishwashers run hot, and the drying cycle hotter still. Sustained heat is not kind to a hardened blade, and it is actively hostile to the adhesives holding a handle together.

Detergent. Dishwasher tablets are far more caustic than hand dish soap — they are formulated to strip baked-on food without scrubbing. That chemistry pits and corrodes steel, and it goes after the thinnest, most exposed metal first. Which, again, is your edge.

Moisture on the handle. Wood swells, cracks and splinters when it is soaked and then baked. A full tang knife with a wooden handle — black walnut, olive burl, maple — will loosen at the scales long before the blade gives up.

Does the dishwasher really make knives dull?

Yes, and faster than most people expect. It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because it is not that the dishwasher "wears down" the blade the way a cutting board does.

What happens is edge deflection and micro-chipping. The apex rolls over where it strikes something hard, and small pieces break away where the impact is sharper. The blade still looks fine. It simply stops biting — it slides off a tomato skin instead of sinking in, and it needs pressure where it used to need none.

A knife that would hold a working edge for months of hand washing can be noticeably duller after a handful of dishwasher cycles. The damage is recoverable on a stone, but you are now sharpening a knife every few weeks that should have needed it twice a year.

But my knives say "dishwasher safe"

"Dishwasher safe" is a claim about the material surviving, not about the knife still being good at its job. It means the steel will not visibly rust and the handle will not fall off inside the warranty period. It does not mean the edge will be intact.

The knives most likely to carry that label are the ones with the least to lose: soft stainless blades with moulded plastic handles, which were never going to hold a fine edge anyway. Once a knife is hardened past about 58 HRC and given a thin, properly ground edge, the dishwasher has something worth ruining.

Are stainless steel knives safe in the dishwasher?

Safer than carbon steel, but that is a low bar and it only addresses one of the four problems. Stainless resists the corrosion from detergent better. It is just as vulnerable to impact damage on the edge, just as exposed to heat, and its handle is no less likely to be wood.

So "stainless" solves the rust question and leaves the dulling question entirely untouched — and dulling is the one you will actually notice.

Is there any knife that is fine in the dishwasher?

Effectively one: a butter knife. It has no real edge to protect, no hardened steel to soften and usually no wooden handle. If it is cutlery rather than a cutting tool, the dishwasher is fine.

Everything else — chef knives, santokus, paring knives, bread knives and steak knives — should be hand washed. Steak knives get asked about most, because they arrive at the sink dirty alongside a full table of plates. They are still knives: a plain-edge steak knife dulled in the dishwasher tears the next steak instead of slicing it.

If you are going to do it anyway: up or down?

This is the most searched follow-up question, so here is the practical answer rather than the pious one.

Blade down, tip down, handle up. A blade pointing up in a cutlery basket is a genuine injury risk to whoever unloads it — that is the single strongest reason. Blade down also reduces how much the edge is thrown against neighbouring items.

Better still, lay the knife flat and alone on the top rack where nothing can reach it, and pull it out before the heated drying cycle. That removes the impact problem and most of the heat problem, which is about as good as a dishwasher gets. It is still worse than thirty seconds at the sink.

How chefs actually wash their knives

The professional routine is almost aggressively boring, which is why it works:

• Wash it as soon as you have finished with it, before anything dries on.
• Warm water, a drop of dish soap, a soft sponge or cloth.
• Wipe from the spine toward the edge, never along it, and never with the cloth wrapped over the edge.
• Rinse and dry it immediately with a towel. Do not leave it on a draining board.
• Put it away where the edge touches nothing — a block, a magnetic holder, a sheath or an in-drawer tray.

That is the whole thing. It is faster than loading the knife into the dishwasher would have been, and it is the reason a good knife can outlast the kitchen it lives in. Our carbon steel knife care guide covers the routine for high-carbon blades, which are the fussiest.

Storage is half of knife care

Where a knife lives between washes does as much damage as how it is washed. A drawer full of loose blades is a slow-motion dishwasher: the same edge-on-metal contact, just spread over months.

A block, a magnetic holder or an in-drawer tray keeps the edge isolated. The Acacia Knife Display Block uses hidden magnets to hold blades against the surface rather than dragging them through a slot, which is what dulls knives in traditional slotted blocks. We compare the options in five ways to store and display knives.

Can you put cutting boards in the dishwasher?

Plastic boards, usually yes. Wooden boards, no — for the same reason as wooden handles. Soaking followed by high heat makes wood swell, then crack along the grain as it dries, and a cracked board is both unhygienic and hard on your edge.

Wooden boards want a hand wash and an occasional oiling. We wrote the full routine in how to clean a wooden cutting board, and best cutting board for knives explains why end grain is the surface that protects an edge.

What if you have already been doing it?

Do not panic — most of it is recoverable.

If the blade is dull but undamaged, a few passes on a whetstone will bring the edge back. If you can see small bright chips along the edge under a light, it needs a coarser stone and more patience, but it is still fixable. If there is surface rust or pitting, a non-abrasive cleaner and a light oiling will stop it spreading. Only a badly loosened or split wooden handle is beyond a home fix.

Then stop putting them in. The knife will not recover twice as easily the second time.

Common questions

Will one dishwasher cycle ruin my knife?
No. One cycle will not destroy a good knife, and the effect may not even be obvious. The damage is cumulative — it is the twentieth cycle that turns a sharp knife into a blunt one.

Is it the heat or the detergent that does more damage?
Neither, usually. Physical impact against other items in the machine does the most damage to the thing you care about most, which is the edge.

Can I put a Damascus knife in the dishwasher?
Definitely not. Damascus blades are built around a hard, thin-ground core and usually fitted with wooden handles — the two components a dishwasher is worst for.

What about the knife block or the magnetic holder?
Wipe those down by hand too. A wooden block should never be submerged, and trapped moisture inside the slots is a common and invisible source of rust.

Shop the range

Shop the range: Chef Knives and Damascus Knives — every blade is hand sharpened and oiled before it ships, and every one comes with a 99-day home trial and a free lifetime guarantee. Look after it properly and it will outlast the dishwasher.

Read next: Carbon Steel Knife Care: Daily Routine, Rust & Patina and How to Clean a Wooden Cutting Board: Daily & Deep Clean.

More in this cluster: Types of Steel for Knives: The Complete 2026 Guide and Can You Put CG Knives In the Dishwasher?