NEC 220.56 Commercial Kitchen Equipment Demand: Table 220.56, explained

Verbatim code text, the full factor table, the two-largest floor rule, worked examples, and a free in-browser calculator. Last updated 2026-08-29 (written for PanelWright v1.14).

Runs in your browser. No account, no install, data never leaves your machine. The commercial-kitchen card sits below the other NEC load cards on the main page.

The rule in one sentence

For commercial kitchen equipment — other than dwelling units — that is thermostatically controlled or used intermittently, you may take the demand load from Table 220.56: a demand factor keyed to the number of units (100%, 100%, 90%, 80%, 70%, 65% at six and over) applied to the total connected (nameplate) load — and the result must never be less than the sum of the two largest individual kitchen equipment loads.

The code text (verbatim)

220.56 Kitchen Equipment — Other Than Dwelling Unit(s)

Two things jump out. First, this is a permissive method — the code allows a reduced demand for covered kitchen equipment, it does not force one. Second, the section hands you a table and a floor: the Table 220.56 factor sets the demand, but the last sentence guarantees the feeder/service load never drops below the two biggest units combined. That floor is the part people most often skip — and it is what makes a commercial kitchen calc different from a household one.

Table 220.56 — the whole table

One column of demand factors, keyed to the number of units of covered equipment. No sub-columns, no notes — the whole method is this table plus the two-largest floor.

The factor steps down only once you get past two units, and it bottoms out at 65% for six or more — so an 8-unit kitchen and a 20-unit kitchen use the same 65% factor. That is the whole of the "how many units" lookup people search for.

The two-largest floor — the sentence that trips people up

So the demand is the larger of two numbers:

• The factored result — Table 220.56 demand factor × total connected load.
• The two-largest floor — the sum of the two biggest individual kitchen equipment units.

Most of the time the factored result is bigger and governs. But a small kitchen with two large units and several small ones can tip the other way: the factor says one thing, and the two-largest rule says not less than this. PanelWright's card takes both inputs and flags which one governs — so you never quietly under-size the service on the floor check.

What counts, and what is out

The code is specific about the population the factors apply to. Get this right and the rest follows:

• In: commercial electric cooking equipment, dishwasher booster heaters, water heaters, and other kitchen equipment — where the equipment has thermostatic control or intermittent use as kitchen equipment. That "thermostatic control or intermittent use" qualifier is what justifies the demand reduction: the code assumes the units do not all run at full load at the same time.
• Out: space-heating, ventilating, or air-conditioning equipment — the factors shall not apply to it. Keep those loads out of the 220.56 total and carry them separately in the feeder/service calc.
• Out (wrong rule): household cooking appliances. If the kitchen is a dwelling unit, household ranges/ovens/counter units go to 220.55 / Table 220.55, not here. 220.56 is "other than dwelling unit(s)" — a restaurant, food-service, institutional, or other commercial kitchen.

Units and VA: like the sibling dwelling cards, the practical reading is nameplate power. A 15 kW convection oven is a 15 kVA / 15,000 VA load for this calc. (The kVA ≡ kW equivalence is stated in the code for the 220.54 and 220.55 sibling sections; 220.56's text does not restate it, so PanelWright treats the nameplate kW the same way as those cards and labels it.)

Worked examples (all locked by the test suite)

The 6-unit case is a real published worked example (ExpertCE, below): convection oven 15 kW, two deep fryers 14 kW each, dishwasher 7 kW, salamander broiler 4 kW, food warmer 3 kW = 57 kW; two largest = 15 + 14 = 29 kW; 65% factor → 37.05 kW, floor 29 kW passes. The same kitchen is locked by the public test suite — 57,000 VA connected with a 29,000 VA two-largest floor resolves to 37,050 VA demand and 19,950 VA of savings. The 4-unit row is the case where the floor beats the factor (16,000 VA factored, but 22,000 VA floor governs) — the exact situation the last sentence of 220.56 exists to catch. Every number above is an assertion in the tool's public test suite (test/run_tests.js in the public repo) — 692/692 passing at the time of writing.

Where 220.56 fits in a feeder / service calc

• Feeder / service demand, not branch circuits. 220.56 sizes the feeder or service load for a group of kitchen units. Individual branch circuits and their overcurrent protection are sized separately (Article 210) for the actual equipment on each — do not size a single oven's branch circuit from the 220.56 group demand.
• One line of the larger calc. The 220.56 demand is a single line in the overall feeder/service sum. Lighting, receptacles, AC, and any excluded heating/ventilation loads are added on their own lines. The 220.56 number replaces the raw nameplate total of the covered kitchen equipment.
• Not the dwelling rule, not the optional method. This is the standard-method commercial-kitchen rule. It is separate from the 220.82 optional dwelling method and from the 220.53 fixed-appliance 75% rule — a restaurant kitchen is not a dwelling, and the three rules do not stack.
• Noncoincident loads (220.60). If two or more kitchen loads are interlocked so they cannot run at once, 220.60 may let you count only the largest in-use load. That is a separate permissive rule — apply it deliberately, not by accident.

Editions: 2014 / 2017 / 2020 / 2023 / 2026

• 2014: the section + table in the form above. Verified from the verbatim NFPA 70 2014 Article 220 text (coordinate-level extraction of the table cell geometry).
• 2017 / 2020: identical. PanelWright ran a programmatic word-level diff of the 220.56 section body and Table 220.56 between the verbatim 2014 PDF and the verbatim NEC 2020 full-code text: the two are identical. (The 2020 OCR interleaves the 220.61 header around the table, so the diff parses ordered percentage tokens rather than line-pairing — the values still match.)
• 2023: the published 2023 change analysis records no change to 220.56 (it appears only in the demand-factor index table).
• 2026: the NEC renumbers load calculations out of Article 220 into the 120 area (220.56 moves toward the 120.56 region). The factors above are the 2014–2023 values; verify section numbers against the edition adopted where your work is inspected.

Free NEC 220.56 calculator

Open the PanelWright 220.56 card →

Enter the unit count, the total connected load in VA, and the two largest individual units. The card shows the Table 220.56 factor it applied, the factored demand, the two-largest floor, and a badge for whichever rule governs — then rolls the result into the CSV export and the branded PDF project report. The same page also covers 220.82 (optional dwelling service load), 220.55 cooking, 220.53 fixed appliances, 220.54 dryers, 220.42 lighting, 220.61 neutral, Table 310.16 / Ch. 9 Table 8 voltage drop, phase balancing, and breaker sizing.

Sources & verification