The Absolutely, Positively Correct Way to Load Your Dishwasher

When the couples therapist inevitably asks, I’ll have an answer ready: The trouble began in August 2017, when my boyfriend and I moved in together, and I quickly revealed myself to be an absolute ding-dong at loading the dishwasher.

I am not what you would call “precise” or “tactical” in really any aspect of my life, but certainly not in front of an open dishwasher. I lack the structural engineer’s mind for space optimization, or maybe I lack the functional adult’s patience to figure it out. I don’t totally understand how the water moves around in there, or how the soap gets dispersed. (Also, because we’re being open and honest with one another, I have never been sure about prerinsing, though I do get the sense that the rules have changed recently?) I don’t have a philosophy about what should go on the top or the bottom—I basically just put things in the first semi-logical place I see, close the door, smash some buttons, and hope for the best. I walk away and hear my plates rattle.

Judging by the sheer volume of dishwasher-loading advice, commentary, and anxiety on the internet, I am not alone in any of this. There are YouTube videos with titles such as “You’re Doing It Wrong!” and “Passive Aggressive Tutorials.” There are articles broken out by brand and by subtopic, thousands of words devoted to the intricacies of scraping, stacking, sorting, eco-washing, half loads, knives, pots, plastic, and more. There is a post from a woman who doesn’t understand how her “genius” husband “can do ANYTHING, but load a dishwasher sensibly,” and one from a person whose wife does it like “an escaped mental patient.” There are Wirecutter articles explaining how to use one’s dishwasher better, and people who write into Wirecutter to complain that they don’t like the way the dishwashers in those articles’ photos have been loaded. There are so, so many guides for couples who can’t stop fighting about the dishwasher, a large number of which suggest that the issue might not be the dishwasher at all but perhaps something with its roots in childhood.

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Sure, but I actually think the dishwasher itself is a great place to start. It is uniquely confounding. No one is standing in front of her refrigerator, flummoxed as to where to put the milk. The American household is not being ripped apart by arguments about the correct way to operate the oven. But last year, when YouGov asked 38,000 American adults about how cutlery should be loaded into the dishwasher, no single approach achieved a majority. Maybe it’s no wonder that the dishwasher is the most underused major kitchen appliance: In 2020, just under 90 million American homes had a dishwasher, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration; 19 percent of them were used zero times a week.

Dishwashers are finicky: Loading them right depends on what kind of dishes you have, what kind of mess you have, and what kind of dishwasher you have. They’re also inscrutable—a black box, sometimes literally. “You close the door; you don’t know what you’re gonna get until you open it,” Carolyn Forté, who has worked for more than 40 years at Good Housekeeping and currently runs its Home Care and Cleaning Lab, told me. We can’t see our dishwashers doing their job, so most of us don’t know how they work. “Some people even think it fills up with water,” Forté said, to illustrate this point. I chuckled along knowingly, but the truth is, if she had told me that’s exactly how a dishwasher works, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I was talking with her, in fact, because I’d decided enough was enough. It was time to finally understand the dishwasher.

As soon as I started trying, one sentence began to haunt me. People repeated it to me; it showed up over and over when I searched online for information about dishwashers and dishwasher conflict. It was this: “In every relationship, there’s one person who loads the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a raccoon on meth.”

It’s the kind of trope-y Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus aphorism that bounces around the internet like a beach ball at an outdoor concert, endlessly rediscovered and reshared. The dishwasher makes for evergreen online humor for the same reason it acts as a password for entry into low-stakes conversation with just about any other adult: It’s incredibly relatable.

In that same YouGov poll from 2024, more than a third of respondents admitted to having disagreements with others about dishwashing best practices. The issue comes up in group chats, on web forums, and even, occasionally, in couples-therapy sessions that the famed psychologist Julie Gottman facilitates. Andrea Barnes, who covers large cleaning appliances for Wirecutter, told me the emails she gets about the dishwasher are much more “social” and “behavioral” than the ones about other appliances. In January, Forté invited Reddit users to ask her anything about dishwashers. She received hundreds of questions, more than Good Housekeeping has ever gotten for a Reddit AMA. A large number started with the poster invoking a spouse’s or a roommate’s wrongheaded approach to the dishwasher and asking Forté to adjudicate. “There’s a lot of psychology behind the dishwasher,” she told me. “There’s a lot of angst.”

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The dishwasher is not just the weird wet box we share our homes with—it’s the site of so many of our cultural and individual values. Loading the dishwasher is, don’t get me wrong, about loading the dishwasher, but I’ve come to understand that it is also about efficiency and optimization, space and time, cleanliness and disgust. The Scandinavian architect’s dishwasher is a beautiful thing, but it’s also, in a certain light, self-indulgent and fussy, more art project than act of service. The stimulant-addled raccoon’s is arguably something much worse: negligent and unsanitary, evidence of a failed commitment to the family. (To be clear, if the raccoon is a woman, especially a mother, society looks even less kindly on her.) In both cases, the criticism is not completely superficial. Dishes are what we eat off of, after all, and eating is how we take care of one another.

Household maintenance has been freighted and intimate since we’ve had houses to maintain. “Our homes and our home possessions and what meaning we ascribe to them is one of the most personal things we can experience,” the sociologist Michelle Janning told me. (In 2017, she published a book on the subject, The Stuff of Family Life: How Our Homes Reflect Our Lives.) The internet has encouraged only more comparison, and more consternation—more places to argue, more pressure to make even the most banal parts of our lives beautiful. “The message everywhere is that our home is supposed to be a signature representation of who we are,” Janning said. “Our home is supposed to be the most meaningful, almost sacred place and space that we hold near and dear.”

Bringing any kind of technology into these sacred spaces saves time, but it can also alienate us from the labor of caring for those we love. Maybe this is why so many people don’t trust, don’t use, or want to command their dishwashers. “The strong opinions associated with how to do it could be people trying to retain some semblance of control in a world where technological devices are doing things so much for us,” Janning said of the dishwasher. “I do wonder if there’s a little bit of fear of losing the humanity associated with our domestic lives.”

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Gottman speculated that part of the reason people get so upset about the dishwasher is that dishwashers are “there to just do a mundane task—very mundane. There’s no creativity within the scope of the dishwasher.” Cooking is fun; cleaning up is not. But it must be done, and done well, in order for the rest of the household to function.

Some years ago, Sandrine Bèrges, a professor at the University of York, in England, became interested in applying concepts we usually use to understand countries and governments to the smallest unit of human coexistence: the home. She called it “the philosophy of domesticity.” In 2015, she published a paper that asked, “Is Not Doing the Washing Up Like Draft Dodging?”

Obviously, seeing this sent a shiver down my spine. I don’t think being bad at the dishwasher is a moral failure, but being unwilling to get better at it might be. It isn’t cute—it’s poor citizenship in the very small nation that is my home. It’s learned helplessness, voluntary ignorance, bad vibes. I have lived in my apartment since 2022 and have been, the entire time, confused by my dishwasher (a Bosch, 2018 model, slightly dented but in fundamentally good shape). I have rolled my eyes at it, disrespected it, misused it, and left its loading to my boyfriend (a John, 1988 model, slightly dented but in fundamentally good shape). Three years is a long time to live with something you’re not very nice to. Eight is even longer.

After weeks of talking with cleaning experts, watching internet tutorials, reading cleaning guides, peering into my dishwasher as though it were an ancient cave, and, at one point, asking one of the aforementioned cleaning experts to do the same over Zoom, here is what I can tell you about how to load the dishwasher.

Each machine has two or three spray arms, at least one on the bottom and one on the top: This is where the detergent-y water comes from. If you are confused about how to load your dishwasher, understanding this is half the battle. Barnes, the Wirecutter expert, recommends looking into your dishwasher and seeing where the holes are, “just to get an idea of the pattern of your own dishwasher.” (She, and almost everyone else I spoke with, also recommended reading the manual.) “And you want to make sure that when you load the dishwasher that those streams of water are going to hit.” Crucially, this means that you should not be overloading your dishwasher. Make sure your plates are separate, your bowls aren’t nested, and nothing is sitting where water can’t reach it.

The second thing is to make sure your stuff is stable in the machine, because if it isn’t, it’s much more likely to break. The general rule is that the bottom rack is subject to more forceful spray, so you want your sturdier items there and your daintier stuff on the top. Clean your filter periodically, if you have one (you might not!). If your dishwasher smells, you can run a sanitizing cycle with vinegar, baking soda, or one of the many specialized dishwasher-cleaning products on the market. Also, no cast iron, no wood, no crystal, nothing with delicate painted-on decorations, like china with a metallic rim.

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Here’s the third big thing: Rinsing isn’t necessary. Oma Blaise Ford, a senior executive editor at Better Homes and Gardens, told me that overrinsing is “one of the most common mistakes in modern dishwasher loading.” She recommends scraping leftover food off your dishes into the trash with a rubber spatula and immediately loading them into the machine, without even turning on the faucet. (The main exception, she said, is fatty proteins such as peanut butter or eggs, which tend to be stubborn.)

This is, indeed, new advice—I wasn’t wrong. Perhaps part of our problem is that the way dishwashers work has fundamentally changed since many of the people currently fighting with their loved ones about dishwashers learned to use them. In the late 2000s, according to Barnes, we switched from phosphate detergent to enzymatic detergent, which works like a little Pac-Man, eating dirt and making room for the soap to do its job. “So if you don’t leave a little bit of food for these enzymes,” she told me, “you run the risk of it starting to break down other materials,” such as your actual dishes. Everyone thinks the way they grew up loading the dishwasher is correct, so this one is hard for people to hear, but she was insistent: The detergent is designed to work on a little bit of dirt. You need, she said, to “trust the machine to do its job.”

Isn’t it amazing how the answer to everything is always the same? Pay attention. Trust the process. Seek to understand. Question your assumptions. Read a book.

Here is what else I can tell you about dishwashers: They are a miracle. The modern water-pressure-powered dishwasher was invented by Josephine Cochran, a socialite who was expected to host a lot of dinner parties but hated cleaning up after them. She built a dishwasher in the shed behind her house and, in doing so, helped kick off what Helen Keller would later call the “startling revolution” that rearranged women’s domestic responsibilities, and therefore their sense of what was possible. Today’s dishwashers save about 230 hours of labor a year: Nearly 10 days, every year, to do something other than wash the dishes. In a water-scarce world, they are even more valuable. Rinsing dishes takes one and a half  to two gallons of water a minute; a really good dishwasher, Barnes told me, takes three to five gallons a wash.

Dishwashers do a lot for us, and we hold them to a high standard. “I’ve seen people put, like, a Thanksgiving dinner in their dishwasher and then be surprised their filter is clogged, or that dishes don’t come out clean,” Barnes told me. We take them for granted: “People get so angry and obsessed with the ones that don’t work,” she said, “and we often overlook how many of them do a great job.”

Last week, I purposefully subjected myself to the real-life version of an anxiety dream. I stood in front of my boyfriend and my parents—three of the people who mean the most to me, and who have offered the most, uh, feedback on my dishwasher-loading abilities—and tried to do the thing. Plates on the bottom, don’t cram too much in there, think about the spray: Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. I thought about the hard work, and the help, required to keep a home. The dishes came out clean.

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