PLA Print Temperature: Nozzle, Bed, and First Layer

Most PLA prints fine at 200C on the nozzle and 60C on the bed. That single pair of numbers will get you a usable part on almost any machine. But PLA is a family, not a material, and the spool in your hand may want anything from 190C to 230C, so it’s worth knowing which direction to move and why.

The Short Answer

PLA is the one common filament that prefers open air. Trapped heat softens the part as it prints and encourages heat creep in the hotend, so if you have an enclosure, run PLA with it open.

Your Spool Beats Any Chart

Every roll ships with a printed range on the label or the box, usually something like 190-220C. That number comes from the people who made the blend, and it beats a generic chart every time. Start in the middle of it.

The reason charts vary so much is that “PLA” covers a lot of ground. Pigment loading changes flow, and dark colors often run a few degrees hotter than naturals. Matte and silk finishes are additive-heavy. PLA+ and “tough PLA” blends usually want 10-15C more than plain PLA. Two spools from the same brand, different colors, can genuinely disagree by 10C.

That’s exactly why a per-spool log beats memory: the number that worked for last month’s grey is not automatically the number for this week’s silk red.

What Each Direction Buys You

Temperature is a trade between layer adhesion and surface quality. Hotter plastic sticks to itself better and flows more easily; cooler plastic holds detail and stops stringing.

Too cold shows up as:

• Layers that split or peel apart under light hand pressure
• Under-extrusion: thin, gappy top surfaces and visible lines between walls
• Clicking or skipping from the extruder as it forces stiff plastic through
• Poor bridging, and overhangs that tear away rather than droop

Too hot shows up as:

• Stringing and wisps between parts
• Blobs and zits where the nozzle pauses
• Drooping overhangs and rounded, soft corners
• A rougher, glossier surface than the spool’s usual finish
• Heat creep: plastic softening above the heatbreak until the extruder jams part-way into a print

If a part is weak, go up in 5C steps. If it’s stringy or losing detail, go down in 5C steps. Only change one thing at a time, and reprint the same test each time.

Bed Temperature

60C is the default because it sits just above PLA’s glass transition, which keeps the first layer tacky without softening the whole base of the part.

• Textured PEI - 60-65C. The texture does most of the gripping.
• Smooth PEI - 55-60C. PLA bonds to smooth PEI aggressively; too hot and you will chip the sheet getting the part off.
• Glass with glue stick or hairspray - 60-65C.
• Painter’s tape - 50-55C, or unheated on older machines.

Running the bed hotter than 65C rarely helps adhesion and starts causing elephant’s foot, where the first few layers bulge outward because the plastic never fully sets. If your first layer is spreading, drop the bed before you touch anything else.

Let the bed soak. Most beds report the target from a sensor under the plate while the surface is still climbing, so give it two or three minutes after it reads 60C before the print starts, especially on large glass beds.

First-Layer Settings

The first layer is the only layer allowed different numbers.

• Nozzle +5C - a slightly hotter first layer flows into the bed texture better. More than +10C causes elephant’s foot.
• Fan off for the first one or two layers. Cooling the first layer is the fastest way to lose adhesion.
• Slower - 20-25 mm/s gives the plastic time to wet the surface.

Everything else about first-layer success is mechanical, not thermal. If it still won’t stick, the problem is Z-offset or a dirty bed, not temperature.

Print a Temperature Tower

Ten minutes of testing settles the argument for a whole spool. A temperature tower is a single model sliced so each block prints 5C cooler than the one below it, with a bridge, an overhang, and a stringing gap on every block.

1. Download or generate a tower for your range, typically 230C at the bottom down to 190C at the top.
2. Add the temperature change per block. Most slicers have a height-based modifier for this, and some ship the tower as a built-in calibration test.
3. Print it, then look at it in good light.

Pick the lowest block that still has clean bridges and no visible layer separation. That is your number. Cooler is better for detail and stringing as long as adhesion holds. Then snap it in half: the break should be ragged, not a clean split along a layer line.

What the Variants Change

Speed and Nozzle Size Move the Number

Temperature charts assume a 0.4mm nozzle at moderate speed. Push either variable and the right temperature moves with it, because what actually matters is how much plastic per second the hotend has to melt.

• A 0.6mm nozzle at the same speed pushes roughly twice the volume: add 5-10C.
• High-speed profiles at 200+ mm/s need 15-25C more than a 60 mm/s profile of the same filament.
• A high-flow hotend melts faster, so it may not need the bump at all.

If you switch to a fast profile and suddenly see under-extrusion on a spool that was fine before, the filament did not go bad. The hotend simply ran out of melting capacity.

Log the Number That Worked

The whole point of dialing in a spool is not repeating the work. Write down the material, brand, color, nozzle temperature, bed temperature, and how it turned out, tied to the spool it came from. Gyroid keeps that per print and per spool, so the next time you load that red silk PLA the number is already there.

For the same numbers across every other material, see the nozzle temperature chart.