Dinner is in an hour and the chicken is a brick. Here is the trail a careful cook walks — the next seven searches, in order, each with the two-sentence answer and the query to run.
Cold water is the answer you are looking for, and it has rules that are not optional.
Cold water, sealed in a leak-proof bag, submerged — about 30 minutes per pound, changing the water every 30 minutes. Boneless breasts are usually done in an hour; cook them immediately afterwards.
The water warms as it pulls cold out of the meat, and once it climbs past 40°F it becomes a bath the outside of the chicken is sitting in. Changing it every 30 minutes keeps the surface out of the danger zone while the middle catches up.
Use the defrost setting and cook it the moment it comes out — microwaves leave warm patches that have already started cooking. This is a safe method only if there is no gap between thawing and cooking.
Slower, but it is the only method that leaves your options open afterwards.
Boneless breasts are about a day; a whole chicken takes one to two. Once thawed this way it will keep another day or two in the fridge before it has to be cooked.
Only if it thawed in the fridge — then it can go straight back in, with some quality loss. Meat thawed in cold water or a microwave has to be cooked first, and only then can the cooked version be frozen.
Reheating has one number, and it is the same one raw chicken has.
165°F throughout, including sauces and gravies, which should be brought to a rolling boil. Stir partway through in a microwave — cold spots are the whole problem with reheating, not average temperature.
Two hours at room temperature, total, and one hour if the room is above 90°F. That budget covers the whole life of the food, so time spent thawing on the counter is already spent.
There are exactly three safe thawing methods, and the fast ones come with conditions attached. These are USDA FSIS rules — the danger zone between 40°F and 140°F is where bacteria double roughly every twenty minutes.
You just walked 7 searches for “how to thaw chicken fast”. The extension maps the trail right on your results page — for anything you search, not just the journeys we’ve written.