The photothermal effect of nanoparticles has proven to be an effective means of substantially increasing the rate of chemical transformations, by factors of up to 10 9 . For thermally activated processes, such a large increase in rate implies a corresponding increase in temperature large enough that it would be expected to affect the steady-state concentrations of products and reactants. We test this hypothesis by following the exothermic reaction between hexamethylene diisocyanate and poly-bis(triethylol) heptanedioate to produce a cross-linked polyurethane under both ambient and photothermal conditions. We demonstrate that the photothermal effect increases the reaction rate by a factor of 7.4 × 10 6 and decreases the effective equilibrium constant by a factor of at least 3 × 10 4 . These two changes provide kinetic and thermodynamic temperature estimates of 732 ± 21 and 683 ± 28 K, respectively. Remarkably, though both estimates of temperature are extreme, the chemical species produced under photothermal heating are the same as produced under ambient conditions.