Dog Feeding Calculator — Calories & Portions for Adult Dogs

The veterinary starting point is RER = 70 × (body weight in kg)^0.75, multiplied by a maintenance factor that reflects your dog's life stage and lifestyle: about 1.6 for a neutered pet dog, 1.8 if intact, 1.2 for seniors and easy keepers, and 2.0 or more for genuinely active dogs. A 20 kg neutered adult lands near 1,060 kcal a day; the same dog intact needs closer to 1,190. Enter your dog's details in the calculator above and it does the multiplication, then converts the calories into grams or cups of the food you actually buy.

Divide the daily calories by your food's energy density. Most dry adult foods carry 350–430 kcal per 100 g, so a 1,060 kcal day is roughly 250–300 g — about 2.4–2.8 cups at the typical 105 g per level cup. Wet foods are far less dense (often 80–130 kcal per 100 g), so the same calorie budget looks like 3–4 times more food by weight. Use the kcal/100 g value printed on your bag or can in the calculator's advanced options for the exact split.

Growth formula stays until the growth spurt is over, and the timing follows size class: around 9–12 months for toy and small breeds, 12 months for medium dogs, and 12–16 months (sometimes 18–24) for large and giant breeds, whose joints benefit from a slower, controlled finish. The switch itself is a 7–10 day gradual blend, increasing the adult share every couple of days. After the switch, you are on this page's math — maintenance calories instead of the puppy growth factors.

Work in calories, not cans: most complete wet foods run 80–130 kcal per 100 g. A 20 kg neutered adult at roughly 1,060 kcal a day would need about 880 g of a typical 120 kcal/100 g wet food — close to 3½ standard 400 g cans split over two meals. That volume is normal; wet food is mostly water. All-wet feeding costs more per calorie, which is why many owners mix wet (for palatability and moisture) with dry (for economy), keeping the total inside the calorie budget.

Senior dogs usually need fewer calories, not more food: the 1.2 factor for seniors and obesity-prone adults trims roughly a quarter off the intact-adult figure, because muscle mass and activity drift down with age. What seniors should not lose is protein quality and muscle — restrict total calories rather than protein unless a specific diagnosis says otherwise, keep weigh-ins monthly, and have any unexplained weight change examined rather than dieted away at home.

Adult raw feeders commonly work by percentages of current body weight — about 2–3% per day for a typical adult, more for hard workers and less for easy keepers. These are community conventions, not veterinary standards. The cross-check that keeps raw feeding honest: if your raw product prints kcal per 100 g (most do), the calorie-based grams from the calculator at that density should land in the same neighborhood as the percentage math. A 20 kg dog at 2–3% eats roughly 400–600 g a day.

Two meals a day, roughly 8–12 hours apart, is the standard adult routine — this page splits your daily grams into that schedule automatically. Small and toy breeds with fast metabolisms do better on two or three; deep-chested large breeds benefit from keeping meals calm and not exercising hard right after eating, because of bloat risk. Free-feeding (leaving food down all day) hides appetite changes that are worth catching early.

No — deliberately. Puppies run on growth factors (about 3 × RER under 4 months, 2 × RER from 4 to 12 months) that this adult page does not apply, and feeding an adult's maintenance ration to a young puppy would underfeed a growing body. If your dog is still growing, use the puppy feeding calculator on this site until the size class for its breed finishes maturing, then come back here for maintenance.