Homemade Dog Food: How Much to Feed by Calories

Updated October 2026 · Daily calorie needs: this site's calculator, following the NRC energy equations

This page does not give recipes, and it does not judge whether a home-prepared diet is complete. That is a job for a veterinarian or a board-certified veterinary nutritionist: home-prepared diets are commonly short on calcium, vitamin D and several trace minerals, and the recipes that circulate online are rarely formulated for one specific dog. What this page does is the arithmetic — once you have a calorie figure for your mix, how many grams a day does your dog need?

The one number the calculation turns on is not a weight, it is a calorie density: how many kcal there are in a kilogram of your mix.

The one number you need is a density, not a weight

How much to feed is not a property of home-cooked food; it is a property of your mix. What you need is the calorie density — how many kcal there are in a kilogram of it.

Get it from whoever formulated the diet, or from the label of a commercial base mix you are adding to. We do not publish a calorie figure for homemade diets, because it depends on the recipe and on how much water the mix carries. It is the one number you have to bring with you.

With that number, the daily weight of food is one division: daily calories ÷ (density in kcal per kg ÷ 1,000).

A conversion table

If your mix contains… — then a neutered adult dog of typical activity needs about:

If your mix contains	10 kg dog	20 kg dog	30 kg dog
1,000 kcal/kg	630 g	1,059 g	1,436 g
1,500 kcal/kg	420 g	706 g	957 g
2,000 kcal/kg	315 g	530 g	718 g
3,000 kcal/kg	210 g	353 g	479 g

Read the left-hand column as a question about your food, not as a statement about ours. The daily calorie needs behind the table — 630 kcal at 10 kg, 1,059 kcal at 20 kg and 1,436 kcal at 30 kg — come from this site's calculator, which uses the NRC resting energy equation with the usual life-stage and activity multipliers.

Where the calorie need comes from

The daily calorie figure is the same one every other page here uses. RER = 70 × (body weight in kg)^0.75, then a multiplier: 1.6 for a neutered adult of typical activity, 1.4 at low activity, 2.0 when active — and a puppy is a different calculation entirely.

The full calculator accepts a kcal/kg figure directly, so you can put your mix's number straight in and skip the table.

Weigh the food, not the scoop

A cup of a moist, home-cooked mix weighs nothing like a cup of kibble, and the gap between a level spoon and a heaped one is a large share of a small dog's day. If the mix changes from batch to batch — different meat, more or less water — the density changes with it, so the grams have to change too.

The calorie label page covers the difference between kcal/kg and kcal/cup, and how to measure without a scale covers the measuring side.

When to stop and call the vet instead

A home-prepared diet is the one place where a feeding problem and a formulation problem look identical from the outside. If the dog is losing weight on the calculated amount, gaining on it, or itching and scratching — food allergy is one of the reasons people move to home cooking, and the substitution has to be done properly — get the diet reviewed rather than moving the grams around.

Puppies are the group where this goes wrong fastest: a growing dog fed an unbalanced home-prepared diet can look well for weeks. Sudden vomiting, diarrhoea or a loss of appetite is a vet question, not a portion question. Switching dog food safely covers the transition, and dog food allergies covers what an elimination diet actually involves.

Frequently asked questions

How much homemade dog food should I feed my dog?

It depends on the calorie density of your mix, not on the fact that it is home-cooked. Divide the dog's daily calorie need by the density: a 20 kg neutered dog of typical activity needs about 1,059 kcal a day, which is about 706 g of a 1,500 kcal/kg mix or about 530 g of a 2,000 kcal/kg mix.

Do I need to know the calories of my homemade dog food?

Yes — it is the one number the calculation turns on. We do not publish a figure for homemade diets because it depends on the recipe and on how much water the mix carries. Ask whoever formulated the diet, or use the value on the label of a commercial base mix.

Can I feed a homemade diet to a puppy?

Only with a diet formulated for that puppy by a veterinarian or a veterinary nutritionist. Growing dogs have narrow tolerances for calcium, phosphorus and energy, and an unbalanced home-prepared diet can cause problems that are not visible for weeks. This page's arithmetic is not a substitute for that formulation.

Source

Daily calorie needs: this site's calculator, which follows the NRC Nutrient Requirements of Dogs and Cats energy equations and the WSAVA Global Nutrition Guidelines, applied as a two-step resting-energy calculation. This page deliberately publishes no calorie density for home-prepared diets, because no general figure can be traced to a source — the density depends on the recipe and on the water content. Completeness of a home-prepared diet is a question for a veterinarian or a veterinary nutritionist. This page is general information, not veterinary medical advice.