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PawCurve

Dog Food Calculator: How Much to Feed Your Dog

Daily calories and grams for a healthy adult dog or puppy — and, unlike every other feeding calculator we could find, an honest account of where the formula comes from.

Use their ideal weight, not their current one, if those differ — your vet can tell you which.

Neutered?

Get this off your bag — it's the single biggest source of error here. Foods range from roughly 3,000 to 4,500 kcal/kg, so the default is a placeholder, not an answer. Wet food is far lower (often under 1,200).

Estimated daily energy

—kcal/day

≈ — of the food you entered

Resting requirement (RER)
—
Maintenance factor applied
—
Formula used
—

The whole industry is copying one table

Every dog feeding calculator runs the same arithmetic: resting energy requirement from bodyweight, times a maintenance factor. And nearly all of them credit it to the NRC or WSAVA. Our own draft did too.

Then we went and looked.

  • WSAVA doesn't publish it. Its dog calorie sheet contains zero instances of "RER" — it publishes130 × kg^0.75 for active adults instead. Its cat sheet has no hits for RER, 0.75, 70, 1.2 or 1.4. And WSAVA's 2011 nutritional guidelines explicitly decline to pick a formula: "RER may be estimated using any of a variety of published formulas."
  • The NRC we could not verify, because chapter 3 is behind a $99.95 paywall. We're telling you that rather than implying we checked. (One caution for anyone else trying: the publisher's in-book search returns "no results" for our term — and also for "dog", and for "the". Its index doesn't exist. A null result from a tool you haven't proven works is not evidence.)
  • The real source is a textbook. Hand's Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, 5th ed, Ch.5, Table 5-2, p.61 — Mark Morris Institute, which is Hill's-affiliated, and not peer-reviewed. Every multiplier in circulation matches that table exactly. Even AAHA's 2021 guidance carries them on a single citation to that one book.

None of which makes the numbers wrong. It makes their pedigree different from what you've been told — a textbook from a pet food company's institute, not an independent standards body. That's worth knowing when a calculator hands you a figure to two decimal places.

The formula isn't even about dogs

Follow the citation one step further and it gets stranger.70 × kg^0.75 is a rounding of work by Kleiber and Brody in the 1930s— 73.3 × BW^0.74 and 70.5 × BW^0.734— describing metabolic rate across mammals. Mice to cattle.

It was never derived for dogs. Allometric scaling of metabolism is real and well-supported, so this isn't a scandal — but the "70" and the "0.75" are borrowed constants, rounded, from a cross-species law. The textbook says as much, and is honest about what that makes its numbers:

"These energy requirements should be used as guidelines, starting points or estimates … and not as absolute requirements."
— Hand's Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, 5th ed, Ch.5

Which is the most useful sentence on this page, and it's the one every calculator drops.

The number that matters more than the formula

Arguing about RER formulas is mostly beside the point, because the largest error in your dog's bowl isn't there. It's the energy density of your food.

Dry dog foods run from roughly 3,000 to 4,500 kcal/kg— a 50% spread. Wet food is often under 1,200. If you take our placeholder of 3,700 and your bag says 4,300, you're underfeeding by 16% before any formula gets involved. That dwarfs the difference between every RER formula on this page.

So: read your bag. It's on there, usually as "kcal/kg" or "kcal per cup". And weigh the food rather than scooping — cups vary between foods and between people, and a habitual 15% overpour is precisely how a dog gets quietly overweight across a year.

Why this calculator focuses on maintenance

Weight-loss programmes need an individual target, health history, and monitoring. This calculator stays on maintenance feeding for healthy dogs, where a published starting estimate is useful and the next adjustment can be made from body condition and your food label.

Frequently asked questions

How much should I feed my dog?
Enter the weight and you'll get a number, but the context matters more than the decimal places. The standard approach is RER × a maintenance factor: work out the resting energy requirement from bodyweight, then multiply by 1.6 for a neutered adult or 1.8 for an intact one. For a 20 kg neutered dog that's about 1,060 kcal/day. Treat it as a starting point and let your dog's body condition guide the adjustment — the textbook these numbers come from says exactly that.
Where does the dog feeding formula actually come from?
Not where you've been told. Nearly every site — and our own first draft — cites "NRC" or "WSAVA". Both are wrong. We checked WSAVA's own calorie sheets: they contain zero instances of "RER", publish 130 × kg^0.75 instead, and WSAVA explicitly refuses to endorse a single formula ("RER may be estimated using any of a variety of published formulas"). The real source is Hand's Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, 5th ed, Table 5-2 — a textbook from the Mark Morris Institute, which is Hill's-affiliated and not peer-reviewed. AAHA's 2021 guidance carries the same figures on a single citation to that book. The whole industry is copying one table.
Is 70 × kg^0.75 specific to dogs?
No — and this surprised us. It's a rounding of Kleiber and Brody's 1930s allometric law for mammals generally (73.3 × BW^0.74 / 70.5 × BW^0.734). It describes metabolic rate across species, from mice to cattle. It was never derived for dogs. That doesn't make it useless — allometric scaling of metabolism is real and well-established — but it does mean the precision implied by "70 × kg^0.75" is borrowed, not measured on dogs.
Why do you use a different formula for cats?
Because the current feline guideline does. The 2021 AAHA/AAFP Feline Life Stage Guidelines publish RER = 30 × kg + 70 — and that document contains no exponential form at all ("0.75" appears zero times in it). Cats weigh 2–8 kg, comfortably inside the 2–45 kg range the textbook states for the linear formula, so following the species' own guideline costs nothing. Dogs span 1–90 kg, where the linear form breaks: it reads 17% high at 45 kg — the textbook's own stated upper bound — and 28% high at 70 kg. A mastiff owner using it would overfeed badly.
How accurate is this?
Less accurate than the decimal places suggest, and the biggest error isn't the formula — it's your food's energy density. Foods run from about 3,000 to 4,500 kcal/kg, a 50% spread, and wet food is far lower again. If you use our placeholder instead of reading your own bag, that swamps everything else. Beyond that: activity, environment, and individual metabolism all vary, which is precisely why the source calls its own numbers "guidelines, starting points or estimates… not absolute requirements".
Why don't you have a weight-loss setting?
Weight-loss plans need an individual target, health history, and monitoring, so this calculator focuses on maintenance feeding for healthy dogs. If your dog needs to lose weight, your veterinarian can set the target and check for medical factors that affect the plan.
How many meals a day?
Two for most adult dogs, three or more for puppies, who can't hold much at once. More useful than the number of meals: weigh the food rather than scooping it. Cups vary wildly between foods and between people, and a consistent 15% overpour is exactly how a dog gets quietly overweight over a year.

Related

Sources last checked 2026-07-17. Formula and maintenance factors: Hand's Small Animal Clinical Nutrition, 5th ed, Ch.5, Table 5-2 (Mark Morris Institute) — a textbook, not peer-reviewed; echoed in AAHA 2021 Box 1 on a single citation to it. Underlying allometry: Kleiber and Brody, 1930s. Not from the NRC or WSAVA, contrary to common attribution — see our methodology page for what we checked.