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How Much Should I Feed My Dog?

Published August 18, 2026 · PawLife editorial team

The feeding chart on the bag is calibrated for an average adult dog of a given weight. Your dog is probably not that dog. If they are neutered, over seven, mostly indoors, or a breed with a low activity baseline, the bag will usually overfeed them — often substantially.

This is not a reason to ignore the bag. It is a reason to treat it as a starting point and then correct.

Start from the bag, then adjust for four things

Take the bag's recommendation for your dog's weight, then adjust downward or upward for:

• Neuter status. Neutered dogs typically need fewer calories than intact dogs of the same weight.
• Age. Puppies need far more per kilo than adults; senior dogs generally need less than they did at five.
• Activity. A working dog and a dog with two twenty-minute walks a day are not on the same diet, even at identical weights.
• Calorie density of the food. Foods vary widely in kcal per 100g. Switching brands at the same gram weight can change intake noticeably, and this is a common cause of unexplained weight gain after a food change.

Also feed for the weight your dog should be, not the weight they are. If your dog needs to lose a few kilos, feeding to their current weight maintains the problem.

Weigh it, do not scoop it

Use a kitchen scale. A "cup" of kibble varies in grams depending on piece shape and density, so the same cup used by two people in the same household can mean different amounts of food. Weighing takes a few seconds and removes the largest source of error in home feeding.

Adjust on body condition, not on the scale

Weight alone is a lagging and noisy signal. Body condition is what you check, every couple of weeks:

• You can feel the ribs easily under a thin layer of fat, without pressing.
• Looking down from above, there is a visible waist behind the ribs.
• From the side, the abdomen tucks upward rather than running straight.

If the ribs are hard to find, cut portions modestly and reassess in two to three weeks. Rapid change is not the goal and can cause its own problems — talk to your vet before any significant reduction, and particularly for cats, where fast weight loss is genuinely dangerous.

Count the treats

This is where carefully measured diets go wrong. Treats, training rewards, chews and table scraps all count, and a common guideline is keeping them under roughly 10% of daily calories. A training session can exceed that on its own. Subtract treat calories from meals rather than stacking them on top.

Know what not to feed at all

Portion control is separate from safety. Some foods are dangerous at any amount, and the list is longer than most people think — chocolate, grapes and raisins, onions and garlic, xylitol, macadamia nuts. We keep a free database of 500+ foods with toxicity ratings and sources: see the dog food safety guide, or the cat food safety guide if you also have a cat. If your dog has already eaten something on the dangerous list, call a vet or a poison line now rather than reading further.

Letting an app do the arithmetic

None of the above is hard, but it is fiddly enough that most people do it once and never revisit it. That is the actual failure mode — a portion size set when the dog was two and never adjusted.

PawLife calculates portions from weight, age, breed and activity, tracks weight over time so you can see whether the adjustment worked, and syncs to everyone in the household so the dog does not get fed twice. Most competing trackers do not calculate portions at all — we checked seven of them in our pet care app roundup, and PawLife was the only one with a feeding engine.

None of this replaces a veterinarian, particularly for a dog with a health condition, a weight problem, or a prescription diet.

PawLife is free to download. Feeding plans, the health diary, medical records and the full food safety database work without a subscription.

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