How much to feed a puppy: the chart on the bag is a starting point

Here is a thing nobody mentions when they tell you to follow the feeding guide.

Open a bag of Royal Canin Medium Puppy and the chart asks for your puppy’s expected adult weight. Open a bag of Skinner’s Field & Trial Puppy and the chart asks for the weight of the puppy right now. Same shelf, same category, opposite questions.

A twelve-week-old labrador weighs about 11kg and will finish around 30kg. Read the Skinner’s chart as if it were asking for adult weight and you would feed that puppy the 30kg row — 710 grams a day instead of 350. Read Royal Canin the other way round and you would halve the ration.

That is before anything else goes wrong. So start there: check which weight your chart is asking for. Harringtons and Royal Canin index on adult weight. Skinner’s and Burns index on current weight. It is not printed in large type.

How many meals, and when that changes

British sources broadly agree at the two ends and argue in the middle.

Age	What most UK sources say
8–12 weeks	Four meals a day — Blue Cross, Dogs Trust, Harringtons, Skinner’s
3–4 months	Three or four. Dogs Trust drops to three at 12 weeks; Harringtons and Skinner’s hold four until four months
4–6 months	Three meals
6 months onwards	Two meals, for life

The disagreements are real and worth knowing about rather than papering over. Blue Cross contradicts itself across two of its own pages — its puppy page says drop to two meals at six months, its general feeding page says twenty weeks. The Royal Kennel Club allows two to three meals from four months, a good deal earlier than the charities. The RVC’s puppy leaflet allows the same.

None of this matters much. What matters is the total for the day and that it goes into more than one sitting; how you slice it is largely convenience. Blue Cross and Dogs Trust are both clear that leaving food down all day is not a good idea.

The arithmetic underneath every chart

All of them are derived from the same equation, and you can run it yourself in ten seconds.

Resting energy requirement = 70 × (bodyweight in kg)^0.75

Then multiply by a life-stage factor. For puppies the standard figures, used by the MSD Veterinary Manual and the veterinary nutrition literature, are 3.0 under four months and 2.0 from four months to adult size. Adults run 1.8 if entire or genuinely active, 1.6 if neutered and averagely busy, and 1.4 if inactive or prone to putting weight on — which is the figure usually applied to older dogs, though it is worth knowing that neither AAFCO nor the NRC recognises a separate senior requirement.

Worked through: a 10kg puppy has a resting requirement of 394 calories. At three months that is 1,181 calories a day. At five months, on the 2.0 factor, 787.

The drop is not a mistake. Growth is expensive and a four-month-old puppy is doing less of it per kilo than a two-month-old.

Where the charts run high

Now compare that arithmetic to what the bags actually say. Skinner’s Field & Trial Puppy is 386 calories per 100g, and its chart is indexed on current weight, which makes it the easiest one to check.

Puppy weight	Resting requirement	Weaning–12 weeks	3–6 months	6–9 months
2 kg	118 kcal	130g = 4.3 × RER	95g = 3.1 ×	75g = 2.5 ×
5 kg	234 kcal	330g = 5.4 × RER	185g = 3.1 ×	155g = 2.6 ×
10 kg	394 kcal	460g = 4.5 × RER	310g = 3.0 ×	260g = 2.6 ×
15 kg	534 kcal	590g = 4.3 × RER	420g = 3.0 ×	350g = 2.5 ×

Those multiples are our own arithmetic, not the brand’s claim, and they tell a clear story. The three-to-six-month and six-to-nine-month columns land almost exactly where the textbook says they should. The weaning-to-twelve-weeks column sits at four and a half to five and a half times resting requirement, where the standard figure is three.

In fairness: a genuinely tiny puppy does burn more than 3 × RER, and the top of that column assumes a puppy who is unusually heavy for the age band. But it is a wide margin, and this is a good, sober British brand rather than a bad one.

The broader evidence agrees. Tufts’ veterinary nutrition team checked the feeding directions on eight randomly chosen dog foods against calculated requirements. Two of the eight matched across all body weights. Four were right for small and medium dogs and excessive for large ones. One provided up to 61% more calories than the dog needed.

There is a UK-specific reason too. The equations manufacturers derive their charts from were found to overestimate puppy energy requirements by around 20% below six months, with the error worst in small and toy breeds. Labradors came out close.

Even the trade body concedes the point. UK Pet Food’s own guidance says the label guides “are only intended as a starting point.”

Treats are ten per cent, and they come off the meal

Both UK Pet Food and Dogs Trust put treats at no more than 10% of daily calories. Harringtons applies the same to puppies and suggests the sensible version: take the training rewards out of the measured daily portion rather than adding them on top.

This is where most overfeeding actually happens. PDSA’s 2023 PAW Report found veterinary professionals estimating 46% of UK dogs are overweight or obese, while 81% of owners believed their own dog was an ideal weight. Of the vets who had seen obesity rising, 28% put it down to treats.

The test that beats every chart

Body condition scoring, on the nine-point scale, with 4 to 5 as the ideal band. PDSA’s five-step version takes about twenty seconds:

1. Run your hands along your dog’s sides. The skin should move freely over the ribs, which you should be able to feel with a light touch.
2. Run your hands along the back. You should feel the spine and hipbones without being able to see them.
3. Feel the base of the tail. There should not be a build-up of fat.
4. Feel under the tummy. It should go in, not bulge out.
5. Look from the side and from above. You should be able to see a waist.

Do it every fortnight and write the answer down. A puppy changes shape fast enough that memory is not reliable.

Large breeds: grow them slower on purpose

If your puppy will finish over 30kg, this section is the one that matters, and it runs against instinct.

The Royal Kennel Club’s position: “avoiding overfeeding benefits skeletal development,” and any puppy with an anticipated adult weight of 30kg or greater should be on a large-breed growth diet for the whole of its growth period. Large and giant breeds “may not mature physically until nearly two years old.”

The mechanism is mechanical. A rapidly growing puppy carrying more weight puts static load and muscular pull through an immature skeleton, and excess energy and calcium together are associated with osteochondrosis. The line veterinary nutritionists use is worth memorising: the goal is optimal body condition, not maximal body condition.

The lifetime evidence is the Purina Labrador study, which followed 48 dogs for fourteen years. Half were fed 25% less than their littermates and kept lean from puppyhood.

• Median lifespan 13 years lean-fed against 11.2 years — 1.8 years, or 15% longer.
• At two years old, hip dysplasia was half as frequent in the lean-fed group.
• By the end, 83% of the control dogs had radiographic osteoarthritis against 50% of the lean-fed ones.
• At eight years, osteoarthritis in two or more joint types: 77% of controls, 10% of the lean-fed.

Note the figure that gets garbled everywhere: it is 25% less food and 15% more life, not 25% longer.

One more thing specific to large breeds. Free-choice feeding is explicitly not recommended for them until adulthood, and it is worth saying that at least one mainstream British brand prints the opposite on its packaging — Harringtons’ pack advises feeding young puppies to appetite where possible. For a labrador or a german shepherd, do not.

When to change food, and how fast

How fast: seven to ten days is the modal British recommendation — Blue Cross and the Royal Kennel Club both give it. PDSA is the conservative outlier at ten to fourteen, starting with a teaspoon of the new food offered on a separate plate. Dogs Trust says a few days to a week. No source cites a trial for any of these numbers; they are practice, not data. If your puppy has a delicate gut, use PDSA’s version.

When to move to adult food is where UK sources genuinely conflict:

Source	Small	Medium	Large
Royal Kennel Club	Adult by 8 months under 10kg	1 year for 11–25kg	15 months to 2 years over 26kg
RVC	11–12 months under 25kg	as left	15 months over 25kg
Blue Cross	Around a year, no size bands		Possibly longer, ask your vet

That is a three-to-four-month disagreement on the same decision for a small dog. In practice it makes little difference provided the calories come down as growth stops — which is exactly what body condition scoring tells you and the calendar does not.

Water, for completeness: constant access, every source, no exceptions.

Who should ignore all of this

If your puppy is on a prescription or veterinary diet, feed what the vet told you and ignore the arithmetic here entirely.

If your puppy is visibly thin, not gaining, or has come from a rescue with an unknown history, do not start by cutting the ration to hit a calculated number. See a vet first — a puppy failing to gain is a clinical question before it is a feeding one.

And if you have a giant breed puppy — a dane, a mastiff, a newfoundland — treat everything above as background reading and have the growth-rate conversation with your vet properly. Controlled growth in those breeds is a skeletal matter with a narrow window, and it is worth an appointment rather than an article.

What to do next

If the number you actually want is the money rather than the grams, what it costs to feed a dog for a week runs the same energy maths and turns it into a weekly and annual figure for your dog’s weight and your own food price.

And if you are still deciding what to put in the bowl rather than how much, raw or kibble for a puppy goes through the UK evidence on both, including the calcium problem that makes this decision different for a large breed.

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The resting energy formula and the life-stage multipliers follow the MSD Veterinary Manual and standard veterinary nutrition references. Feeding-chart figures are quoted from the manufacturers’ own published charts for Skinner’s, Harringtons, Royal Canin and Burns, checked September 2026; the multiples of resting requirement calculated from them are ours, not the brands’. Accuracy-of-label findings are from Tufts’ Petfoodology; body condition scoring follows WSAVA’s nine-point chart and PDSA’s home check; obesity prevalence is PDSA’s PAW Report 2023; the lifespan figures are from Purina’s fourteen-year Labrador study (Kealy et al., JAVMA 2002). Nothing here is veterinary advice — for a puppy who is over or under weight, on a prescription diet, or a giant breed, speak to your vet.