Quick answer: For a Friendsgiving dinner, budget 1 to 1¼ lb (450–565 g) of turkey per person on the bone, plus ½ cup of each side dish per person and 1½ lb (680 g) of total food per adult across the table. Ten guests need a 12–14 lb turkey, five sides and two pies.
Start here: buy 1 pound of turkey per person, and plan on 6 to 8 shared dishes for 10 guests — not 10. Everything else is adjustment around those two numbers.
The turkey figure is the one thing nearly everyone agrees on. Butterball states plainly that "a general rule is 1 pound of turkey per person." The Kitchn gives the same number and adds that you should "plan on 1 1/2 pounds per person attending if you want a good amount of leftovers." The Old Farmer's Almanac party planner chart also lists 1 pound per person. That's bone-in weight — the rule is built to absorb the carcass, skin and bones you won't eat.
The dish count is where Friendsgiving diverges from Thanksgiving, and where most hosts get it wrong.
Why Friendsgiving is a different arithmetic problem
A family Thanksgiving is usually one cook making a fixed menu. A Friendsgiving is a potluck, and potlucks fail in a predictable way: everyone brings what they like to make, so you end up with four desserts, three bowls of something with brussels sprouts in it, and nobody bringing gravy.
Portion behaviour changes too. When there are twelve things on a table, people take a spoonful of each rather than a proper serving of four. Total food eaten per head stays roughly flat; food eaten per dish falls sharply. This is why catering charts and home-cooking charts disagree so much — more on that below.
So the planning question isn't "how much of everything." It's "how few dishes can I get away with, and who brings what."
The per-person chart
These are the figures I'd actually plan against. Sources are named because a quantity chart without sources is just someone's guess.
| Item | Per person | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Turkey (bone-in, raw) | 1 lb / 450 g | Butterball; The Kitchn; Almanac |
| Turkey if you want real leftovers | 1.5 lb / 680 g | The Kitchn |
| Stuffing / dressing | ¾ cup / 180 ml | Almanac |
| Gravy | â…“ cup / 80 ml | Almanac |
| Cranberry sauce | ½ cup / 120 ml | Almanac |
| Mashed potatoes (cooked) | ½ cup / 120 ml | Chef-Menus quantity chart |
| Green vegetable (cooked) | ½ cup / 120 ml | Chef-Menus quantity chart |
| Green salad | 1 cup / 240 ml | Chef-Menus quantity chart |
| Dinner rolls | 2 | Almanac; Chef-Menus |
| Dessert | 1 slice / small square | Chef-Menus quantity chart |
| Cheese, as an appetizer | 2 oz / 57 g | Chef-Menus quantity chart |
A US cup is 237 ml, so the metric column is rounded for sanity rather than being exact. If you're hosting in the UK or Australia, 450 g of bird per head and 180 ml of stuffing is close enough — nobody has ruined a dinner by 3 ml of stuffing.
The turkey number is genuinely contested, and you should know why
Every consumer-facing source says 1 lb per person. The catering charts say roughly half that. Ellen's Kitchen — a long-running cooking-for-crowds reference — lists 13 pounds of whole turkey for 25 servings. That's about 0.52 lb per person, near enough half the Butterball figure.
Both are right, for different tables. The 1 lb rule assumes turkey is the centrepiece of a short menu and people will go back for seconds. The crowd charts assume a buffet with eight or ten other things on it, where turkey is one item among many and most guests take two slices.
A Friendsgiving sits between the two. My read: if your menu is turkey plus three or four sides, use 1 lb. If ten people are each bringing a dish and the table is groaning, you can drop to ¾ lb per person and still have leftovers. Below that you're gambling, and turkey is the one thing you can't send someone out for at 6pm.
How many dishes, and who brings what
Work backwards from the table rather than from your guest list. For 10 people:
- 1 main (the turkey — the host should make this; it's the one thing that can't travel)
- 2 starches — stuffing and mashed potatoes, or stuffing and a bread situation
- 2 vegetables — one hot, one a salad, so there's something that isn't beige
- 1 sauce — gravy, and someone must be assigned this by name or it will not exist
- 1 dessert — one, not four
- 1 appetizer — a cheese board is the least work per unit of goodwill
That's 8 dishes for 10 people. Assign them explicitly. "Bring a side" produces three potato gratins; "you're on green vegetable" produces a green vegetable.
For scale: ¾ cup of stuffing × 10 people is 7.5 cups. A 9 × 13 inch pan filled two inches deep holds about 16 cups (9 × 13 × 2 = 234 cubic inches, ÷ 14.4 cubic inches per cup), so one half-filled tray covers ten people. Most people bring twice that — which is fine, but it's why you need fewer dishes than you think.
For the appetizer end of the table, our cheese board calculator sizes the board to your headcount.
Drinks
Friendsgiving skews younger and later than Thanksgiving, and drinks scale with hours, not just heads — a different calculation from food, and worth doing properly. Our party drink calculator handles the hours-and-headcount maths; the wine calculator covers it if you're keeping the table to wine only.
One Friendsgiving-specific note: guests bring bottles as well as dishes. You will end the night with more alcohol than you started with, so buy your own at the low end.
The bit most Friendsgiving guides skip: the 2-hour rule
Potluck food travels. It sits in a car, then on a counter, then on a table for three hours while everyone talks. This is the actual food-safety risk of the format.
The USDA danger zone is 40°F to 140°F (4°C to 60°C). NC State Extension's guidance for large gatherings states that "food should never be left out of refrigeration over two hours," dropping to one hour if it's above 90°F. Hot food should be held and served at 140°F or above; cold food at 40°F or below.
University of Minnesota Extension is blunter about potlucks specifically, since they're the one service style with no holding equipment at all: "no more than 2 hours cumulative at room temperature," then dispose of leftovers. Cumulative is the word doing the work — the drive over counts.
The practical fix is boring and effective: put out half of each dish and keep the rest in the fridge or a low oven, then swap. It also makes the table look better at hour three.
The short version
Ten guests: 10 lb of turkey, 8 dishes, assigned by name. Gravy is somebody's job. Half the food goes out, half stays cold. Buy drinks at the low end because people bring bottles.
If you're planning what everyone drinks as well, our Thanksgiving drink quantities guide runs those numbers for the same weekend.
Next step: work out the drinks properly with the party drink calculator — it's the part of Friendsgiving that's easiest to get badly wrong in either direction.