How Much Turkey Per Person?

By Diwakar Patel · Updated August 2026

Quick answer: Buy 1 to 1.25 pounds (450–570 g) of whole, bone-in turkey per person — 1.5 lb (680 g) if you want real leftovers. That is raw bird including bone. It yields roughly 7–8 oz (200–230 g) of cooked meat each, against the British Dietetic Association's 150 g plated portion.

One pound of raw, bone-in turkey per person. That is the figure the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service publishes, and almost every American source agrees with it.

It is also, taken literally, three times what British dietitians recommend. Neither side is wrong. They are weighing different objects, and no page-one result in either country says so.

What the sources actually say

Here is the spread, with what each figure is measuring — which is the column everyone else omits.

The hidden variable: bone

A whole turkey is sold with its skeleton, skin, neck and an empty cavity. You pay for all of it and eat about half of it. Rutgers' agricultural extension service is the only source we found that publishes the conversion outright: 1 to 1.5 lb of uncooked turkey "will yield approximately 10 ounces of cooked turkey meat per person."

The mechanism holds up independently. University of Wisconsin livestock extension puts a ready-to-cook poultry carcass at "around 60% meat and 40% skin and bones," and a 1968 turkey carcass study found birds in the 14–16 lb class ran 59.3% meat and 7.5% skin. Roast that raw meat and it loses another quarter of its weight to moisture. Work it through and a whole bird lands at 45–50% cooked edible meat by purchased weight. Wilson Farm Meats, a butcher, quotes "about 40 to 50 percent" — the same answer from the trade side.

So does yield reconcile the transatlantic gap? Most of it, not all of it — and it is worth being precise about that. One pound of raw bird becomes 200–230 g of cooked meat. The BDA's plated portion is 150 g. Bone and cooking loss explain about a 2.2× gap; the remaining 1.4× is real. American feast portions genuinely are more generous than a dietitian's recommended serving, and they are meant to be. The BDA's own Christmas guidance sizes a 4.5 kg (10 lb) bird for 6–8 people — 570–760 g of raw bird each — precisely so there is "some leftover."

The table that should exist: pounds per person by guest count

Here is the second thing nobody publishes. "One pound per person" is not a constant. A turkey's skeleton does not grow in step with its meat, so the bigger the bird, the better the meat-to-bone ratio — and the fewer purchased pounds each guest needs.

Apply a flat multiplier and you go wrong in both directions: you over-buy badly at 20 guests and under-buy at four. Heatherlea Farm, one of the few sources to band it at all, drops from 1–1.5 lb per person under 18 lb to 3/4 lb per person above 20 lb. Our banding, for a proper roast dinner with sides and a modest amount left over:

Two things fall out of this that are worth knowing before you shop. First, at the small end the arithmetic stops mattering: six people at 1.5 lb each want a 9 lb bird, and the smallest whole turkeys on sale are around that size anyway. A small table gets leftovers whether it plans for them or not — which is why the National Turkey Federation suggests a bone-in or boneless breast instead for a handful of guests.

Second, at the top end you should stop buying one bird. Both the National Turkey Federation and Taste of Home advise two smaller turkeys past roughly 15 people. Two 13 lb birds cook faster, thaw faster and fit an oven better than one 26 lb bird, and you gain a second set of legs and wings for the people who want dark meat.

One genuine disagreement: which direction?

We report conflicts rather than averaging them, and there is one here. Most sources that address bird size at all say larger birds carry proportionally more meat. Wilson Farm Meats: "Smaller birds have a little less yield because the bone-to-meat ratio is higher." Heatherlea Farm: "larger turkeys have a higher meat to bone ratio than smaller birds."

Taste of Home says the opposite — "Larger turkeys have large bones and less edible meat" — and therefore recommends more per person for a big bird, not less. That is a live disagreement between two commercial sources and we can't settle it with a citation. Our read is that the majority position is also the one the carcass data supports: skeletal mass scales more slowly than muscle in a growing bird, which is why the yield percentage in the 14–16 lb class already sits at the top of the published range. We have banded the table that way. If you are cautious, take the middle of a band rather than the bottom.

If you're not roasting a whole bird

The pre-stuffed figure is a real USDA distinction and an easy trap: FSIS raises the recommendation to 1¼ lb per person for a frozen pre-stuffed bird because some of what you weighed is stuffing. And never thaw one — it goes in the oven frozen.

Two safety numbers worth more than any portion figure

Whole turkey is safe at 165 °F (74 °C) measured with a thermometer, stuffing included. Thawing in the fridge takes 1–3 days for a 4–12 lb bird, 3–4 days at 12–16 lb, 4–5 days at 16–20 lb and 5–6 days at 20–24 lb — so a 20 lb bird bought on the Monday of Thanksgiving week will still be frozen. Leftovers keep 3–4 days refrigerated, and nothing should sit out more than two hours.

The rest of the plate

Turkey is the one dish people over-buy and the sides are where they run short. Once the bird is sized, work through how much stuffing per person — where the same raw-versus-prepared unit problem appears in an even nastier form — then how much mashed potato per person and how much gravy per person, which is capped by pan drippings you cannot scale. For the drinks side of the same meal, see Thanksgiving drink quantities, and how much food for Friendsgiving if the guest list is younger and the format looser.

The one-line version: buy raw pounds, plan cooked ounces, and let the number per head fall as the bird gets bigger.