How Much Should I Feed My Puppy?
The amount of food that a puppy needs each day depends primarily on size. Smaller puppies typically require fewer calories than large breeds. Puppies that are less than 12 months old require the following amounts based on their expected size at maturity:
This guide on how much to feed an eight-week-old puppy is just an approximation and by no means a hard and fast set of rules. Your puppy may require more or less food based on factors such as metabolism, activity levels, and more.
Why feeding puppies puppy food is important
Puppies need a lot of calories, extra protein, and more fat to help sustain growth, so puppy food is balanced accordingly. Typically, puppy food also includes some of the nutrients found in mother’s milk, like the Omega Fatty Acid DHA.
To ensure you’re selecting a puppy food, make sure it is labeled specifically for puppies or says “for all life stages” somewhere on the package.
How much to feed a puppy and how often to feed a puppy depends first and foremost on his age. The easiest way to remember how much to feed a puppy is to create a puppy feeding chart that matches your puppy’s breed and weight at maturity.
Very young puppies need to eat a high-quality puppy food diet approximately 3 to 4 times per day. The frequency of feeding puppies goes down to 3 times per day at around 3 to 6 months of age, and 2 times per day at around 6 to 12 months.
After about a year, most puppies can transition to a nutritionally balanced adult dog food diet 2 times per day.
| How much to feed a puppy | ||
| Age | Portions | Frequency |
| 8 – 12 Weeks | Small Portions | 3-4x/day |
| 4 – 5 Months | Puppy Food | 3x/day |
| 6 – 8 Months | Puppy Food | 2x/day |
| 9 – 11 Months | Adult Food | 2x/day |
| 1 – 2 Year* | Adult Food | 2x/day |
| 2 Year +* | Adult Food | 2x/day |
| Check the back of your puppy’s food packaging to get accurate portion sizes for his weight. | ||
*Toy and smaller breeds may be able to transition to adult food a little earlier (some as early as 7 to 9 months), while some giant breeds don’t reach adulthood until around 18-24 months. Ask your veterinarian for specific guidance here, and if you have any doubts as to when your puppy has officially become a full-grown dog, keep him on puppy food a little longer. When it comes to feeding puppies, it’s better to give a few extra nutrients than not enough.
First 6 to 8 Weeks
During the first six to eight weeks of life the puppy should stay with the mother and be allowed to nurse ad-lib. It is especially important they nurse from the mother. The mother’s milk provides the best nutrition and provides antibodies to help protect your puppy from disease. Sometimes it is not possible to keep a puppy with the mother for the first eight weeks such as when the mother develops eclampsia or mastitis. In these situations milk replacers
Feeding Puppies 8 weeks old
There are so many questions when it comes to puppy food. A question I just received the other day was “How often should you feed a puppy?” Here’s a short list of some of the other common questions I receive from friends, family, and comments on this blog:
The list could go on and on and that’s just the what, why, how’s of feeding your puppy. In fact here’s another question I received from a commenter on this very blog a few days ago:
Lucky for us Guide Dogs of America sends us home with some very helpful guidelines answering several of the above questions including how often should you feed a puppy.
As a guide dog puppy raiser we get to bring home a new puppy when he is approximately 7 weeks of age. That same day we receive a packet of information and one of the flyers in that packed contains a puppy feeding schedule. We actually wrote about puppy feeding schedules about 4 years ago, but thought it might be a nice time to update with the latest GDA information.
In fact, I didn’t even realize the schedule had changed until a couple months before I turned in Dublin.
Those are the guidelines set forth by Guide Dogs of America. So far the school has changed our puppy food 3 times since I’ve been a raiser. When I raised Stetson I fed him Canidae. Derby got to eat Natural Balance. Dublin was eating Purina Pro Plan and Apache is eating the same.