The 80/10/10 rule: how much raw food to feed your dog

A feeding chart by weight and life stage, what the 80/10/10 split actually contains, and the two things the ratio does not cover — with the FDA's contamination figures and what vets say about balance.

Sep 19, 2026 · By Calcelate Team

Raw feeding runs on two numbers that get confused with each other constantly. The first is how much to feed: a percentage of the dog’s body weight per day. The second is what that amount is made of: the 80/10/10 split. You need both, and neither one answers the other’s question.

How much: the chart

Most of the traffic to raw-feeding pages is people looking for a table, so here it is. Percentages of body weight per day, divided across however many meals you feed.

A 20 kg (44 lb) adult dog of normal activity eats 500 g a day, or 250 g twice a day. A puppy of the same weight at 6 to 12 months eats 800 g, because it is building a body as well as running one. A dog that needs to lose weight eats 400 g.

One correction that matters more than anything else on this page: for an overweight dog, use the weight it ought to be, not the weight it is. Feeding 2% of an inflated number is how a diet fails before it starts. If you are unsure what the target should be, that is a conversation for your vet, and it is worth having before you change anything.

Age changes the answer too, and it changes gradually rather than on a birthday. A large-breed dog is still growing at twelve months while a small one has finished; a nine-year-old terrier may be middle-aged while a nine-year-old mastiff is firmly senior. The dog age calculator gives a more realistic life stage by size than the old multiply-by-seven rule, which is the stage the feeding rate should follow.

What: the 80/10/10 split

The ratio describes what goes into the bowl, and the numbers are shares of the total daily amount.

Eighty percent muscle meat, ten percent raw edible bone, ten percent organ — of which half is liver and half is another secreting organ such as kidney or spleen, which is why the model is sometimes written 80/10/5/5. This is the Prey Model Raw version. The BARF variant sets aside a share for vegetables and fruit and reduces the rest proportionally; the raw dog food calculator will do either.

Three details do most of the damage when they are missed:

“Edible bone” is not “bone”. It means raw bone soft enough for the dog to eat — poultry necks, wings, rib tips. Weight-bearing bones from large animals, and any cooked bone whatsoever, are a different and dangerous category. Cooking makes bone brittle and prone to splintering.

Heart is muscle, not organ. It is a common and expensive mistake: heart is lean muscle meat and counts in the 80%, not the 10%. If you count it as organ, the dog ends up short on liver.

Liver is not optional and not interchangeable. It is the main source of vitamin A and copper in the whole diet. Too little and the dog is deficient; substantially too much over time and vitamin A accumulates, because it is fat-soluble and the body does not simply flush the excess.

The ratios are weekly averages, not per-meal rules. Feeding exactly 10% bone at every single meal is unnecessary; hitting it across the week is the goal, and varying the protein sources over that week — beef, poultry, fish, lamb — is how the diet gets its range of nutrients.

What the ratio does not cover

The 80/10/10 model is a convention that grew out of the raw-feeding community, not a nutritional standard. It is a sensible shorthand for approximating what a whole prey animal contains, and it says nothing at all about whether the result meets a dog’s requirements for specific nutrients.

The actual standards are the FEDIAF nutritional guidelines in Europe and the AAFCO profiles in the United States, both built on National Research Council data. They specify minimum and maximum levels for dozens of nutrients. A diet can hit 80/10/10 perfectly and still miss several of them — the gaps most often reported in analyses of home-prepared raw diets are vitamin D, vitamin E, iodine, zinc, manganese and calcium-to-phosphorus balance. A 2013 review in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Freeman LM et al., 243:1549–58) went through the evidence on raw meat-based diets and found the nutritional-adequacy problem to be the rule rather than the exception in home-made versions.

This is not an argument against raw feeding. It is an argument against assuming a ratio has done the work of a formulation. If you feed raw long-term, the two reasonable paths are a commercially prepared complete raw food that states it meets FEDIAF or AAFCO, or a recipe drawn up by a veterinary nutritionist for your dog. Growing puppies are the least forgiving case of all: they need calcium and phosphorus in a fairly narrow range and both directions of error do skeletal damage.

Handling it safely

Raw meat carries bacteria, and this part is not up for debate. The US Food and Drug Administration ran a two-year study of over 1,000 pet food samples. Of the 196 raw pet food samples, 15 tested positive for Salmonella and 32 for Listeria monocytogenes. Dry foods, semi-moist foods and jerky treats were at or near zero for both.

The risk runs in both directions: the dog can get sick, and so can the household, including from a dog that is perfectly healthy but shedding bacteria. The precautions are the ordinary kitchen ones, applied seriously — wash hands for twenty seconds after handling, keep raw pet food and its bowls away from human food preparation, disinfect surfaces and bowls, and do not rinse raw meat, because the splash spreads it further than the rinse removes. The FDA’s advice is worth reading in full if there is anyone in the house who is very young, elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, where the calculation changes considerably.

Starting out

Begin with the chart, feed one protein source for a week or two so you can see how the dog handles it, then widen. Weigh the food rather than eyeballing it for the first month — portions judged by eye drift upward quickly.

Then stop measuring and start looking. Two weeks in, run your hands over the dog: ribs should be easy to feel under a thin covering, with a visible waist from above and a tuck from the side. Body condition beats any percentage, and it is the number the raw dog food calculator cannot see. Adjust by 10% at a time and give each change a fortnight before judging it.

If there is a cat in the house, do not scale the dog’s numbers down for it. Cats are obligate carnivores with requirements dogs do not share — taurine above all — and their energy needs follow a different curve entirely; the cat calorie calculator is the right starting point there.