How big of a turkey do you need for Thanksgiving?

If you are planning to host Thanksgiving dinner, you might already be planning for the turkey that you need to cook. After all, this is the time to snag the bird from the store. And depending on how many people you have coming to your Thanksgiving dinner, you probably want to know how much turkey you need to have on hand to feed everyone.

The big question is typically how much turkey do you need for every person who will be eating at your table. And that leads to determining what size of turkey you actually need.

In general, you really want to plan for approximately 1.25 pounds of turkey for every person who is eating. From there, you can easily multiply that by the number of people that you are going to have at dinner. (And if the number isn’t a whole number, then you may want to round up.)

Planning for Thanksgiving dinner and how much turkey you need

One thing we always note is that it is okay to have more meat, but you do not want to have less turkey than you need. So if you happen to be feeding four people, maybe a five pound turkey is all you need. However, it can be hard to find such a small turkey at this time of year, so there’s no issue in potentially buying that eight pound turkey instead. Yes, you will likely have some excess turkey left over, but who doesn’t love leftover turkey with all the fixings the day after, when you no longer want to cook.

Knowing the approximate poundage per person, makes it easy to figure out how big of a turkey you need. And as we already know that four guests is equal to five pounds, that means that eight guests would be 10 pounds. And you would just go up from there. It is a relatively simple mathematical equation that we learned from Taste of Home, that we have used in the past and has worked out well for us. Using this equation has made it so easy for us to figure out how much turkey we need for our guests. And it has yet to steer us wrong.

It absolutely makes planning your Thanksgiving meal so much easier to have this equation handy. And the thing we love best is the fact that if you are able to get a turkey around the size that you need, you don’t have to worry about waste. Not only that, but you will make sure that every person who sits at your table has enough to eat.

Have you use this equation before? How do you determine how much turkey you need for your Thanksgiving meal?