Formula Feeding Amounts by Age

Three stages are published, and they are the whole of the by-age answer: in the first week, feeds of no more than about 1 to 2 ounces; by the end of the first month, 3 to 4 ounces every three to four hours; by six months, 6 to 8 ounces at each of four or five feeds. Those are the American Academy of Pediatrics' figures, they are ranges rather than targets, and the same organisation says babies regulate their intake from day to day to meet their own needs. The NHS puts the other half of it in one line: all babies are different, and your baby will know how much milk they need.

What follows is what those rows leave out — how often rather than how much, what a half-finished bottle means, and the signals that tell you enough is going in when the bottle disagrees with the table.

The published stages

An ounce is about 30 millilitres, so the first-week row is roughly 30 to 60 millilitres, the one-month row roughly 90 to 120, and the six-month row roughly 180 to 240. There is a second published route to the same place — a sum worked from your baby's weight, with a ceiling on it — and it lives on the how much milk by weight page rather than being repeated here. The milk intake calculator runs both routes at once and shows you where they disagree.

The gaps between the rows are the point

Notice what is not in that table: months two, three, four and five. Nobody publishes a figure for them, because the honest shape of this is a slow climb from the first row to the last with an enormous amount of ordinary variation inside it. Any chart that fills those months with tidy numbers has invented them, and a printed table is in any case the average of babies who are not yours.

The NHS says the same thing from the other end: newborns need quite small amounts to start with, and the amount will vary from baby to baby. Two babies born the same week, both thriving, can be a full ounce apart at every feed for months.

How often, which is the more useful question

The published answer to how often is not a schedule. It is to feed whenever she seems hungry — responsive feeding, or feeding on demand — with your attention on the baby rather than on the clock. The intervals in the table above are a description of what tends to happen, not a rule you are keeping to.

The AAP is direct about the work involved: learning your own baby's feeding pattern is one of the biggest challenges of the weeks after the birth, and once you know it you can tell when she is hungry, when she has had enough, how often she needs to eat and how long a feed takes. It also notes that babies have styles. Researchers once named five common ones, and they include the baby who feeds energetically from the first second, the baby who gets frantic at the sight of the bottle and has to be calmed several times during a feed, and the baby who takes a few minutes, rests, and comes back for more. None of them is doing it wrong.

Catching hunger before the crying

Start a feed at the earliest signs of hunger rather than waiting for a cry — that is the AAP's advice and it is practical rather than sentimental. The early signals are small: stirring and restlessness, sucking on fists or fingers, murmuring, turning the head with the mouth open. A baby who has got as far as a full cry has to be calmed down before she can feed at all, so you end up doing two jobs instead of one.

Fullness has its own set: slowing down, letting the teat sit in the mouth without sucking, turning away, pushing the bottle out, going floppy and content. Those are the ones worth learning, because they are what tells you a feed is finished — not the line on the bottle.

The bottle she does not finish

This is the sentence worth carrying off the page. The NHS says to follow your baby's lead, feed her when she seems hungry, and not to worry if she does not finish the bottle — and then it says why it matters: do not force them to take more milk than they want, as that can lead to overfeeding.

So a bottle with an ounce left in it is information, not a failure. It tells you she was full, or tired, or that this feed came a little close to the last one. Milk left behind several times in a row usually means the bottles you are making up are slightly too big, which is a thing to adjust rather than a thing to enforce. The paced bottle feeding page covers how to feed in a way that leaves the stopping to her.

Night feeds

The published amounts are per 24 hours and per feed. Nothing in them treats a feed at two in the morning as different from one at two in the afternoon, and no publisher this site may cite prints a month at which night feeds are supposed to end. A baby who takes a full bottle in the night is hungry in the night.

What is worth protecting is the sleep around it. Feeds go back down on her back for every sleep, day and night, on a firm flat mattress, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys, in your room for at least the first six months — that does not loosen because everybody is tired. If the night waking itself is the thing you came here about, cluster feeding and the newborn wake windows page are the nearer answers.

The signals that outrank the table

When the bottle and the chart disagree, the chart is not the evidence. Three things are, and the NHS names all three: weight gain, around six wet nappies (diapers) a day from a few days after the birth, and at least one dirty nappy a day. Add the routine weigh-ins, because the AAP's position is that regular checkups and watching growth over time are the best way to know a baby is getting enough. The wet nappy count page has the thresholds in full.

Milk or formula is the whole of her nutrition for the first six months, so this is a subject where somebody who can weigh her should be in the conversation early rather than late. A few days on the printed day sheet or the feeding chart gives that person something better than a memory of a bad week.

When to stop counting

Once weight gain is steady and nappies are ordinary, the counting has done its job. Keep a rough sense of the day rather than a total, and go back to writing things down only when something changes and you want evidence rather than an impression.

Ring your health visitor, GP or pediatrician about a baby who is not gaining, whose nappies have dropped off, who is hard to rouse for feeds, who is unhappy through every feed, or who never seems satisfied however much is offered. The same goes for a worry that will not go away — it is a reason to ring today rather than to read another page. Nothing here is medical advice, and no chart can see your baby.