How much hay does a horse need? Per day, per winter, per bale.

Published 5 October 2026

Autumn is when most people commit to a winter’s supply, and the figure most of them start from — 20 pounds a day — undercounts what actually needs to be bought. People who run short rarely get the daily ration wrong. They miss on waste, weather, and bale weight.

The daily number

Extension guidance is consistent: plan on 2 pounds of good-quality grass hay for every 100 pounds of bodyweight, every day. That is 2 percent of bodyweight, and it is the figure both North Dakota State and the University of Maryland use.

• A 500 lb pony: about 10 lb a day.
• A 1,000 lb horse: about 20 lb a day.
• A 1,200 lb horse: about 24 lb a day.

Use a weight tape or a livestock scale rather than a guess. Rounding a 1,200 lb horse down to 1,000 understates the daily ration by 4 pounds, which is nearly 500 pounds over a 121-day winter.

It is also roughly the same 2 percent that sets how much pasture a horse needs in grazing season, which is why the acres per horse guide and this one share a starting point.

The number people leave out: waste

Not every pound you put out gets eaten. Hay is trampled, soiled and scattered, and how much depends mostly on how you feed it. Maryland Extension publishes waste rates by method:

Look at the spread rather than any single number. On small squares, the gap between a slat feeder and feeding on the ground is 12 percentage points. On round bales it is the difference between 5 to 11 percent and 57 percent.

That last figure deserves a second look. If 57 percent of a round bale is wasted, only 43 percent is eaten, so you have to buy about 2.3 times what the horse actually needs. (That multiplier is simple arithmetic, not a figure from the table.) At those rates a feeder is less an accessory than the biggest single lever on how much hay you buy.

A worked example: one horse, one winter

Maryland Extension’s own example uses a 1,000 lb horse fed from December 1 to March 31, which is 121 days:

• Daily. 1,000 lb × 2% = 20 lb of hay.
• Season. 20 lb × 121 days = 2,420 lb.
• Allowances. Add 5 percent for storage losses and 5 percent for feeding waste, and the total is 2,668 lb, about 1.3 tons.
• In bales. At the 40 lb bale Maryland assumes, that is roughly 67 bales.

Now change one thing. Feed the same small squares on the ground with no feeder, at 13 percent waste instead of 5, and the total rises by roughly 200 pounds — five or more extra bales — with no change in what the horse eats.

Cold weather moves the number

The 2 percent figure is for mild conditions. NDSU Extension puts the lower critical temperature for a horse with a heavy winter coat, in dry and calm weather, at 30°F. Below that, each 10 degrees colder adds roughly 2 pounds of feed per day.

That is easy to price. At 10°F you are 20 degrees under the threshold, so about 4 extra pounds a day. Two months at that temperature is 240 pounds, or six 40 lb bales, on top of the base figure.

The same source notes that wind and wet raise the requirement considerably more for a horse without shelter, which makes a dry windbreak worth thinking about as a feed saving as well as a comfort.

Winter length is the swing factor

Every figure above scales with the number of days, and that is the one most people estimate loosely. One extra month at 20 lb a day is 600 lb, or 15 bales of 40 lb.

Count winter by when your pasture stops feeding the horses, not by the calendar. The pasture acreage calculator asks for your grazing season in days; every day it does not cover is a day hay has to.

Buy by weight, not by the bale

“A bale” is not a unit. Maryland’s example assumes 40 lb, but small squares vary a great deal depending on how they are tied and baled, and a count of bales only means something once you know what each one weighs.

Weigh three or four from the load with a hanging scale or a bathroom scale before you agree a price. Then compare on price per ton: price ÷ bale weight × 2,000. With illustrative numbers, a $9 bale at 40 lb works out to $450 a ton, while the same $9 at 60 lb is $300 a ton. The same sticker price can hide a 50 percent difference in what you are paying for the hay.

One formula to order from

bodyweight × 0.02 × days × number of horses × waste allowance ÷ bale weight

For the Maryland horse: 1,000 × 0.02 × 121 × 1.10 ÷ 40 ≈ 67 bales. Swap in your own bodyweight, your own winter length, the allowance that fits your feeder, and the weight of the bales you actually weighed.

What this does not cover

These are figures for an average adult horse at maintenance. Hard keepers, broodmares, horses in heavy work, seniors with poor teeth, and horses managed for metabolic problems all sit above or below this, in different directions. Your vet or an equine nutritionist is the person to set those, and a hay analysis will tell you far more about what is in a given load than its appearance does.