When you’re exclusively pumping for your baby – or even if you’re both nursing and bottle feeding pumped milk – it can be hard to know exactly how much your baby should be eating. How much should your baby get per feeding? How much should he or she eat in a day?
Many people feeding pumped breast milk (including me, when I was a new, confused, and sleep-deprived exclusive pumper) refer to formula feeding guidelines for an idea of how much they should be giving their babies. However, formula and breast milk aren’t the same – for example, breast milk is metabolized faster than formula. And because most breastfed babies are nursed, there is no way to tell how much they are taking in (short of weighing them before and after every feeding with a baby scale).
I recently did a survey of women that exclusively pumped for their babies, and one of the questions that I asked the respondents was how much milk their babies ate on a daily basis. I’ll go through these results first, and then go through the recommendations for formula fed babies to see how they compare.
What is the average milk intake per day for breastfed babies drinking from bottles?
The overall average intake for babies across the first year was 26.8 oz (792.5 ml); after one month of age, the minimum reported daily intake for was 16 oz (473 ml) and the maximum was 48 oz (1,420 ml). Below is a chart showing how the results were distributed:
Here we can see that most babies eat between 24 (710 ml) and 30 oz (887 ml).
As one might expect, breast milk intake varied slightly with the baby’s age, with it averaging slightly lower in the first month of life and then increasing up to between 26 and 28 oz (770 and 828 ml) until about 10 months of age. At this point, presumably, solids are making up a more substantial part of the baby’s diet, and the average drops down to 25 oz (740ml) at 10 months and 19.5 oz (577 ml) at 11 months.
I also looked to see if breast milk intake varied by any other factors that I had asked about in the survey, such as the age of the mother, whether the baby was a first baby or a subsequent child, and race. I didn’t find any statistically significant differences based on maternal or child characteristics, except for the age of the baby as described above.
The one relationship that I did find with regard to a baby’s intake of breast milk was the amount of milk that the mother pumped. Mothers that pumped more milk tended to feed their babies more milk.
This could be for a few different reasons. For example, mothers that switched from nursing to exclusive pumping might be closely in sync with the amount of milk that their baby needs. Additionally, women with supply on the low end of the spectrum that have babies that also don’t need as much milk might not work to bring it up as much as mothers whose babies take in more.
How does this compare to formula feeding guidelines?
I was curious whether or not the results that I got in survey would be similar to formula feeding guidelines, so I looked up the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines. Reading them is a bit confusing, as the descriptions of appropriate intake use three ranges – the age of the baby (i.e., 1-3 months), the amount of formula (i.e., 2-3 oz), and the number of feedings (i.e., every 3-4 hours).
To simplify things, I broke the guidelines down into the below table:
Here we can see that the total daily recommended intake is fairly close to the averages reported above for babies by age. The recommendation is slightly lower in the beginning, but on par with actual totals for breastfed babies by six months.
The guidelines specifically state not to feed a baby more than 32 oz (946 ml) of formula per day. I’m not sure whether or not that recommendation would also apply to breast milk, but over 10% of the respondents’ babies drank more breast milk than that on a daily basis.
(Including mine! The baby that I exclusively pumped for was a really big baby who ate 40 oz of breast milk on the regular, so hopefully it’s not an issue for breast milk.)
Note: The typical feeding schedule for breastfed babies may be very different from that of formula-fed babies. It’s more common for breastfed babies to eat more often and less on schedule than formula-fed babies, likely because (as noted above) breast milk is metabolized more quickly than formula. This discussion is only about total intake.
So, what should you do with this information?
I get frequent questions as to how many ounces should be in a baby’s bottle at given ages. My goal with this post was to be able to give mothers a ballpark as to what is “normal” for breastfed babies to eat in a given day, and if you want, you can use this as a starting point that you can tweak based on your baby’s needs. As you can see from the first chart, there is a huge variation in what breastfed babies will eat in a given day – your baby might be one that only needs 20 oz per day or one (like mine) who needs a lot more.
Ultimately, though, I would let your baby be your guide. If he finishes his bottle and still seems hungry and isn’t soothed by a pacifier or any of your other tricks, then I would go ahead and feed him more. If he’s on the other end of the spectrum and just doesn’t like to eat much, I wouldn’t push it unless there is an issue with weight gain (and then I would discuss the best approach with your pediatrician).
Note: If you’re a data geek like me and interested in more survey data, I wrote an e-book about exclusive pumping and milk supply that makes extensive use of it; you can check out here. I’ve also written this post and plan on additional ones in the future.
References- Exclusive Pumping and Milk Supply survey, conducted 1/2015.
- Healthy Children. “Amount and Schedule of Formula Feedings.” https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/feeding-nutrition/Pages/Amount-and-Schedule-of-Formula-Feedings.aspx
Thank you! So frequently I see new mothers asking in mommy groups about how much they’re supposed to feed their child, especially in the exclusive pumping groups. (I was one of them!) There’s so little information out there about expressed breast milk, that everyone is either curious or an expert. I once chimed in about my 4 month old who was eating 4 oz bottles 6 times a day (24 oz total) and was scolded by others that it was way too much. That I shouldn’t be feeding more than 3 oz at a time, ever! Let the mommy guilt set in. I felt awful. I tried to cut back and after a few hours I caved. It was right then that I had to remind myself that these people were not me and not my pediatrician.
A study recently showed that most mother’s get inaccurate advice for caring for their children, and most of it comes from family, friends, and the Internet. If you have questions, speak to your pediatrician!
That would be fine but a lot of pediatricians are also misinformed on breast feeding guidelines and give guidelines for formula which leads to many problems.
If it helps my lactation consultant said babies can eat anywhere between 3-5 oz at a time, she’s been a consultant for almost 20 years. I personally only pump 4 oz at a time therefore he can only eat 4 oz. I exclusively pump and sometimes it’s only 3 oz at times. My baby is 12 weeks currently.
While babies all take in different amounts of milk, I think it’s very important to bring up paced bottle feeding for breastfed babies.
Babies that nurse have to work harder to get milk from the breast, and feeding sessions tend to take longer than for babies that drink from a bottle. If you are a nursing mom that is giving a bottle of expressed milk, it’s key to pace the feeding so that the baby doesn’t chug it down quickly and think they are still hungry. It’s very easy to overfeed mainly-breastfed babies this way and can cause confusion in the amount your child is eating!
Thanks for this article and data, very much appreciated! Two ideas for future research – (1) I wonder if the length of the baby, or perhaps BMI, would be a statistically significant factor in how much breastmilk a baby drinks? I’m suggesting length as the measurement to study because a heavier than average baby could be considered heavy due to possible overfeeding. My baby is 99%+ in length and drinks a higher than average (per your data) of pumped milk, 32-28 oz per day. (2) I recently read something where a mother pumping breastmilk said a health practitioner did a test of her pumped milk and said it was not as fatty as average milk, in other words, her milk was more like skim instead of 2% or whole milk. Of course the fullness of the breasts at the time of pumping comes into play (more full = less fat), but I’m sure they considered that. I wonder if this factors into how much a baby would drink? Thanks again for this article!
What a good article! Thank you for conducting the surveys and gathering the data! This is so helpful since breast milk is so different than formula, and I always wondered what the average/“normal” amount my baby should be eating.
For formula fed guidelines, I always saw that there’s an equation for calculating amount of formula per body weight. Did you find anything that may suggest a feeding to body weight ratio?
Also I think they ask you not to feed over a certain amount in formula because formula has a lot of vitamins and minerals, and if you feed too much the baby could be consuming more than the safe amount? Like he can be getting too much calcium and it could start building like in his organs? I don’t know, just speculating.
Hi Jenny! I didn’t find anything about the feeding/body weight ratio, but that’s an interesting thought! Also interesting about the vitamins/minerals – I hadn’t thought of that!