Meat Cooking Time Calculator
Estimate roasting time for turkey, chicken, beef, pork, ham and lamb from weight and oven temperature, with USDA safe internal temperatures and rest times.
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How long to roast a turkey, a pork loin or a leg of lamb is one of the most-searched kitchen questions every November — and most published answers are a single number that ignores what you're actually cooking. This calculator uses a separate USDA-guideline roasting rate for each of seven meats — turkey, whole chicken, boneless chicken breast, beef roast, pork roast, precooked ham and leg of lamb — because a chicken breast and a whole turkey do not cook at the same minutes-per-pound rate, and a precooked ham only needs reheating, not cooking through.
Pick your meat, weight (pounds or kilograms), and — for beef roast — the doneness you want, from rare to well done. The calculator multiplies your weight by that meat's per-pound rate at the USDA-standard 325°F (163°C) oven, then adjusts for a hotter oven if you selected 350°F or 400°F, using the common rule that each 25°F of extra heat trims roughly 10% off the total time. The result comes with the USDA minimum safe internal temperature for that meat in both °F and °C, and a recommended resting time before you carve.
Beef roast is the one meat here with a real doneness choice, because pulling it rare or medium-rare is common practice even though it sits below USDA's 145°F (63°C) minimum safe temperature for whole cuts. When that happens the calculator says so plainly — it's a stated preference, not a hidden downgrade of the safety number. Poultry, pork, ham and lamb use USDA's single published safe temperature (165°F for poultry, 145°F for pork and lamb, 140°F for reheating precooked ham), so there is no doneness choice to make for those.
None of this replaces a meat thermometer. Oven calibration, whether the meat started refrigerator-cold or at room temperature, bone-in versus boneless, and the exact shape of the cut all shift real cooking time — sometimes by 30 minutes or more on a large roast. Treat the time as when to start checking, not when to pull the meat; internal temperature is the only number that actually tells you it's done. Everything runs locally in your browser, and if you also need to convert a recipe's cups and grams, this site's cooking measurement converter handles that with real ingredient densities.