Whole Chicken 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.
Processed entirely in your browser — nothing you enter here is ever uploaded.
Result
About this tool
This page opens the meat cooking time calculator with whole chicken preselected, using the USDA-guideline rate of about 20 minutes per pound at 325°F (163°C). A whole chicken cooks noticeably slower per pound than a turkey of similar proportions, because it is a much smaller bird relative to its own bone and cavity, and home roasting charts for chicken consistently run higher per-pound minutes than turkey ones.
Enter your chicken's weight and, optionally, switch the oven temperature — many chicken recipes push to 400°F (204°C) for crisper skin, which this calculator's oven-temperature setting accounts for by trimming the total time by roughly 20-25% compared with the 325°F baseline.
The USDA safe internal temperature for whole chicken is 165°F (74°C), checked in the thickest part of the thigh without touching bone. Let it rest 15 to 20 minutes before carving; because a whole chicken is smaller than a turkey, it needs a shorter rest even though the safe temperature is identical.
Example. A 12 pound turkey at 325 F returns 156 minutes, which the page formats as 2 hours 36 minutes, plus the stored 165 F poultry figure and a 20 to 30 minute rest.
Limit. Oven choices are only 325 F, 350 F, and 400 F, and the minute rate is a per-pound table rather than a reading from a thermometer.