Bearded dragon feeding schedule by age
Published feeding charts disagree, sometimes by three meals a day. This one starts from a veterinary hospital’s schedule for your dragon’s age, then lets your dragon adjust it: what’s left in the bowl moves the next portion, and the scale decides whether the plan is working. It won’t give you a cricket count, because there isn’t a reliable one.
A schedule is a starting point
Beardie Days keeps the log that tells you whether it’s working
- After each meal, one tap. Log the feed from the app, a widget or your Apple Watch, with a note like “12 crickets, ignored greens”.
- Home shows who’s due. After two days by default, and you can change that gap to the schedule above.
- Weights go on the same timeline. A slow drop in appetite or a flat line in grams shows up there, and gives your vet something concrete.
How this works
It’s the chart in our bearded dragon feeding chart by age, asked as questions. The meals come from NC State’s veterinary hospital, because that’s the schedule the guide recommends starting from: two or three meals a day under one month, two a day from one to four months, one a day from four months until adulthood, and every day or every other day for adults. The insect-to-greens split is the guide’s range for that age, drawn from NC State, VCA, Chewy and PangoVet.
Then your dragon adjusts it. Portions are set by time, not by count: insects for about 10 minutes, greens for about 30. If the bowl is empty well before time, offer more next meal; if a lot is always left, offer less. That’s PangoVet’s approach. A dragon that gains steadily and clears its food is getting enough.
When it sends you to a vet instead
Two weight answers turn the headline into “take this to your vet”: falling behind the growth chart, and looking heavy. The guide’s advice for both is to change the plan with a vet, not with a chart, so the tool doesn’t pick a new number of meals for you. A heavy dragon that clears its bowl is never told to add insects, because insects are the part of the diet that leads to obesity.
A dragon that has stopped eating gets no schedule at all. Under a year, or already thin, the answer is a vet. A year or older in autumn or winter may be heading into brumation, and the brumation check takes it from there. Otherwise the steps are the guide’s: temperatures and lighting first, then stressors, then different foods, then a vet.
Our calls, labelled
If you don’t know its age, the tool reads it from length using the table in our growth chart. Where two age rows overlap it takes the younger one, because under-feeding a growing dragon is the worse mistake. Past about 16 inches, size stops being a clock, so it uses the 12–18 month row and says so. Choosing Adult yourself is better if you know it’s been full-sized for over a year.
Supplements are the same at every age, so they sit under every answer: a light sprinkle of phosphorus-free calcium daily, calcium with D3 two or three times a week, a multivitamin once or twice a week, all from VCA, Chewy and PangoVet. This is general information, not veterinary advice.
- Bearded dragon feeding chart by age — the full chart, what goes in the bowl, and where the sources disagree
- Bearded dragon growth check — read two weigh-ins against the growth band for its age
- Bearded dragon body condition — how to tell thin, healthy and heavy by eye