How much chicken for tamales
Buy 0.6 to 1 lb of raw boneless chicken per dozen tamales. With bone-in legs the one recipe I found that uses them comes to about 1.7 lb per dozen. I opened four chicken tamale recipes on 2026-10-14 and divided each chicken weight by its yield. Pork has its own page, how much pork for tamales.
| Recipe | Chicken as printed | Yield | Raw lb per dozen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whole Foods, green chile chicken tamales | 6 boneless thighs, about 1 1/4 lb | about 2 dozen | 0.63 |
| Food Network Kitchen, chicken tamales | 1 lb breast plus 3/4 lb thighs, boneless | 24 tamales | 0.88 |
| Mama Latina Tips, chicken tamales | 2 1/2 lb chicken breast | 30 servings (read as tamales) | 1.00 |
| Tasting Table, chicken and poblano tamales | 4 bone-in, skin-on legs, about 2 1/2 lb | 18 tamales | 1.67 |
Per-dozen values are my own division of each printed weight by its printed yield, sorted from least chicken to most.
Breast, thighs or bone-in
The thigh recipe is the lowest at 0.63 lb per dozen and the all-breast recipe sits at 1.0. The Food Network Kitchen mix of breast and thighs lands between them. The pages do not say why the amounts differ, so I would not read the gap as a difference between cuts. Yield per recipe also depends on how full each tamale is.
Bone-in legs are the heaviest per dozen because the bone and skin are part of the weight you buy. Only the Tasting Table recipe uses them, and it gives the shredded result: 2 1/2 to 3 cups from the 2 1/2 lb of legs, which is 1.7 to 2.0 cups of shredded chicken per dozen. The planner's filling line is 1.1 to 1.4 cups per dozen for all filling together, so the poblano recipe makes fuller tamales than that. If you shred your own bone-in chicken, buy at the high end.
Pounds of chicken by dozens
| Dozens | Tamales | Boneless, lb raw | Bone-in legs, lb raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 24 | 1.2 to 2 | 3.4 |
| 3 | 36 | 1.8 to 3 | 5.1 |
| 4 | 48 | 2.4 to 4 | 6.8 |
| 5 | 60 | 3 to 5 | 8.5 |
| 6 | 72 | 3.6 to 6 | 10.2 |
| 8 | 96 | 4.8 to 8 | 13.6 |
| 10 | 120 | 6 to 10 | 17 |
| 15 | 180 | 9 to 15 | 25.5 |
Boneless is 0.6 to 1 lb per dozen, my pick from the table above. Bone-in is the single Tasting Table figure scaled up, so treat it as a rough guide. A dozens link opens the planner with that many chicken tamales.
Worked example: 20 guests, 4 each
Twenty guests at 4 tamales each is 80, which rounds up to 7 dozen (84 tamales). That takes 4.2 to 7 lb of raw boneless chicken, or about 11.9 lb of bone-in legs. The same run in the planner adds 7 to 10.5 lb of fresh masa, 93 to 139 corn husks and 3 steamer loads in a pot that holds 36. Open the planner with these numbers and change them to yours.
More amounts: how much red chile sauce for tamales (for red chile pork), < href="/how-much-masa-per-dozen-tamales" class="text-primary-text hover:text-primary-dark underline">how much masa per dozen tamales, how many tamales per person and how many corn husks for tamales. Or go back to the tamalada planner.