Amounts of Cooked Meat From a Roasted Chicken

How much picked meat can you expect to get from a whole chicken?

We roasted 3-, 4-, and 5-pound chickens and then picked them clean to find out how much meat we could get per pound. The birds averaged about 1 cup of cooked picked chicken per pound of raw chicken (the 3-pound raw chicken yielded about 3 cups cooked chicken), and the proportion of white meat to dark was about 2 to 1. If you're purchasing a cooked chicken from the market, remember that chickens lose about 25 percent of their weight when cooked, so plan on a 2 1/2-pound cooked chicken for 3 cups picked meat.