For one adult, weigh about 90 g (roughly 1/2 US cup) of raw rice as a main dish, or 45 g (about 1/4 cup) as a side. Cooked, that lands on the plate as about 1 1/2 cups or 3/4 cup. If you searched for "raw rice," you are asking how much uncooked rice to cook — and raw, uncooked, and dried are three labels for the same grain.

How Much Raw Rice Per Person? Weigh the Dry Grain, Not the Cooked One

The word "raw" trips people up more than it should. A recipe that says "1 cup uncooked rice" is talking about the same thing as a bag labeled "dried rice": grains that have not seen water or heat yet. Nobody cooks with "raw" rice and nobody eats it that way on purpose — the label exists so recipes can tell you to measure before cooking. So when a page says "how much raw rice per person," the honest translation is "how much dry rice should I start with," and the answer is the same 90 g / 45 g rule you will find everywhere else.

Raw rice from the bag: work backward from what you bought

Rice is sold by weight, and the bag in your pantry already answers the portion question. A 2 lb bag holds about 907 g of raw rice. Split it by the 90 g main-course portion and it feeds roughly 10 people as a main dish; split it by the 45 g side portion and it covers about 20 people. A 1 kg bag works out to about 11 main-course servings. A 5 lb bag, the family-size buy, holds about 2,268 g and feeds about 25 people as a main. The arithmetic is plain division: bag weight in grams divided by the per-person grams.

Why work from the bag at all? Because raw rice is the only measurement that does not lie. A cooked cup of rice changes shape with the pot, the water, and the cook — the same raw scoop can swell into different volumes in different hands. Raw grains, weighed dry, behave identically every single time: 90 g is 90 g, whether it came from a measuring cup, a kitchen scale, or the bottom of a 2 lb bag.

Matching the raw portion to the rice in your bag

The 90 g / 45 g rule holds across varieties, but the cooked result changes with the grain. Long-grain white and basmati expand the most and land light and separate; jasmine grows to a similar volume; short-grain and sushi rice swell less and clump, so their cooked bowls look smaller; brown rice is denser and more filling, so lighter eaters often take less. For portion planning the dry weight stays the same either way — the difference shows up on the plate, not in the scoop.

A kitchen scale makes the rule exact. Weighing raw rice removes the last variable: a level US cup of white rice weighs about 180 g, so half a cup is about 90 g and a quarter cup about 45 g. If you only have cups, the fractions line up with the grams; if you only have a bag, the division does the work.

The one measurement habit that settles every portion

Weigh the raw rice dry, once, and let the bag's weight do the math for the week. Cooked rice volume is a report on how your pot behaved, not a recipe for how much to cook. Ask which cup you are using (the US measuring cup or the smaller rice cooker cup), decide main or side, and weigh from there. That chain answers "how much raw rice per person" for one person, for a bag, or for a crowd — without ever trusting a cooked scoop.