ToolNestFree Pizza Dough Calculator
Last updated: October 25, 2026
Quick answer: Every pizza recipe starts with the same question: how much dough do I actually need, and how much flour, water, salt, and yeast does that mean? Guess wrong and you get a crust that tears, a pan that overflows, or a sad thin disc in the middle of a big tray. This free pizza dough calculator does the baker's math for you: pick your style — Neapolitan, New York, Detroit pan, or thin crust — your pizza size and how many pizzas, and it returns the exact flour, water, salt, and yeast in grams, the weight of each dough ball, and a full baker's-percentage table you can check by hand. It also adjusts the yeast for your ferment time (a same-day dough needs far more yeast than a 48-hour cold ferment) and offers a sourdough-starter mode that folds the starter into the recipe instead of piling it on top. Everything runs in your browser; no signup, no app.
65%
2.8%
Rule of thumb: one 12-inch Neapolitan pizza takes about a 280 g dough ball. If your ball tears when you stretch it, the dough is under-proofed or too cold — give it 30 more minutes at room temperature, don't add flour.
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How to Use the Pizza Dough Calculator
- Pick your pizza style first, because style sets the defaults: Neapolitan starts at 65% hydration with about a 283 g ball for a 12-inch pizza, New York at 62% with a slightly heavier, chewier ball, Detroit at a thick pan-dough weight, and thin crust at 55% with a much lighter ball. Change the style and the hydration, salt, and ball weight follow it — then adjust to taste.
- Choose how to start: the usual case is number of pizzas + size (2 pizzas, 12 inches each), but if you already know your dough total — say 560 g for a batch — switch to total dough weight and enter it directly. Both routes land on the same recipe math.
- Set hydration with the slider: 55–60% gives a firmer, easier-to-handle dough (thin crust, beginner-friendly); 62–65% is the Neapolitan/New York sweet spot; 70%+ is soft, sticky, and airy but needs confident handling. If the dough sticks to everything, drop 2–3 points before you blame your technique.
- Set salt (2–3% of flour weight) and your ferment plan: same-day dough at room temperature needs the most yeast, an overnight cold ferment needs about half, and a 48–72 hour cold ferment needs about a third. The calculator changes the yeast amount when you change the plan — most ranking tools use one fixed percentage for all three, which is why their cold ferments over-proof.
- Pick your leavening: instant yeast, active dry yeast, fresh yeast, or sourdough starter. In starter mode the calculator uses 20% starter relative to flour weight and subtracts the starter's own flour and water from the recipe, so the totals stay honest instead of drifting high.
- Press Calculate recipe and read three things: the ingredient weights in grams, the dough ball weight (divide the dough into that many equal balls), and the baker's-percentage table — flour at 100%, everything else as a percentage of flour — so you can scale the recipe to any batch size by hand later. Press Copy recipe to take it to your notes.
Why Use Our Pizza Dough Calculator?
- Four styles with real defaults — Neapolitan, New York, Detroit pan, and thin crust each start at the hydration, salt, and ball weight that style actually uses, instead of one generic formula pretending all pizza is the same dough.
- Two starting points — pizzas + size for the usual 'dinner for four' question, or total dough weight when you already know your batch size. Most ranking calculators offer only the first.
- Ferment-aware yeast — same-day, overnight, and long cold ferments get genuinely different yeast amounts (roughly 3:1 between fastest and slowest), because yeast is a function of time and temperature, not a fixed number.
- Honest sourdough-starter mode — the starter's flour and water are subtracted from the recipe's flour and water, so a 20%-starter dough totals what you asked for instead of quietly running 20% heavy.
- Baker's percentages on every result — flour = 100% and every other ingredient as a percentage of flour, which is how bakers scale, compare, and fix recipes. Once you know your percentages, you never need a calculator for the same dough twice.
- Per-ball and per-pizza amounts — the result says how much each dough ball weighs and what each pizza's share is, so dividing the dough is a weighing step, not a guessing step.
Common Use Cases
- Friday pizza night for four: Two 14-inch New York pizzas: the calculator gives about 693 g of dough (346 g balls), roughly 421 g flour, 261 g water, 10.5 g salt, and overnight-ferment yeast — mixed Thursday night, fridged, and ready Friday with no morning-of rush. Scale the count to three and the whole recipe rescales, ball weights included.
- A first Neapolitan attempt in a home oven: One 12-inch pizza at 65% hydration: a 283 g ball, about 168 g flour, 109 g water, and 4.7 g salt. The per-ball weight is the number beginners get wrong most often — too much dough and the center stays raw; too little and it tears. Starting from the ball weight removes the guess.
- Switching a recipe to sourdough starter: Your usual recipe uses 500 g flour and instant yeast, but your starter is active and you want its flavor: switch the leavening to starter mode and the calculator keeps the flour total at 500 g (450 g added flour + 50 g from the starter) instead of silently making a 550 g-flour dough. The overnight ferment plan suits starter doughs best.
- Scaling a Detroit pan recipe for a party: Two 10×14-inch Detroit pans need about 1,300 g of dough — a batch size most single-pan recipes never mention. Enter the pan size and count and the recipe scales in one step, with the thick pan dough's heavier ball weight already built into the style default instead of guessed from a round-pizza formula.
Pizza Dough Calculator vs Alternatives
- Single-formula pizza calculators (most of the current top 10): They answer one question well — usually flour/water/salt for a given dough weight at one hydration — with a clean page. What they do not do is adjust yeast for ferment time, handle starter honestly, or set ball weights by style and size, so the moment your question changes shape you are back to doing baker's math yourself. This page covers all four styles, both starting points, and the ferment question in one place.
- Pizza blog recipe charts: Food blogs explain dough beautifully, and their ball-weight charts are genuinely useful — the size table on this page borrows their consensus numbers. A chart cannot do your arithmetic, though: for 3 pizzas at 14 inches in Detroit pans, or a starter conversion, you still need a calculator, and this page is that calculator next to the chart.
- Baker's-percentage spreadsheets: Serious home bakers keep a spreadsheet with their percentages, and it is the best tool once your recipe is settled — this page prints the same percentages on every result so you can build yours. A spreadsheet does not help the first time, though: it needs the ball weight, the style defaults, and the ferment yeast figures, which is what this calculator supplies.
- Sourdough hydration calculator (ToolNest's companion tool): That tool answers the hydration question for bread doughs: what a given hydration feels like and how much water a flour amount needs. If your question is bread hydration in general, use it; if your question is a pizza recipe — ball weights, style defaults, yeast by ferment, starter subtraction — this pizza dough calculator is the right one.
Most pizza calculators give you one formula for one dough and leave the ferment, the starter, and the ball weight to you. This page gives you the recipe in grams, the ball weight, both starting points, four styles, ferment-aware yeast, and honest starter math — the whole dough, ready to mix, for the pizzas you are actually making tonight.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you calculate a pizza dough recipe?
Start from the dough ball weight: a 12-inch Neapolitan pizza needs about a 283 g ball, so 2 pizzas need 566 g of dough. Then use baker's percentages with flour at 100%: at 65% hydration and 2.8% salt, flour = 566 ÷ (1 + 0.65 + 0.028 + yeast) ≈ 337 g, water ≈ 219 g, salt ≈ 9.4 g, yeast ≈ 0.8 g for an overnight ferment. The calculator above does this for any pizza count, size, and style — and the baker's-percentage table on the result lets you verify every number by hand.
How much dough do I need for a 12-inch, 14-inch, or 16-inch pizza?
As a rule of thumb, per pizza: 10 inches ≈ 200 g, 12 inches ≈ 280 g, 14 inches ≈ 380 g, 16 inches ≈ 500 g for Neapolitan/New York styles (about 2.5 g and 2.25 g per square inch respectively). Thin crust runs lighter (a 12-inch thin pizza is about 180 g) and Detroit pan runs heavier (an 8×10-inch pan takes about 400 g, a 10×14-inch pan about 650 g). The calculator computes the ball weight from your exact size and style instead of asking you to guess.
What hydration should pizza dough be?
62–65% is the sweet spot for most home pizza: wet enough for an open, airy crumb, dry enough to stretch without tearing. Thin crust works at 55–60%; high-hydration Neapolitan doughs go to 65–70% but get sticky and need confident handling. If you are new, start at 60–62% — a dough you can actually stretch beats a theoretically perfect one that glues itself to the counter. Wetter is not automatically better; it is a trade-off between crumb openness and handling.
How much yeast do I need for pizza dough?
It depends on ferment time, and this is where most recipes mislead: a same-day dough (4–8 hours at room temperature) needs about 0.5% instant yeast by flour weight; an overnight cold ferment (24 hours in the fridge) needs about 0.25%; a long cold ferment (48–72 hours) needs about 0.15%. Active dry yeast runs about 30% higher than instant; fresh yeast runs about 3x instant. The calculator adjusts all of this when you change the ferment plan — a fixed '0.5% always' recipe will over-proof a 48-hour dough.
What percentage of salt goes in pizza dough?
2.5–3% of flour weight — for 500 g of flour, 12.5–15 g of salt. Neapolitan tradition sits near 2.8%. Below 2% the crust tastes flat and the dough proofs too fast; above 3% it starts tasting salty and the yeast slows noticeably. Weigh the salt: a 'teaspoon' of fine salt and a 'teaspoon' of coarse kosher salt can differ by 40% in weight.
Can I use sourdough starter instead of yeast for pizza?
Yes — use starter at about 20% of flour weight (100 g of starter for 500 g of flour, at 100% hydration, meaning equal parts flour and water). The key step most guides skip: subtract the starter's flour and water from the recipe — 100 g of 100%-hydration starter contributes 50 g flour and 50 g water, so a 500 g-flour recipe becomes 450 g added flour and correspondingly less added water. This calculator's starter mode does that subtraction for you, and a starter dough typically wants an overnight cold ferment for the best flavor.
What flour is best for pizza dough?
It depends on the style and your oven: '00' flour is the Neapolitan classic — finely milled, moderate protein (~12%), made for very hot, fast bakes. Bread flour (12.5–13.5% protein) is the New York workhorse — chewier, more forgiving, and better in a home oven at 250°C/500°F. All-purpose flour works fine for thin crust and beginner doughs, with a slightly softer bite. What matters more than the brand is protein: below ~11% the dough tears; above ~14% it gets tough. And no flour fixes a cold oven — home pizza lives or dies on preheat: a steel or stone, fully heated for 45–60 minutes, matters more than the flour bag.
Why does my pizza dough tear when I stretch it?
Usually one of three things: the dough is under-proofed (the gluten is still tight — give it 30–60 more minutes), it is too cold straight from the fridge (let it sit at room temperature 30–60 minutes before stretching), or the hydration is too low for the flour (try 2–3 points higher next time). Stretch from the center outward, leaving a rim, and let gravity help — hold the dough by an edge and let its own weight stretch it. If it keeps springing back, walk away for 10 minutes: rested gluten stretches, fought gluten tears.