Search "kratom dosage chart" and you will find dozens of tidy tables handing out gram counts by body weight and desired effect. Almost all of them are invented. There is no clinical dosing standard for kratom, no regulatory serving size, and no study establishing what a given number of grams does to a given person.
What can be pinned down is the measurement side, and that is genuinely worth understanding: how much a teaspoon actually weighs, why two grams of different products are not equivalent, what a capsule holds, and what the vendors themselves put on their own labels. That is what this guide covers.
Safety & legal note. Kratom is not approved by the FDA for any use, and nothing here is medical advice or a recommendation to take any amount. Vendors' own labels state that kratom may be habit-forming and is not recommended for long-term use. It is not for anyone under 21, not for use while driving or operating machinery, and not for anyone pregnant or taking prescription medication without asking a doctor. Kratom is banned in some US states — check your local law.
A gram is a unit of weight, not of strength
This is the part the charts leave out, and it undercuts all of them.
Kratom's primary alkaloid is mitragynine, and the amount in a leaf varies with the strain, the region, the maturity at harvest, the drying method, and the batch. Kraken Kratom, for instance, publishes that its raw powders, leaf, and capsules test at an average of greater than 1.5% mitragynine — a figure it can only state because it runs alkaloid testing on every batch.
That number is exactly the point. If one product tests at 1.2% and another at 1.8%, then a gram of the second carries 50% more alkaloid than a gram of the first. Same weight, materially different content.
So a chart that says "X grams for Y effect" is quietly assuming every bag of kratom on earth is identical. They are not, and the vendors who test know it — which is why an alkaloid percentage on a current COA tells you something a gram count never can.
Practical consequence: a number that applied to one batch does not transfer to a different product, a different strain, or even a different lot from the same vendor.
What a teaspoon actually weighs
"Kratom dosage chart teaspoon" is one of the most common versions of this search, and it has a real answer — with real error bars.
Loose kratom powder is light and fluffy, so volume measures are imprecise. The commonly cited conversions are:
| Measure | Typical weight | Spread |
|---|---|---|
| 1 level teaspoon | ~2–2.5 g | can range 1.5–3 g |
| 1 heaped teaspoon | ~3–4 g | highly variable |
| 1 level tablespoon | ~6–7 g | can range 5–8 g |
Those ranges are wide for a reason. Grind fineness, moisture content, how compacted the powder is in the bag, and whether the spoon is level or heaped all move the number. A finely milled powder packs denser than a coarse one, so the same spoon holds more.
Which is why the honest advice about spoons is short: if the amount matters to you, weigh it. A digital scale that reads to 0.1 g costs about $10 and removes the entire problem. Spoon conversions are for estimating, not for precision.
Note also that Kraken's own leaf product page states a serving size of one teaspoon every 24 hours — a vendor's conservative labeling, and notably a per-day figure rather than a per-serving one.
Capsules: convenient, and pre-measured
Capsules solve the measurement problem by doing it at the factory. The trade-off is cost and speed.
A size 00 capsule — the most common for kratom — holds roughly 0.5 g of powder. Size 0 holds around 0.35 g; size 000 holds closer to 0.75 g. Fill weight varies with how tightly the vendor packs them, so treat these as approximations and check the product page, which should state the fill.
Two things follow. First, capsule counts translate to weight easily: at a 0.5 g fill, 20 capsules is about 10 g. Second, capsules cost substantially more per gram than loose powder — roughly 2.6× at the vendors we priced, which we break down in cheapest kratom.
Capsules also take longer to open in the stomach than loose powder, so onset is generally slower. Neither better nor worse; just different.
Why "start low" is the one piece of universal advice
Across vendor labels, community sources, and harm-reduction guidance, the single consistent recommendation is to begin at the low end and give it time before adjusting.
The reasoning is mechanical rather than moral. Alkaloid content varies between products, individual response varies between people, and effects are commonly reported to shift with dose in ways that are not linear. Someone moving from one strain or vendor to another is effectively starting over, because the number that applied before was calibrated to a different alkaloid profile.
Tolerance is the other half of it. Vendors' own labeling states that kratom may be habit-forming and is not recommended for long-term use — Kraken prints exactly that on its product pages. Community sources widely discuss tolerance building with frequent use, and rotating strains or taking regular breaks is the most commonly reported approach to managing it. That is a reported practice, not a clinical protocol.
What we are not going to publish
You will find charts elsewhere assigning gram counts to outcomes — a number for pain, a number for energy, a number by body weight. We do not publish those, for three reasons:
- No clinical basis exists. There is no dosing study to cite, so any specific table is somebody's opinion formatted to look like data.
- Alkaloid variance breaks the premise, as above. A gram is not a fixed dose.
- Kratom is not an approved treatment for anything. Publishing a "dose for pain" would be presenting it as medicine, which it is not, and which no honest vendor-comparison site should do.
We also will not publish dosing for animals. Kratom dosing for dogs is a search that exists, and the answer is to ask a veterinarian — not a kratom site.
If a page hands you a confident gram number for a medical outcome, that is a signal about the page, not about kratom.
Buying in a way that makes measurement easier
A few practical points that connect dosing to purchasing:
- Buy from vendors that publish alkaloid content. A COA with a mitragynine percentage is the only way to know whether a gram of this bag resembles a gram of the last one. See how to tell kratom is clean.
- Stay with one product long enough to know it. Every switch resets what you have learned about that batch.
- Prefer lot-numbered products. If the vendor can tell you which batch you have, the COA means something specific.
- Get a 0.1 g scale if you use powder. It costs less than a single small bag.
For which vendors publish what, see our ranked vendor comparison and the scoring methodology behind it.
The bottom line
- There is no established kratom dosing standard, and charts that imply one are inventing it.
- A gram is a weight, not a strength — alkaloid content varies by batch, which is why testing matters more than any number.
- A level teaspoon is roughly 2–2.5 g, with a wide spread. Weigh it if it matters.
- A size-00 capsule holds about 0.5 g, and capsules run about 2.6× the per-gram cost of powder.
- Start low, go slow, and re-calibrate whenever you change product — the one point every source agrees on.