How many turkeys are eaten across the United States on Thanksgiving?

How to get close to this number

Divide households by birds. The country has around one hundred and thirty million households, most celebrate, and a turkey feeds a gathering rather than a person — so roughly one bird per celebrating household. That gives tens of millions, not hundreds.

The per-bird framing is what makes this different from the hot dog and chicken wing questions on this site. Those are per-person items and scale with population; a turkey is a per-table item and scales with households, which is why the number is two orders of magnitude smaller despite being a more universal tradition.

The trend in the explanation is the interesting movement: down from a historical peak nearer forty-six million, as households shift to smaller birds or alternative mains. Household size has fallen and a whole turkey is too much food for a small gathering, so a tradition that looks fixed is quietly being resized by demographics.