The short answer
Indoor photoperiod plants usually finish somewhere between 30 and 120 grams of dried, trimmed flower. That covers most tents, most beginners, and most mid-tier LED setups. Get your light, airflow, and genetics lined up and 150 to 300 grams per plant is a fair target. Outdoors in a long, warm season, 250 to 500 grams per plant is normal, and a big plant in a 30-gallon pot can clear 1,000 grams. Autoflowers sit lower: 15 to 60 grams is typical, with 90 or more when everything lands right.
cannabis yield per plant outdoor
Every one of those numbers is dry weight. That matters more than people think.
cannabis yield per plant autoflower
Why the range is so wide
Two growers running the same clone can finish 60 grams apart. Yield is a product of how much light the plant intercepts, how long it vegges, how big the root zone is, and how well the environment holds steady through flower. Change one of those and the scale moves.
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A plant in a 2-gallon pot under 100 watts simply cannot build the same flower mass as a plant in a 10-gallon pot under 500 watts. Genetics set the ceiling. Everything else decides how close you get to it.
Rough numbers by setup
- 2x2 tent, one plant, ~100W LED: 40 to 90 g dried.
- 4x4 tent, four plants, 400 to 480W: 300 to 600 g total, so 75 to 150 g per plant.
- Autoflower in a 3-gallon pot under 18/6: 15 to 60 g.
- Outdoor plant, full sun, 30-gallon pot: 250 to 500 g, higher with a long season.
- Outdoor plant, ground bed, warm climate: 500 to 1,000+ g if it has room to spread.
Treat these as middle-of-the-road, not promises. Seed sellers love to quote the top of the range. Most home grows land in the bottom half.
Grams per watt and grams per square foot
These two ratios are how I judge whether a harvest was actually good, because they strip out plant count and pot size.
- Grams per watt: 0.5 to 1.0 g/W is solid for LED. Skilled growers with CO2 and dialed rooms hit 1.5 g/W and up.
- Grams per square foot: 30 to 60 g/sq ft is a healthy canopy. Anything past 70 is a very tuned room.
If you pulled 200 grams from a 4x4 under 400 watts, that is 0.5 g/W and 12.5 g/sq ft. Not bad for a first run, but the room has headroom.
Wet weight vs dry weight
Freshly chopped flower is roughly 75 to 80 percent water. Dried and trimmed, you keep about 20 to 25 percent of what you weighed on the stem. So a plant that looks like 800 grams wet lands near 160 to 200 grams dry. If someone quotes you a pound per plant, ask whether that was wet. It usually was.
What actually moves the number
- Light intensity. Daily light integral during flower is the single biggest lever. Weak light equals airy, light buds.
- Veg time. Two extra weeks of veg can double final yield indoors, assuming you have the vertical space.
- Container size. Small pots cap root mass, and root mass caps flower mass.
- Canopy management. Topping, low-stress training, and defoliation spread light across more bud sites instead of one tall cola.
- Environment stability. Temperature and humidity swings in weeks 4 through 8 cost you density.
- Harvest timing. Chopping a week early is the most common quiet yield loss, and it costs potency too.
A reality check on plant limits
Several US states cap how many plants an adult can grow at home. Colorado, for example, allows a small number of plants per adult, which means your total harvest depends almost entirely on yield per plant. When the count is fixed, per-plant grams stop being a vanity metric and start being the whole plan.
That is also why legal flower at a store gets sold by weight and tested by potency, not by how many plants it came from. The plant count is a legal detail. The grams are what you take home.
How to estimate your own harvest
- Weigh one representative wet cola, dry it, and weigh again to get your personal wet-to-dry ratio.
- Count your bud sites and multiply by your average dried cola weight.
- Compare the total to your grams-per-watt figure from last run.
- Change exactly one variable next cycle, then measure again.
Do that three or four times and you will predict your harvest within about 15 percent. That beats any breeder's spec sheet.