How long does a tub of creatine actually last?

September 10, 2026

Supplement tub with measuring scoop and chocolate-flavored powder

Divide the tub's net weight in grams by your daily dose in grams: that's how many days it lasts. A 250 g tub at 5 g a day is 50 days. A 300 g tub is 60 days, a 500 g tub is 100 days, and a 1 kg tub is 200 days. Loading first shortens all of these.

That's the whole calculation, and it's strange that it's hard to find. Search for it and you get two things: dosing guides answering "how much creatine should I take," which is a different question, and marketplace listings for one specific tub that happen to print a serving count on the box. Nobody just does the division and shows the work for the sizes people actually buy.

The formula

tub weight (g) ÷ daily dose (g) = days the tub lasts

That's it. No conversion factors, nothing brand-specific. Once you know your tub's net weight and your daily dose, you can work this out for anything on a shelf, including a size not covered below.

At a flat 5 g a day, the top of the 3 to 5 g/day maintenance range these sources give [1][3]:

Tub size	Days at 5 g/day
150 g	30
200 g	40
250 g	50
300 g	60
400 g	80
500 g	100
750 g	150
1 kg (1,000 g)	200

[Image placeholder: alt="A 250 g tub of creatine monohydrate next to 50 leveled 5-gram scoops, illustrating the tub-to-days math"]

If you're on the lower end of the maintenance range instead, 3 g a day [1], the same 250 g tub stretches to about 83 days and a 300 g tub to 100. Tub sizes on shelves run anywhere from small starter sizes up to bulk kilogram bags, so the table above is a set of worked examples, not a complete list. Do your own tub's math with the formula above and you'll always get the right number.

One thing worth checking before you trust any of this: whether your scoop is actually giving you the dose the label claims. A level scoop and a heaping scoop aren't the same weight, and a cheap kitchen scale settles the question in about ten seconds. If your scoop is quietly running heavy, your real daily dose is higher than the label math assumes and the tub runs out sooner than the table says; if it runs light, it lasts longer.

If you're loading, the math changes

The table assumes you started at your maintenance dose on day one. A lot of people don't. A loading phase means taking a much larger dose for the first several days to fill up muscle creatine stores faster, and it eats into the tub before the "days per tub" number ever applies.

The dosing literature describes loading as roughly 20 to 25 g a day for 5 to 7 days, often split into four or five 5 g servings across the day, followed by the 3 to 5 g/day maintenance dose [1][2][3]. That's not a small variation from the maintenance figure. It's four to five times it, for about a week.

Worked against a 250 g tub:

Lightest protocol in that range: 20 g/day for 5 days uses 100 g. That leaves 150 g, which lasts 30 more days at 5 g/day maintenance. Total supply from one tub: 35 days, not 50.
Heaviest protocol in that range: 25 g/day for 7 days uses 175 g. That leaves 75 g, which lasts 15 more days at 5 g/day maintenance. Total supply from one tub: 22 days.

A tub that looks like a 50-day supply on the label can be a 22-to-35-day supply in practice, entirely because of how the first week is dosed. If you're planning to load, plan your reorder around the shorter number, not the maintenance-only one.

Is loading worth what it costs the tub?

That depends on whether you want the effect sooner or the tub to last. A loading phase gets you to fully saturated muscle creatine stores in about a week; skipping it and taking 3 to 5 g a day from the start gets you to a similar place in roughly four weeks [1][2]. A trial in that review found that muscle creatine accumulation was about the same, roughly a 20% increase, whether people took 3 g/day for 28 days or 20 g/day for 6 days [2]. Same destination, different speed.

If the only thing you're optimizing is "how long does my tub last," skipping the loading phase and starting at maintenance is the straightforward choice: it's the number in the first table, not the shorter one in the second. If you're optimizing for feeling the effect sooner, loading gets you there faster and costs you somewhere between two and four weeks of tub life to do it.

Why AUROM's tub is 250 g and not some other number

AUROM's creatine monohydrate comes in a 250 g tub, and at 5 g a day that's exactly 50 days. That's not a coincidence. It's sized to the dose on purpose, and the subscription is built around the same math: one tub delivered every 50 days, or two tubs every 100 days. The interval matches the tub instead of running on a flat monthly clock that has nothing to do with how fast you're actually going through it.

That sounds like a small thing, and it's the whole point. A lot of subscription supplements pick a tub size and a 30-day billing cycle and leave the customer to notice the mismatch: either a fresh tub shows up with two weeks of the old one still in it, or the next delivery is a week later than the tub ran dry. Fixing that requires knowing the number in the first place, which is the math this whole post is about.

AUROM's scoop is 5 g. The loading protocol in the research above is written in 5 g servings, four or five a day [2], so whatever you're taking, the scoop is the unit, not a number you have to eyeball.

The label gives you servings, not days

A supplement label is required to state a serving size, and in almost all cases a servings-per-container count as well [4]. What it doesn't do is tell you how many days that is, because the label doesn't know your dose. Fifty servings is fifty days at one 5 g serving a day, twenty-five days at two servings a day, and something else entirely if you're mid-loading-phase. The label hands you one number; you supply the other.

That's the reason this math is worth writing down instead of assuming it's obvious. It's arithmetic that depends on one number the label can't give you: your actual daily dose. If you haven't settled on a daily amount yet, how much creatine to take per day is worth working out first, since every number in this post depends on it.

Why the math matters more than it seems

Running the numbers matters because staying consistent with any supplement, over months and years, turns out to be the harder part. A cohort study of nearly 20,000 German adults found that after a median of 8.5 years, only 14.6% of men and 22.9% of women were consistent vitamin or mineral supplement users, against 28.5% and 38.6% who reported using them at baseline; among the men using at the start, 36% had stopped by the end [5]. That study wasn't about creatine and it doesn't prove anything about tub sizes, but it lines up with something anyone who's used creatine for a while already knows: the plan falls apart at the gap, not at the workout you skipped.

Knowing exactly when your tub runs out is what lets you close that gap before it opens, whether that means reordering or just being honest with yourself about whether missing a day here or there actually matters.

FAQ

How many scoops are in a 250 g tub of creatine? Fifty, at a 5 g scoop. The math is 250 g divided by 5 g, and it works the same way for any tub size and any daily dose.

Does loading burn through the tub faster than the label suggests? Yes, substantially. A tub sized for 50 days of maintenance dosing can be a 22-to-35-day supply if you load first, depending on how aggressive the loading protocol is.

What if my daily dose doesn't divide evenly into the tub size? Round down for a conservative estimate. A 250 g tub at 4 g a day is 62.5 days, so plan for 62 with a bit left over rather than assuming a clean split.

Why is AUROM's subscription every 50 days instead of monthly? Because 250 g divided by 5 g a day is 50 days, and the delivery is timed to the tub rather than to a calendar month that has no relationship to the dose.

Does it matter if my scoop is a little heaping instead of level? For the tub math, yes. A consistently heaping scoop means a higher real daily dose than you think, which means fewer days than the label math predicts. It will make your tub run out sooner than you planned for.

The number to actually remember

Whatever tub is in front of you, the math is the same three inputs: the net weight on the label, your daily dose, and whether you're loading. Get those three and you know exactly when you'll need the next one.

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.