How long doLeftoverslast in the fridge?
The USDA rates 3 kinds of this separately
The USDA files 3 separate entries under this name — with meat, fish, poultry, or egg, without meat, fish, poultry, or egg (such as cooked vegitables, rice, or potatoes) and pizza — and gives every one of them the same window outside the freezer, 3 days to 4 days. They are separate rows in the source rather than separate answers to the question.
Freezing changes the unit, not just the number
Here the freezer does not so much extend the answer as replace it. 4 days in the refrigerator becomes 3 months in the freezer: 22 times longer, and days turning into months. The freezer figure alone spans 2 months to 3 months, a factor of 1.5.
Every storage figure the USDA publishes for this item
The USDA rates this item cold or frozen and never at room temperature: no pantry figure exists for it, as for 222 of the 466 foods in the data that get no pantry time at all. The source also indexes it as meat, fish, poultry and egg.
Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg
- In the freezer2 months to 3 months
- In the fridge3 days to 4 days
Leftovers, without meat, fish, poultry, or egg (such as cooked vegitables, rice, or potatoes)
- In the freezer1 month to 2 months
- In the fridge3 days to 4 days
Leftovers, pizza
- In the freezer1 month to 2 months
- In the fridge3 days to 4 days
Turning the range into a date
Each kind gets its own dated rows here, 6 rows across the 3 the USDA lists under this name, because a date is only worth printing against the window it belongs to.
Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg
- In the freezerUse by2 months to 3 months after the day you stored it
- In the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it
Leftovers, without meat, fish, poultry, or egg (such as cooked vegitables, rice, or potatoes)
- In the freezerUse by1 month to 2 months after the day you stored it
- In the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it
Leftovers, pizza
- In the freezerUse by1 month to 2 months after the day you stored it
- In the fridgeUse by3 days to 4 days after the day you stored it
Is this window about safety or about taste?
The answer at the top of this page reads 3 days to 4 days in the fridge. What decides that is the food and not the shelf the source files it on: it is an animal food, or made with one. Past it, throw it out rather than taste it: a perishable food can carry enough bacteria to make you ill while it still looks and smells fine.
The figure in the freezer here is a quality window. The same page carries windows of more than one kind, so which sentence applies depends on which row you are reading, not on the food. Held at 0 °F food stays safe for as long as it stays frozen, which is why a freezer figure counts as quality on this site whatever the food is. Every figure assumes the food was sound when you stored it, that your refrigerator holds 40 °F or below and your freezer 0 °F or below, and that the package was handled normally.
It is past the date. Now what?
Say the calculator above puts it past its 3 days to 4 days in the fridge window, or the container sat out on the counter overnight. Throw the container out without tasting it, and count any hours it already spent out of the refrigerator as part of that window rather than on top of it.
The USDA's limit for perishable food standing at room temperature is 2 hours, or 1 hour when the kitchen is above 90 °F, and that clock runs whatever the storage figure says. Freezing stops the clock but does not turn it back: food already past its window is not rescued by putting it in the freezer. The FoodKeeper entry this page is built from prints storage times and nothing else, so anything past them here is USDA and FSIS guidance rather than a figure from the source. The whole rule, including the cases the source does not cover, is set out under what to do when the date has passed.
Is that a long time?
13 items in the Deli & Prepared Foods list keep exactly as long as Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg, 4 days, so they all share place 12 of 25 rather than being put in an order the data does not support.
Items that behave the same way
All 4 of the 6 items nearest Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg keep exactly as long as it does, 4 days, so the ranking around it is a tie rather than an order.
Products the USDA rates in the same places
This is a common shape of record: 33 of the 466 products are rated in the same places, freezer and refrigerator, and 7 of the nine slots are left blank on all of them. Sorted by how close their windows are to this one, the nearest are Egg dishes, Cooked poultry dishes and Fried chicken, and the rest of that group is what the list below draws on. Of the ones shown, none keeps longer than this one does. The longest-keeping of them is Egg dishes at 4 days.
- Egg dishes3 days in the fridge
- Cooked poultry dishes3 days in the fridge
- Fried chicken3 days in the fridge
- Poultry pieces3 days in the fridge
- Cooked fish3 days in the fridge
- Guacamole3 days in the fridge
- Meats3 days in the fridge
- Soup3 days in the fridge
The rest of the Deli & Prepared Foods shelf
The USDA puts this product on the Deli & Prepared Foods shelf together with 24 others, and 11 of them keep longer outside the freezer. The shelf runs from Olives at 18 months down to Pate at 2 days. Nearest this product by window are Poultry pieces, Fruit, cut and Guacamole, which is the order the list below is printed in. The order counts the longest window outside the freezer, so Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg sits here at 4 days rather than at the 3 days in the fridge its own answer prints.
- Poultry pieces4 days3 days in the fridge
- Fruit, cut4 days4 days in the fridge once opened
- Guacamole4 days3 days in the fridge
- Main dishes or meals4 days3 days sealed in the fridge
- Meats4 days3 days in the fridge
- Egg salad4 days3 days in the fridge
- Soup4 days3 days in the fridge
- Casseroles4 days3 days in the fridge
If it has to keep longer than this
If it has to keep longer than 4 days, the Deli & Prepared Foods aisle gives 6 products that hold at least twice as long outside the freezer. The smallest step up is Commercial brand vacuum-packed dinners at 2 weeks against this one's 4 days; after it come Luncheon meat or poultry, Salami and Canadian bacon. They are printed below in the order the step gets bigger, not alphabetically. In the other direction, 1 entry in the category keeps half as long or less, Pate among them.
- Commercial brand vacuum-packed dinners2 weeks2 weeks sealed in the fridge
- Luncheon meat or poultry2 weeks3 days in the fridge once opened
- Salami2 weeks3 days in the fridge once opened
- Canadian bacon80 days10 days in the fridge
- Hummus3 months7 days in the fridge once opened
- Olives18 months2 weeks in the fridge once opened
The record this page is built from
The USDA publishes 3 separate rows under this name — records 173, 174 and 175 — and this page carries all of them rather than picking one, because their windows differ. Between them they fill 2 of the nine storage slots with a time. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for Leftovers, with meat, fish, poultry, or egg, which is the kind the plain name means here, chosen kind by kind rather than by the order the source happens to list them in. The same record answers to meat, fish, poultry and egg in the source's own index.
Where these numbers come from
Every range on this page is published by the USDA FoodKeeper and reproduced unchanged. The multipliers, the rankings, the percentages and the dates are ours, computed from those ranges. Where the source gives a span such as 3 to 5 weeks, comparisons use the upper figure, and the full span is always printed.
Rankings cover only the items the USDA gives a usable figure for, and identical ranges share a place rather than being ordered arbitrarily. Neighbors are chosen by nearest storage time within the same category, never alphabetically: two foods filed next to each other by name usually have nothing to do with each other. The freezer is excluded from ranking because it flattens almost everything.
Where the USDA lists several kinds under one name, they share one page here and every kind keeps its own windows: the source prints them as separate rows, and a page that merged them would be inventing a figure the source never published. Comparisons and the place in the category are computed for the kind the plain name means — the shell egg for eggs, the can for tuna — which is settled name by name rather than by the order the source lists its rows in, and the page names it. Where the plain name means no single kind, the page prints no single figure at all and lists the kinds instead.
Source: USDA FoodKeeper, retrieved 1 September 2026. This site computes every comparison on this page and takes responsibility for it. Found a figure that does not match the source? Tell us on the contact page, with the page and the row — the parsing is mechanical, so a mismatch is our bug and we want it. How the whole site is built, which figures are ours and where the source can be checked is on the method page.
USDA index terms: cooked vegetables, egg, fish, leftover, meat, pizza, potato, potatoes, poultry, rice, vegetable, vegetables, without meat
KeepsUntil is an independent reference built on public USDA data. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Food and Drug Administration. Whether a given window is a safety limit or a quality window is stated on the page that prints it.