Maintaining cattle on stored forage is expensive, especially for fall-calving beef cow operations. Using stockpiled tall fescue (Festuca arundiacea Schreb) to extend the grazing season can decrease winter feed costs. However, little information exists on its use for lactating, fall-calving cows. Our objective was to determine the optimum daily herbage allowance of lactating beef cows wintered on stockpiled tall fescue. The experiment had four treatments; stockpiled tall fescue at herbage allowances of 2.25, 3.00, 3.75, and 4.50 percent of cow and calf BW hd-1 d-1. The experimental design was a randomized complete block with three replications. Sixty, cow-calf pairs were stratified into twelve groups and then assigned to treatments at random. The experiment began on 2 December 2004 and ended 24 February 2005. Stockpiled tall fescue was strip-grazed with forage allocated every 3.5 days. Pre-grazing herbage mass was determined at the beginning of the experiment and every 21 days thereafter, by clipping ten, 0.8 m x 4.6 m strips from each pasture. The strips were cut to as near as ground level as possible. Cows and calves were weighed at the beginning of the experiment and every 21 days thereafter. Cows allocated herbage at 2.25% of BW hd-1 d-1 lost the most weight (avg. daily loss of 1.25 kg d-1), while the other three allocation levels did not differ (avg. daily loss of 0.98 kg d-1). Calves in the 2.25% BW hd-1 d-1 treatment had an ADG of 0.55 kg hd 1 d 1 while those in the 4.5% BW hd-1 d-1 had an ADG of 0.73 kg hd-1 d-1. Since the hectares required to winter a cow-calf pair would double between the lowest and highest allocations, economic analyses suggest stockpiled tall fescue should be allocated levels at 3.0% BW hd-1 d-1.