Three to four days in the fridge, if it went in quickly. That is the short answer, and for most households it is the only number they need.
The reason people end up searching for it twice is that the published figures do not agree. General guidance for cooked leftovers puts the window at three to four days refrigerated, which is what the USDA sets out in its guidance on leftovers. Look up rice specifically in the USDA’s FoodKeeper tool and you can find a longer figure. Neither is wrong. They are answering slightly different questions, and the conservative one is the one to run your kitchen on.
What actually governs rice is not the days. It is the hour after cooking.
Uncooked rice commonly carries bacterial spores that survive boiling. Cooking does not eliminate them, and it is not supposed to. What keeps them harmless is temperature: spores that sit in warm, moist rice at room temperature can germinate and multiply, and some of what they produce is not destroyed by reheating later. That is the mechanism behind rice’s reputation, and it is why the advice is different from, say, a roast joint. The general principle is the whole basis of the USDA’s guidance on keeping food safe: the accumulated time food spends between refrigerator and cooking temperatures is the thing that matters, and it accumulates across every occasion, not just the current one.
Which turns the practical rule into something more useful than a number of days. Rice left on the hob to cool for three hours and then refrigerated has already spent its margin. It may be within three days and still be the riskier plate. Rice spread thin, cooled fast, and refrigerated inside an hour has barely used any, and on day three it is in better shape than the first batch was on day one.
So the sequence that matters looks like this. Get it out of the pan while it is still hot rather than letting it sit. Spread it wide instead of leaving it in a deep mound, because depth is what slows cooling. Refrigerate it in shallow containers rather than one large bowl. Portion at that point rather than later, since it is the last moment it is easy.
Reheating is where the second misunderstanding lives. Reheating does not reset the clock. Rice cooked Sunday and reheated Tuesday is still Sunday’s rice on Wednesday, and heating it a second time buys nothing except a hot meal. Reheat once, thoroughly, and reheat only the portion being eaten, which is another argument for dividing it up at the start.
Freezing works properly and is underused for rice specifically. Cooked rice freezes well, thaws quickly, and reheats from frozen without much loss, and frozen food held at zero degrees Fahrenheit is safe indefinitely per FSIS advice on freezing. If a batch is not going to be eaten in the next two days, the freezer is a better answer than optimism.
For the per-food breakdown and how rice compares with the other things sharing your fridge shelf, the full guide covers the timings and the storage detail in one place.
The one thing to take away: with rice, the question is almost never how many days have passed. It is how long it sat out before it went in.