Most of feeding behavior in aquatic organisms such as prey selection, its type and size depends on their size. In aquaculture industry, suitable growth is a key factor in success of fish cultivation. In order to compensate reduced growth in fish cultivation, compensatory growth phenomenon is one of the most important management tools. Compensatory growth (or catch-up growth) is a phase of unusual rapid growth which occurs in animals after the refeeding of fish following a period of deprivation. In this study, effect of short-term starvation and refeeding on growth, feeding performance and chemical body composition in rainbow trout ( Oncorhynchus mykiss) were investigated. For this purpose, 270 individuals of rainbow trout (17.37 ± 0.83 g in average initial weight, 11.86 ± 0.15 cm in average initial total length, mean ± standard error of mean) were distributed between 15 plastic round tanks (each 100 L in volume) after 14-days period adaptation as completely randomized design with three replicates. Experimental feeding treatments including; control (2 times feeding per day in apparent satiation), T 1 (one day starvation and two days feeding), T 2 (one day starvation and four days feeding), T 3 (three days starvation and 12 days feeding), T 4 (four days starvation and 16 days feeding). The experiment period was lasted 60 days and fish biometry was carried out every 15 days. At the end of experiment, 5 fish individuals were sampled randomly for chemical analyses (moisture, ash, lipid and protein) from each tank. Physico-chemical parameters of water were monitored to maintain at safe levels during fish rearing, continuously. Results showed that short-term starvation and refeeding had not considerable effect on growth performance and there was not a significant difference (P ? 0.05) between control and other treatments in final weight, specific growth rate (SGR), condition factor and weight gain. However, maximum final weight (66.23 ± 2.44) and highest SGR (2.19 ± 0.04) were obtained at control fish treatment. In addition, there was not significant differences in feeding indices such as; feed conversion ratio (FCR), feed efficiency ratio (FER) and protein efficiency ratio (PER) between treatments, although, maximum FCR (1.27 ± 0.02) was determined at T 3 and highest FER (87.64 ± 1.58) and PER (2.19 ± 0.03) at T 1 treatment. Comparative results on chemical body composition of O. mykiss showed that there was no significant difference between trial treatments in ash and moisture contents (P ? 0.05). On the other hand, the protein content of T 3 (65.04 ± 2.09) was significantly (P 0.05) higher than other examined treatments. In addition, lipid content at T 3 (26.64 ± 0.14) and T 2 (27.35 ± 0.51) were significantly lower (P 0.05) than control while T 1 (27.82 ± 0.49) and T 4 (27.69 ± 0.55) were not significant compared to control. Based on growth and feeding performance can be concluded that complete compensation was obtained at all examined treatment at end of experiment. In general, the findings of this research illustrated that short-term starvation and refeeding did not negative significant effect on growth performance. Therefore compensatory growth is useful as a management tool at rainbow trout farms. Keywords: Rainbow trout ( Oncorhynchus mykiss) , Compensatory growth, Growth performance, Feeding performance, Body composition