Context. Since the mid-1990s, the sample of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) has been growing thanks to the increasing sensitivities in the optical and in near-infrared telescopes for objects at z> 2.5. However, the dust properties of the LBGs are poorly known because the samples are small and/or biased against far-infrared (far-IR) or submillimeter (submm) observations. Aims: This work explores from a statistical point of view the far-IR and submm properties of a large sample of LBGs at z ~ 3 that cannot be individually detected from current far-IR observations. Methods: We select a sample of 22, 000 LBGs at 2.5 -0.7), 15% of the total sample, present a high dust attenuation than the mean IRX-M∗, but they are still in agreement with the mean IRX-βUV relation. We suggest that we have to combine both the IRX-βUV and IRX-M∗ relations to obtain the best estimation of the dust attenuation from the UV and NIR properties of the galaxies (LFUV, βUV, M∗). Our results enable us to study the average relation between star formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass, and we show that our LBG sample lies on the main sequence of star formation at z ~ 3. we demonstrate that the SFR is underestimate for LBGs with high stellar mass, but it give a good estimation for LBGs with lower stellar mass when we calculate the SFR by correcting the LFUV using the IRX-βUV relation.