How many calories are in ground turkey?

Ground turkey is the lean swap people reach for instead of beef, and the calorie math explains both why it works and where the real win is. A 3 oz cooked serving (85 g) runs about 173 calories — that’s 203 calories per 100 g — for roughly 23 g of complete protein and no carbohydrate. A quarter-pound raw patty cooks down to about that serving. The surprise is how close that calorie figure sits to beef: this isn’t a dramatically lighter food than 90/10, but it is a more protein-efficient one, and that distinction is the whole point of the comparison.

Where the calories come from

Like beef, ground turkey splits its calories fairly evenly between protein and fat, with carbohydrate off the board entirely. Run it through the standard Atwater factors (protein and carbs ≈ 4 cal/g, fat ≈ 9 cal/g) and you get roughly 54% protein calories and 46% fat. The driver is the 10.4 g of fat per 100 g — fat carries 9 calories a gram, so it shoulders nearly half the total. That fat content is what this cooked USDA average bakes in, and it’s exactly the lever the leaner blends pull on: trim the fat and the calories follow. One note on the figure: 203 calories per 100 g is the cooked number. Raw turkey tests lower per gram because cooking renders fat and drives off water, concentrating protein and calories together — so unless a label says “raw,” assume cooked.

Turkey vs beef: the protein-per-calorie edge

Here’s where ground turkey earns its reputation. Calorie for calorie, it’s nearly identical to 90/10 beef — 203 versus 204 per 100 g — so anyone expecting a big calorie saving from the swap alone is in for a shrug. The actual advantage is protein density: turkey carries 27.4 g of protein per 100 g to beef’s 25.2 g, so it packs more protein into the same calories. You get more of what you’re eating meat for, per calorie spent. The catch is that “ground turkey” isn’t one thing. An 85/15 blend includes dark meat and skin and runs fattier and higher in calories than this average; 93/7 is leaner and closer to it; and 99/1 turkey breast is leanest of all, with the fewest calories and the highest protein-per-calorie ratio of the bunch. If calories are the priority, the package fat ratio — not a generic “ground turkey” figure — is what tells you what you’re getting.

For the full protein side of the same meat — and how those ~23 g per serving build toward a daily goal — see protein in ground turkey. For the head-to-head on the obvious alternative, see calories in ground beef.