How much protein is in chicken breast?

The gold standard of lean protein

Cooked skinless chicken breast is the food most diet and training plans are quietly built around, and the numbers explain why: 31 g of protein per 100 g for 165 calories, with no carbohydrate and only 3.6 g of fat. Almost nothing else in the whole-food aisle packs that much protein into that few calories without bringing fat along for the ride. It’s the benchmark other proteins get measured against, not because it tastes the best, but because the protein-to-calorie ratio is hard to beat.

The protein itself is high quality in every sense that matters. Chicken breast is a complete protein — it supplies all nine essential amino acids in proportions your body can actually use — so there’s no pairing or food-combining to think about the way there is with beans or grains. It’s also notably high in leucine, the amino acid that acts as the trigger for muscle protein synthesis. A 3 oz (85 g) cooked portion delivers roughly 2 g of leucine, comfortably above the threshold most research associates with maximally stimulating muscle repair after training. In practical terms, breast is among the most efficient ways to get usable amino acids per calorie that exists.

The cooked-vs-raw gotcha

Here is the single most misread fact about chicken, and it’s baked into the USDA number above: 31 g per 100 g is the cooked figure. Raw breast is closer to 23 g of protein per 100 g. The meat didn’t gain protein on the grill — it lost water. Cooking drives off moisture and shrinks the piece, so the same breast weighs less when it’s done and tests higher per gram. A raw 6 oz breast can finish around 4.5 oz cooked.

This trips people up in both directions. If you weigh a raw breast and then look up “cooked” macros, you’ll overcount your protein. If you eat a 4 oz restaurant portion (already cooked) and log it against raw numbers, you’ll undercount. The clean rule: nearly every restaurant menu, recipe, and packaged figure quotes the cooked weight, so unless a label literally says “raw,” assume cooked — which is exactly the basis the 26 g per 3 oz figure on this page uses.

Hitting a protein goal with chicken breast

Because breast is so dense, the math is forgiving. A standard 3 oz cooked serving (85 g) is about 26 g of protein; a more typical dinner-plate portion of 4 oz (113 g) lands near 35 g. That means a single, ordinary serving of chicken breast clears the ~30 g target that anchors most per-meal protein recommendations — you don’t need a giant slab of meat to get there, just a normal one. A palm-to-deck-of-cards sized piece does the job.

For context on how many of those ~30 g servings you actually need across a day, see how much protein per day. The short version: most people building or holding muscle do well spreading protein across meals, and chicken breast makes that almost trivially easy because it carries so little else. Where it falls short is variety and the fat-soluble nutrients leaner cuts simply don’t have — which is why rotating in fattier proteins like salmon or eggs is worth doing even when breast is your default. One practical note on the convenience versions of this food: breaded nuggets and tenders trade away part of that lean-protein edge, diluting the meat with breading and adding fat and sodium that the plain breast never had.