How much protein is in chicken thigh?

Chicken thigh is one of the most reliable high-protein foods in the kitchen, and the numbers back it up: cooked, skinless thigh carries about 24.8 g of protein per 100 g, which comes to roughly 21 g in a 3 oz (85 g) cooked portion. A single boneless, skinless thigh — usually somewhere between 85 and 110 g once cooked — lands in the 21 to 27 g range on its own. That is a complete protein, meaning it supplies all nine essential amino acids your body cannot make itself, with a generous share of leucine, the amino acid most closely tied to building and holding onto muscle.

Thigh vs breast: the honest comparison

This is the question almost everyone is really asking, so it is worth being direct. Chicken thigh is dark meat, and chicken breast is white meat, and that single difference drives the whole trade-off.

Breast wins on the spreadsheet. Cooked skinless breast runs about 31 g of protein per 100 g — meaningfully more than thigh’s 24.8 g — and it does it with less fat and fewer calories. Gram for gram, breast is the leaner, more protein-dense cut, which is exactly why it is the default for people who are cutting weight or trying to hit a high protein target without much room in their calorie budget.

But thigh is not the loser of that comparison so much as a different tool. Dark meat carries more fat, which is the entire reason it tastes richer and stays juicy. That extra fat also makes it far more forgiving to cook: leave a breast on the heat thirty seconds too long and it turns dry and stringy, while a thigh shrugs off the same mistake and stays tender. Thigh also brings a little more iron and zinc than breast — a modest but real edge for two minerals plenty of people fall short on.

So which should you pick? If your goal is maximum lean protein for the fewest calories, reach for breast. If you want flavor, lower cost, and a cut that is genuinely hard to overcook — while still getting excellent, complete protein — thigh is the smarter buy. In practice, a lot of people split the difference: breast on disciplined weekdays, thigh when taste, budget, and a relaxed cooking pace matter more.

Cooked vs raw — read the number you are actually using

The 24.8 g figure above is for cooked, roasted thigh, which is how the USDA reports this cut and how you will almost always eat it. That detail matters because raw chicken holds a lot of water. When you cook it, that water cooks off and the protein concentrates, so 100 g of cooked thigh contains more protein than 100 g of raw thigh — the meat simply got denser as it shrank.

The practical rule: match the state you are measuring to the number you are using. If you weigh chicken raw on a kitchen scale, use a raw value; if you are reading a cooked figure like this one, weigh it cooked. Mixing the two — weighing raw but using cooked numbers — is the single most common way people accidentally over- or under-count their protein for the day.

To put one thigh in context, that ~21 g per 3 oz portion covers roughly a third of the daily protein many adults aim for. To find the target that fits your own body weight and training, see our guide on how much protein you need per day.