Calories in a Crumpet: What One Actually Costs You

The calories in a crumpet come to 95 for a standard 46 g one, toasted, or 207 kcal per 100 g. Two for breakfast is 190 kcal before anything goes on top. That is the lightest thing on the breakfast bakery shelf, and it arrives with a catch nobody mentions: salt.

You'd need to walk about 19 minutes to burn the 95 calories in one 46 g crumpet, toasted.

On this page

• Crumpet nutrition at a glance
• How many, and what they weigh
• The salt is the real story
• With butter
• With jam or honey
• With peanut butter
• With melted cheese
• How does a crumpet compare?
• Two things people get wrong
• Most popular crumpet brands
• FAQ

Crumpet nutrition at a glance

*%RI = percentage of the reference intake for an average adult (2,000 kcal; 70 g fat, 260 g carbohydrate, 90 g sugars, 50 g protein, 6 g salt). †The UK sets no reference intake for fibre, so this is measured against the 30 g a day the NHS suggests.

Read that table upwards and it tells a different story than reading it down. Energy, fat and sugar are all modest. The salt line is not, which is why it is the only one in bold.

How many, and what they weigh

Branded and own-brand crumpets sit in a narrow band, roughly 89 to 99 kcal each on the label, with Warburtons printing 89. Use your own pack if it gives a number; if not, 95 kcal will never put you more than about six calories out.

Crumpets are unusually easy to log for that reason. A slice of bread changes with how the loaf was cut. A crumpet is a crumpet.

The salt is the real story

At 2.6 g of salt per 100 g, one crumpet carries about 1.2 g, a fifth of the 6 g an adult is advised to stay under in a whole day. The standard two-crumpet breakfast is 2.4 g, so 40% of your day's salt is gone before the butter, the cheese or the bacon.

For something most people file under "sweet teatime thing", that is a genuinely surprising number, and it is the one figure no crumpet calorie chart bothers to print.

Our position: this is not a reason to give up crumpets, and it is not a calorie problem at all. It is a salt question. The NHS caps adults at 6 g of salt a day, so if crumpets are your weekday breakfast rather than a Sunday treat, use unsalted butter and know that nearly half your allowance is spoken for by 9am.

Toppings are where the calories actually move, so here is what the usual suspects cost.

Crumpet with butter: 169 kcal

A 10 g knob of butter is 74 kcal, at 744 kcal per 100 g, taking one crumpet to 169 kcal. The butter is 44% of that.

The holes are not decorative, they are a delivery system, and butter that vanishes into them still counts. Two buttered crumpets, at 338 kcal, cost more than three plain ones.

Crumpet with jam or honey: 134 or 116 kcal

A 15 g spoonful of jam adds 39 kcal at 261 kcal per 100 g, for 134 kcal. A teaspoon of honey adds about 21 kcal, for 116 kcal.

Both are cheaper than they feel, because they are sugar and water rather than fat. This is how you get the sweet version under 150 calories.

Crumpet with peanut butter: 216 kcal

Twenty grams of smooth peanut butter is 121 kcal at 607 kcal per 100 g, landing a crumpet at 216 kcal, more than double the plain figure.

It is also the only topping here that brings real protein, so it earns the calories if you need the crumpet to last until lunch. Weigh 20 g once, because it is less than you were about to spread.

Crumpet with melted cheese: 178 kcal

Twenty grams of grated cheddar melting into the holes is 83 kcal at 416 kcal per 100 g, for 178 kcal in total.

Savoury crumpets are the best value per gram of actual food on this list, but they stack salt on salt. The crumpet has already spent 1.2 g before the cheese lands.

How does a crumpet compare?

Per 100 g the protein and fat tell the same story: white bread 8.7 g protein / 2.1 g fat, bagel 10.6 g / 1.3 g, croissant 8.3 g / 19.7 g. The croissant is the outlier because a third of it is butter; the other three are all low-fat doughs.

The verdict: by weight the crumpet is the lightest option on the shelf, and the reason is air, since the holes mean less bread per crumpet-shaped object. Pick it over a bagel or a croissant every time on calories, but plain toast carries roughly a sixth of the salt, and the NHS advises keeping salt under 6 g a day. The full crumpet vs toast comparison runs the numbers side by side.

On carbs, a crumpet holds 20.9 g, about a third of what is in a medium jacket potato. The NHS puts starchy foods at the base of a balanced plate, and a crumpet is a small serving of one.

Two things people get wrong

"Toasting adds calories." It does not. Toasting drives off water, which is why 207 kcal per 100 g looks high for something so light, but the crumpet loses that weight and keeps its energy, so the per-crumpet figure barely moves. Only what lands on top changes the total.

"They're the low-calorie choice, so I needn't log them." Plain, they genuinely are light. Buttered, two of them are 338 kcal, and in food diaries the butter is the line that goes missing far more often than the crumpet does.

Most popular crumpet brands in the United Kingdom

Ranked by how widely each product appears among foods sold in the United Kingdom, from the BodyPal food database of over 3.3 million products. Calories are the figures printed on each label.

Brand popularity: BodyPal food database. Nutrition: manufacturer labels.

Frequently asked questions

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Similar foods

• Bread — 78 kcal per wholemeal slice
• White bread — 85 kcal a slice
• Burger bun — 152 kcal each
• Baguette — 658 kcal whole
• Bagel — 230 kcal each
• Tortilla wrap — 196 kcal per large wrap

Count it without the maths

BodyPal logs the crumpet and the butter from one photo, so the topping does not quietly disappear.