Calories in a Doughnut: 413 kcal [83 Minutes of Walking]
Most doughnuts sold in Britain land between 200 and 250 calories each. Per 100 g the two main types split hard, and not in the direction people guess: an iced ring is 413 kcal, a jam-filled one 321. The calories in a doughnut peak in the one with nothing inside it.
You'd need to walk about 83 minutes to burn the 413 calories in 100 g of an iced ring doughnut.
How long does it take to burn off a doughnut?
100 g of an iced ring doughnut is 413 kcal. Enter your weight and the amount you ate to see how long it takes you to burn that off:
lb
| Activity | Time to burn 413 kcal |
|---|---|
| Walking, brisk | 1 hr 23 min |
| Cycling, moderate | 52 min |
| Swimming, moderate | 59 min |
| Jogging | 49 min |
| Weight training, moderate | 1 hr 32 min |
Times are for a 154 lb (11 st) adult at a steady pace; change the weight to see yours. The amount is set to the portion in the text (100 g); change it to what you actually ate. BodyPal works this out from your steps automatically.
On this page
- Doughnut quick facts
- The empty one is the heavy one
- Saturated fat, the row nobody reads
- Salt hides in the dough
- What one doughnut costs, shop by shop
- Which type to pick
- Are doughnuts worse than cake?
- Most popular doughnut brands in the United Kingdom
- FAQ
Doughnut quick facts
Both columns come from UK composition data, each averaged across ten samples of branded and own-label doughnuts, so they describe the shelf rather than one product.
| Nutrient | Ring, iced (100 g) | RI%* | With jam (100 g) | RI%* |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | 413 kcal / 1,728 kJ | 21% | 321 kcal / 1,343 kJ | 16% |
| Protein | 5.8 g | 12% | 5.4 g | 11% |
| Carbohydrate | 42.3 g | 16% | 48.4 g | 19% |
| – of which sugars | 16.2 g | 18% | 20.3 g | 23% |
| Fat | 25.7 g | 37% | 13.1 g | 19% |
| – of which saturates | 14.14 g | 71% | 4.96 g | 25% |
| Fibre | 2.7 g | – | 1.7 g | – |
| Salt | 0.815 g | 14% | 1.01 g | 17% |
Verified nutrition data
Numbers on this page come from CoFID, the UK government’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset, and from manufacturer labels where a branded product is named. Last verified August 2026. How we verify our data →
*RI% = 100 g as a share of an adult's daily reference intake, based on 2,000 kcal.
Run your eye across the two columns and the pattern is almost symmetrical. The ring wins on energy, fat and saturates. The jam one wins on sugar and salt. They are not two versions of the same food so much as two different problems.
The empty one is the heavy one
Ninety-two calories per 100 g separate the iced ring from the jam-filled doughnut, and the ring is on the wrong side of it. That reads as a mistake until you think about what happens in the fryer.
A ring has a hole. A hole means more surface for its weight, and surface is where a doughnut takes on frying fat. The jam-filled one is a solid ball with less exposed crust per gram, and then a fifth or so of its finished weight is filling. Jam is water and sugar. It carries no fat at all, and it dilutes the fried dough it sits inside.
The ranking is not a quirk of one dataset. Greggs prices its own products the same way: the glazed ring is 346 kcal per 100 g and the jam doughnut 311. Krispy Kreme's Original Glazed is denser still at 450. Every source available puts glazed rings above filled ones by weight.
Then the plate reverses it. A Greggs glazed ring is 58 g and comes to 201 calories. A Greggs jam doughnut is 76 g and comes to 236. The heavier-per-gram doughnut is the lighter one to eat, purely because bakers make rings smaller. That is the single most useful thing to know about doughnuts, and no label tells you.
Saturated fat, the row nobody reads
The iced ring carries 14.14 g of saturates per 100 g. An adult's daily reference is 20 g. A hundred grams of that dough uses up over two thirds of the day, and a 60 g ring built to that average still accounts for about 8.5 g of it, or over two fifths.
Nothing on a doughnut suggests this. It is sugar people brace for, and sugar is the milder number here at 16.2 g per 100 g, 18% of the reference. The fat comes from two places at once: the frying medium the dough absorbed, and the icing, which in most retail rings is built on hardened vegetable fat rather than water. That combination is why the NHS advice on fats treats iced bakery goods as one of the standard saturated fat sources in a British diet.
The jam version is a genuinely different proposition on this row: 4.96 g per 100 g, roughly a quarter of the daily figure, because the filling replaces fried dough rather than adding to it. If saturated fat is the number you track, the jam doughnut is not a compromise. It is the answer.
Salt hides in the dough
Doughnuts are salty, which surprises almost everyone. The jam-filled one carries 1.01 g per 100 g. That is more salt by weight than plenty of savoury foods, and it comes entirely from the enriched dough, which is a bread dough with sugar and egg in it.
The iced ring reads lower at 0.815 g, and the reason is arithmetic rather than recipe. Icing is sugar and fat with no salt in it, so it pads out the weight and drags the per-100 g figure down. The dough underneath is doing the same thing in both.
Against the 6 g a day the NHS suggests as a maximum, a doughnut is not going to be your problem. It is worth knowing it is not zero.
What one doughnut costs, shop by shop
Averages are useful for understanding; counts are what you log. These are from the sellers' own published tables.
| Doughnut | Weight | Calories | Per 100 g |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greggs Glazed Ring Doughnut | 58 g | 201 kcal | 346 |
| Krispy Kreme Original Glazed | 50 g | 225 kcal | 450 |
| Greggs Jam Doughnut | 76 g | 236 kcal | 311 |
| Greggs Yum Yum | 78.2 g | 310 kcal | 396 |
| Krispy Kreme Biscoff | 91 g | 425 kcal | 467 |
Two hundred and one to four hundred and twenty-five. Same counter, same category in most people's heads, and the top of the range is more than double the bottom. Weight explains nearly all of it: 58 g at one end, 91 g at the other.
The Yum Yum is on that list as a warning. It looks like a doughnut, sits next to the doughnuts, and is not one. It is laminated pastry, twisted and glazed, and at 310 calories it costs half as much again as the glazed ring beside it.
Supermarket packs behave like the composition averages rather than like the chains. A five-pack of own-label iced rings will sit near 413 kcal per 100 g, and a pack of jam ones near 321. Weigh one out of the packet once and you will have a number you can reuse all year.
Which type to pick
Our take: if you are counting calories, a glazed ring from a bakery counter is the cheapest genuine doughnut in Britain at around 201 for one. It is small, it is not iced with hardened fat, and it is over a hundred calories below a filled doughnut from the same window.
If you are counting saturated fat, buy the jam one instead and ignore the calorie line. Four point nine six grams against fourteen point one four per 100 g is the biggest single gap in this whole page, and it is the row with the most bearing on a day's eating.
If you are counting sugar, neither type helps much and the jam one is worse: 20.3 g per 100 g against 16.2. A jam doughnut is a sugar-forward food that happens to be low in fat for its category, which is an odd thing to say about fried dough and is nonetheless true.
Custard-filled doughnuts turn out to sit at the light end rather than in the middle. A British supermarket bakery custard doughnut reads 311 kcal per 100 g, with 41.1 g of carbohydrate but only 10.4 g of sugar, 1.2 g of fibre and 0.32 g of salt. The custard brings fat, and it replaces a lot of the sugar that jam supplies.
For a bakery habit built around something other than the fryer, a croissant, a scone or a hot cross bun are all baked rather than fried. A flapjack is denser than any of them and a stack of pancakes is the cheapest sweet breakfast of the lot.
Are doughnuts worse than cake?
By weight, usually yes, and by a margin most people would not predict.
A soft iced retail sponge is 368 kcal per 100 g. An iced ring doughnut is 413. The doughnut is 45 calories per 100 g ahead of the cake, and it is ahead on saturates by a wide gap because sponge is baked and a doughnut is fried.
The comparison flips on the plate again, for the same reason it flipped earlier. A slice of cake is usually cut bigger than a doughnut is made. One doughnut at around 200 to 240 calories will often beat a generous wedge of iced sponge, so the answer depends entirely on whether you are asking about the food or about the portion.
The other common belief worth correcting: baked doughnuts and ring doughnuts are not the same thing, and neither are doughnuts and Yum Yums. Anything laminated, twisted or filled with a fat-based cream belongs in a different row of the table.
Most popular doughnut 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.
| Product | Calories (per 100 g) |
|---|---|
| Sainsbury’s Raspberry Jam Doughnut | 339 kcal |
| Sainsbury’s Sugar Ring Doughnut | 279 kcal |
| Sainsbury’s Custard Doughnut | 258 kcal |
| Tesco Jam Doughnut | 225 kcal |
| Morrisons Custard Donut | 222 kcal |
Brand popularity: BodyPal food database. Nutrition: manufacturer labels.
Doughnut FAQs
How many calories in a jam doughnut?
236 kcal for a 76 g bakery jam doughnut, based on 321 kcal per 100 g in UK composition data. That brings 20.3 g of sugar and 4.96 g of saturates per 100 g. The filled doughnut is the lighter of the two main types by weight, because jam is water and sugar rather than fried dough.
How many calories in a glazed doughnut?
A Greggs glazed ring is 201 kcal for 58 g and a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed 225 kcal for 50 g. The UK average for an iced ring is 413 kcal per 100 g, which is the highest figure of any doughnut type. Rings take on more frying fat per gram than filled doughnuts do.
How many calories in a Greggs doughnut?
201 kcal for the Glazed Ring at 58 g, and 236 kcal for the Jam Doughnut at 76 g. Per 100 g those work out at 346 and 311. The glazed ring is the lower count of the two on the plate despite being the denser product, because it is 18 g lighter.
Krispy Kreme or Greggs?
The bakery chain has the smaller number either way you cut it. Its glazed ring comes to 201 kcal, the American brand's plain ring to 225, and by weight the gap widens to 346 against 450 per 100 g. At the top of the range one filled Biscoff, 425 kcal, outweighs two rings from the British counter put together.
How many calories in a ring doughnut?
413 kcal per 100 g for an iced ring, averaged across ten UK samples. Real rings weigh 50 to 60 g, which puts most of them between 201 and 250 kcal each. The same 100 g also carries 25.7 g of fat and 14.14 g of saturates, the highest fat figure of any doughnut on the British shelf.
How much sugar is in a doughnut?
16.2 g per 100 g in an iced ring and 20.3 g in a jam-filled one, so the filled version is the sweeter of the two. On a typical doughnut that is roughly 9 to 15 g, between a tenth and a sixth of the 90 g daily reference. Sugar is the number people expect to be high here, and it is the milder one.
Are doughnuts high in saturated fat?
Iced rings are: 14.14 g per 100 g, around 71% of an adult's 20 g daily reference. Jam-filled doughnuts are far lower at 4.96 g. The gap comes from the icing, which is usually built on hardened fat, and from the extra fried surface a ring has for its weight.
Are doughnuts worse than cake?
By weight, yes. An iced ring doughnut is 413 kcal per 100 g against 368 for a soft iced retail sponge, and the doughnut carries far more saturated fat because it is fried rather than baked. By portion the answer often reverses, since a slice of cake is usually cut larger than a doughnut is made.
Similar foods
- Greggs Yum Yum — 310 kcal each
- Flapjack — 260 kcal a slice
- Krispy Kreme — 225 kcal an Original Glazed
- Croissant — 224 kcal each
- Cupcake — 470 kcal per 100 g frosted
- Chocolate chip cookie — 52 kcal small biscuit
One photo, one number
Point the camera at the bag and BodyPal works out which type of doughnut it is looking at and what it costs you.
