How Many Calories Are in Honey?

A tablespoon of honey is 64 calories. That is the serving printed on the Nutrition Facts panel of nearly every jar on an American shelf — 21 grams of it — and honey runs 304 calories per 100 g. A teaspoon comes to 21, a 0.5 oz squeeze packet to 43, and a full cup to 1,031.

You'd need to walk about 13 minutes to burn the 64 calories in a tablespoon (21 g).

On this page

• What one tablespoon of honey contains
• Why 82 grams of carbs is only 304 calories
• US serving sizes, from packet to squeeze bear
• Honey by the cup
• Your jar says 60 calories
• The added sugars line and the dagger
• Raw honey, honeycomb and the mineral claim
• Honey against the other sweeteners
• Most popular honey brands
• Honey calories FAQ

What one tablespoon of honey contains

The reference is the USDA entry for plain honey, FDC 169640, scaled to the 21 g tablespoon that every US label uses as its serving.

% Daily Value is based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

There is no added sugars row above, and that is deliberate rather than an omission: the USDA record for plain honey carries no added-sugars figure, because nothing was added to it. What happens on the jar instead is worth a section of its own, further down.

Total sugars have no Daily Value under FDA labeling rules, so that row stays blank too. Every other line rounds to zero. Honey is carbohydrate and water, and the carbohydrate is sugar.

Why 82 grams of carbs is only 304 calories

Run the usual arithmetic and honey should be heavier than it is. Carbohydrate is normally counted at 4 calories per gram, and 82.4 × 4 comes to 330. USDA publishes 304.

The gap is real and it has a cause. USDA assigns honey its own energy conversion factors rather than the standard 4/4/9: 3.68 calories per gram of carbohydrate, 3.36 for protein, 8.37 for fat. Check it: 82.4 × 3.68 = 303.2, plus 0.3 × 3.36 = 1.0, which lands on 304. Anyone estimating honey as grams × 4 inflates it by roughly 9%.

What sits behind that factor is the sugar itself. Table sugar is 99.8% sucrose, one molecule that your gut has to split before anything happens. Honey holds just 0.89 g of sucrose per 100 g. The rest arrives pre-split: fructose 40.94 g, glucose 35.75 g, plus galactose at 3.10 and maltose at 1.44. Add the three single sugars and you get 97% of honey's total sugars already in monosaccharide form, against zero percent in the sugar bowl.

That composition is the reason honey tastes sweeter than its weight suggests, and the reason a calorie chart built on generic factors gets it wrong.

US serving sizes, from packet to squeeze bear

USDA lists three of those directly for honey: the cup at 339 g, the tablespoon at 21 g and the diner packet at 14 g. The teaspoon works out to 7 g, which is the tablespoon divided by three and also the weight USDA files under "quantity not specified" — two routes to the same number, so it is about as solid as a spoon measure gets.

Note what the packet does. Half an ounce of honey, the kind that comes with a tea order, is 43 calories — two thirds of a tablespoon, not the trivial thing the size of the tub implies.

Honey rarely travels alone, and the partner usually costs more than the drizzle. A baked buttermilk biscuit is 165 calories for a 51 g one, so a biscuit with a tablespoon of honey is 229. The sodium in that pairing comes almost entirely from the biscuit: 511 mg against honey's 1 mg, which is 22% of the day in the bread and nothing at all in the honey. An ounce of walnuts under the same tablespoon makes 249 calories, and this time the fat and the protein are worth having.

Honey by the cup

Honey breaks people at the cup line, not the spoon line. One cup of honey is 339 g and 1,031 calories. One cup of granulated sugar is 200 g and 774. Cup for cup, the "healthier" swap in a baking recipe adds 257 calories to the bowl.

The rest of the measuring set, from the same USDA figure: ½ cup is 515 calories, ⅓ cup is 344, ¼ cup is 258.

Then there is the bear. A 12 oz squeeze bottle holds 340 g, which is 1,034 calories in a container most kitchens treat as a condiment. Nobody drinks it in one sitting, but a bear that empties over three weeks is roughly 50 calories a day that never showed up in anyone's log.

Your jar says 60 calories

Pick up seven American honeys and six of them print 60 calories per tablespoon: Sue Bee, Kirkland Signature, Great Value, Local Hive, Bee Harmony, Wholesome and Good & Gather all declare 286 calories per 100 g. Nature Nate's, on the same shelf, prints 70 — its USDA record shows 333 per 100 g. The lab figure for plain honey, 64, sits between the two.

Neither label is lying. FDA rounding rules let a food above 50 calories per serving report to the nearest 10, and carbohydrate is declared in whole grams, so 17.3 g becomes 17 g on one panel and 18 g on another before the calorie line is even calculated. Two jars of identical honey can legally differ by 10 calories a spoon.

Our take: log 64 and stop reading the panel. For someone using three tablespoons a day, the difference between 60 and 64 is 12 calories daily and about 4,400 across a year, which is the kind of quiet drift that makes a food log stop matching the scale.

The added sugars line and the dagger

Honey sits in an odd corner of the Nutrition Facts label. Every gram of sugar in the jar is added sugar by FDA's definition once it leaves the hive and goes into anything, yet declaring "17 g added sugars" on a jar of pure honey reads as though a manufacturer stirred sugar into it. FDA settled this by letting single-ingredient sweeteners carry a dagger symbol (†) and a footnote in place of a gram figure — the rule is spelled out in the agency's added sugars labeling guidance.

The symbol changes the panel, not the sugar. A tablespoon of honey delivers 17.2 g of it, and the Daily Value for added sugars is 50 g. That is 34% of the day's allowance in one spoon. Three tablespoons — a mug of tea, a bowl of yogurt and a marinade — puts you past the limit before anything else sweet is counted.

For the wider target, dietary guidelines keep added sugars under 10% of daily calories, and MyPlate files honey with syrups rather than with the foods it gets poured on.

Raw honey, honeycomb and the mineral claim

Raw honey does not carry fewer calories, and the reason is easy to check: USDA has exactly one entry for honey in its legacy database and one in its survey database, with no separate record for raw, unfiltered or pasteurized. The labels agree. Kirkland Signature's raw unfiltered honey and Great Value's filtered clover honey print the same 60 calories a spoon. Raw honey differs in enzymes, pollen and how fast it crystallizes, not in energy: 21 calories a teaspoon and 64 a tablespoon, either way.

Honeycomb is the genuine exception. USDA's record for comb honey shows 333 calories per 100 g and 6.67 g of fat, the only honey with any fat at all, because the beeswax is part of what you chew. Its serving is smaller too, 15 g rather than 21, which puts a spoon of comb honey at 50 calories.

The mineral argument does not survive the panel either. A tablespoon carries 11 mg of potassium, 0% of the Daily Value. Even a full 100 g of honey supplies 52 mg, which is 1%. Reaching that 1% costs 304 calories.

Honey against the other sweeteners

The two columns disagree, and the right one wins. Per 100 g, sugar is far heavier than honey, 387 against 304. Per spoon the order flips completely, because a tablespoon of honey weighs 21 g while a tablespoon of granulated sugar weighs about 12.6 g. Honey is the heaviest ordinary spoonful in the American pantry, tied with agave and ahead of molasses, maple and sugar.

Our take: on calories alone, maple syrup at 52 and table sugar at 49 are the smaller spoons, so switching to honey to save calories moves the wrong way. Honey earns its place on flavor and on sweetness per gram, not on the number. If you want the number down, the lever is the spoon, and the teaspoon column proves it: honey and agave 21 each, molasses 19, maple 17, sugar 16.

Most popular honey brands in the United States

Ranked by how widely each product appears among foods sold in the United States, from the BodyPal food database of over 3.3 million products. Calories are the figures printed on each Nutrition Facts label, checked against USDA FoodData Central.

Brand popularity: BodyPal food database. Nutrition: manufacturer labels / USDA FoodData Central.

Honey calories FAQ

Similar foods

• Cheeseburger — 488 cal per cheeseburger
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• Condensed Milk — 122 cal per 2 tbsp
• Maple Syrup — 216 cal for 1/4 cup
• Gouda cheese — 75 cal per slice
• Thousand Island Dressing — 216 cal per dipping-size container

Count it without the math

Point the camera at the biscuit and BodyPal logs the honey, the bread under it and the walnuts beside it in one shot.