How many calories are in a muffin?

One medium store-bought muffin weighs 113 g and carries 424 calories. Per 100 g the same muffin runs 375 calories, which puts it level with a Danish pastry gram for gram. Size is what moves the number: the mini in that same USDA record is 64 calories, the bakery large 521.

You'd need to walk about 85 minutes to burn the 424 calories in one medium muffin (113 g).

On this page

• Muffin quick facts
• US servings, from a mini to a bakery jumbo
• Blueberry, chocolate chip, corn and bran
• An English muffin is a different food
• Sugar and sodium are the rows to watch
• How does a muffin compare?
• Most popular muffin brands
• Muffin FAQs

Muffin quick facts

The row behind every number here is USDA SR Legacy 172765, "Muffins, blueberry, commercially prepared (Includes mini-muffins)". It is the plastic-wrapped or bakery-case muffin most Americans actually eat, and it is the only muffin record that ships a full USDA portion table running from mini all the way to extra large. Its per-100-g figures are identical to the FNDDS entry "Muffin, NFS," which is USDA's own generic answer when a survey respondent just says "a muffin."

The serving column below is one medium muffin, 113 g, straight out of that USDA portion list.

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

Two rows you will see on a wrapper are missing above. There is no added sugars line, because the SR Legacy edition of this record does not publish added sugars, so no %DV for added sugar can be calculated honestly. Total sugars carry no Daily Value at all under the FDA label rules, which is why that cell stays empty even though 35.6 g is the biggest number on the card.

US servings, from a mini to a bakery jumbo

Every one of those is a USDA household measure for record 172765, dimensions and all, so nothing in the table is guesswork. USDA carries one more size above the large: an extra large at 168 g, which works out to 630 calories. That is the shape of the trap. Bakery cases and coffee-shop counters sell from the top of this list, not the middle, so the muffin you are holding is more often the 139 g or 168 g one than the 113 g one the nutrition panel describes.

Weigh a muffin once and you never have to guess again. A kitchen scale settles the argument in three seconds, and 176 calories is exactly the gap between the small muffin and the medium.

Blueberry, chocolate chip, corn and bran

The flavor matters less than the size, but it is not nothing. Chocolate chip is the heaviest generic muffin USDA lists; oat bran is the lightest of the standard sweet ones, with only the low-fat reformulation below it.

Only the corn and oat bran rows come with a USDA 113 g serving of their own; for chocolate chip, plain and low-fat blueberry the piece figures are our own arithmetic from each record's 100 g value, not a USDA serving.

Chocolate chip adds 27 calories per 100 g over blueberry, and its saturated fat nearly doubles, from 2.84 g to 5.39 g per 100 g. Plain is a rounding error away from blueberry, which tells you the fruit is decoration rather than a real ingredient by weight. Corn muffins cut the sugar roughly in half, 17.78 g per 100 g against 31.47 g, and that alone is where most of the 70-calorie saving comes from.

Oat bran is the one genuinely different sweet muffin. At 4.6 g of fiber per 100 g it carries four times the fiber of the blueberry row's 1.1 g, and its sugar collapses to 8.22 g. The low-fat blueberry reformulation is the opposite bargain: the fat drops from 16.07 g to 4.22 g per 100 g, but sugar stays at 27.05 g, so you save calories without making the muffin any less sweet.

Brand muffins sit in the same band. USDA's Branded file lists an Otis Spunkmeyer Wild Blueberry Muffin at 363 calories per 100 g, or 410 for the 113 g muffin, and the Banana Nut version at 416 per 100 g, or 470 per muffin. A Hostess mini-muffin package of 57 g is 210 calories, which is roughly a small muffin in bite-sized pieces.

An English muffin is a different food

This is the single biggest source of muffin confusion, and it is worth spelling out. USDA carries two closely matched plain English muffin records, at 223 and 227 calories per 100 g, and one muffin weighs about 57 g. That is 127 calories for the piece you split and toast.

Against the 424 of a medium bakery muffin, that is a 3.3x difference behind one word. The composition is not remotely the same either: the enriched plain English muffin record runs 8.87 g protein and just 3.53 g sugars per 100 g, versus 4.49 g protein and 31.47 g sugars in the sweet muffin. One is a bread roll, the other is cake in a paper cup.

One thing runs the other way. The English muffin carries 425 mg of sodium per 100 g against the sweet muffin's 336 mg, so per gram it is the saltier of the two. It just comes in a much smaller gram count, so the piece you actually eat lands well below the sweet muffin's 380 mg.

Sugar and sodium are the rows to watch

Nobody is surprised that a muffin is sweet. The number still lands hard: 35.6 g of total sugars in one medium muffin, from 31.47 g per 100 g. Total sugars have no Daily Value, and because this USDA record predates the added sugars requirement, the split between the fruit's own sugar and what the bakery poured in is simply not published. So the honest statement is the total, and the total is nearly a third of the muffin's weight in carbohydrate that reads as sugar.

Sodium is the row people miss entirely. 380 mg in one muffin is 17% of the 2,300 mg Daily Value, or about a sixth of a teaspoon of table salt, sitting inside something that tastes like dessert. Two muffins in a day is a third of the day's sodium before lunch.

Saturated fat is more moderate than the total fat suggests: 3.2 g, 16% of the Daily Value, because commercial muffins lean on vegetable oil rather than butter. The chocolate chip version is the exception, at 5.39 g per 100 g.

Protein is where the muffin gives you almost nothing back. 5.1 g in a 424-calorie breakfast is 10% of the Daily Value, and if you are aiming to make breakfast hold until lunch, MyPlate's grains guidance points at whole-grain choices with more fiber for exactly this reason. The oat bran muffin, at 4.6 g of fiber per 100 g, carries the most fiber of any muffin on this page.

How does a muffin compare?

Our take: gram for gram these four are functionally the same food, all within 3 calories per 100 g of each other and within 1 calorie per ounce. What separates them on your day is the size they are sold in. A creme-filled sponge cake is a two-bite object; a bakery muffin is 113 to 168 g of the identical calorie density, which is how a muffin ends up outweighing a one-ounce snack cake four to six times over while wearing a healthier reputation. If you want the muffin, take the small one, or split a large with someone. If you want a breakfast that holds, the English muffin at 127 calories with 8.87 g protein per 100 g is the better starting point, and you can put something with protein on top of it. The breakfast tart's 1 oz figure is our own scaling from its 100 g value; the other three ounce servings are USDA household measures.

Most popular muffin 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.

Muffin FAQs

Similar foods

• Cinnamon Roll — 335 cal plain, 407 frosted
• Scone — 267 cal per regular scone
• Garlic Bread — 143 cal per slice
• Chocolate chip muffin — 523 cal per medium muffin
• Apple Fritter — 455 cal per fritter
• Crescent roll — 114 cal per crescent roll

Count it without the math

Point the camera at the plate and BodyPal counts the muffin for you, size and all.