How Many Calories in a Slice of Pizza?

A slice of cheese pizza is 317 calories. That is one eighth of a 14-inch pie, 119 g on the plate, at 266 calories per 100 g. Cut the same pizza at 12 inches and the slice falls to 229. The width of the pizza moves the number far more than anything sprinkled on top of it.

You'd need to walk about 63 minutes to burn the 317 calories in a slice of a 14-inch cheese pizza.

On this page

• What a slice actually carries
• Pizza is priced by the square inch
• Every slice size, from personal to extra-large
• Crust and topping, slice by slice
• Thin crust is denser, not lighter
• What USDA measured at the chains
• Costco, MOD and any pizza you can measure
• Sodium breaks before calories do
• Pizza against the rest of the takeout menu
• Most popular frozen pizza brands
• Pizza FAQs

What a slice actually carries

The reference food is restaurant cheese pizza on a medium crust, the record behind almost every pizza a delivery driver hands over.

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

Two rows deserve a second look. Protein is genuinely good: 13.6 g in a slice, 27% of the day, which is why two slices hold you the way a bagel never does. Sodium is the outlier — 28% of the daily limit for 16% of the day's calories.

There is no added-sugars line here on purpose. No USDA record for pizza carries one, and a pizzeria has no Nutrition Facts panel to read, so the honest figure is total sugars: 4.3 g, most of it tomato and dough. Total sugars have no Daily Value under FDA labeling rules, which is why that cell is blank rather than guessed.

Pizza is priced by the square inch

Here is the thing nobody else publishes: USDA does not only weigh slices, it weighs one square inch of pizza. For a medium crust that unit is 6.2 g, or 16 calories. Thin crust is 4.5 g a square inch (12 calories), thick crust 6.9 g (19 calories).

Run the circle math and the official weights fall straight out of it. A 14-inch pizza covers 153.9 square inches; at 6.2 g each that is 954 g, which is exactly the weight USDA lists for one large (13–15 inch) pizza. Divide by eight: 119 g, the slice at the top of this page. A 10-inch pizza comes to 487 g, and cut into six it gives 81 g against USDA's listed small slice of 80 g.

So the slice counts baked into the data are six on a 10-inch, eight on a 12- or 14-inch, and ten on a 16- to 18-inch. That is testable, and it holds.

The consequence is the single most useful fact about pizza calories. Area scales with the square of the diameter. An 18-inch pizza is only 1.5 times wider than a 12-inch, but it carries 2.25 times the food. Going one size down on the same order saves about 88 calories per slice; switching pepperoni for plain cheese saves 33. Ask how wide the pizza was before you ask what was on it.

Every slice size, from personal to extra-large

Every weight in that table is USDA's own portion figure for the same food, not a guess scaled from one slice.

A personal pizza is the row people misjudge most. It looks like a snack because it is small enough to hold in one hand, and it is 466 calories — more than a slice and a half of the large pie you were trying to avoid. The pan version sold as a lunch deal has no separate USDA record, so 175 g and 466 calories is the closest measured stand-in.

Two slices, at 633 calories, is an ordinary dinner. Three, at 950, is half a day.

Crust and topping, slice by slice

Each row below uses its own slice weight from a 14-inch pizza, so the comparison is one pizza size with the crust and topping changed underneath it.

Pepperoni costs 16 calories per 100 g over plain cheese, about 6%. Stuffed crust costs a third of a slice in weight before anything goes on top, which is why one stuffed-crust pepperoni slice reaches 485 calories and half a day's sodium.

The whole wheat row is the quiet surprise. It is 318 calories against 317 for the ordinary slice — identical energy — but 4.2 g of fiber instead of 2.7 g. It buys fiber, not calories. Gluten-free thin crust behaves the same way at 314 calories; neither is a lighter pizza, they are differently built ones.

Out of the freezer the picture shifts again, because a boxed pizza is cut by the manufacturer:

USDA's branded-label records show frozen pizza "servings" defined as anything from half the pizza to a sixth of it, all printed as one serving. Two boxes with nearly the same density can differ by 27% on the panel, purely because of where the maker drew the line. Read the fraction, not the word.

Cauliflower crust is worth a sentence for the same reason. Across the branded records the cauliflower-crust shelf runs 165 to 270 calories per 100 g, sitting squarely inside the normal band, and a typical box calls half the pizza one serving at around 350 calories. The saving comes from a smaller pizza, not from the cauliflower.

Thin crust is denser, not lighter

The received wisdom says thin crust is the diet order. Measured as one pizza, it is the opposite.

USDA's earlier lab analysis put three crusts of the same 14-inch cheese pizza side by side: thin 302 calories per 100 g, regular 266, thick 271. Take away bread and what remains is a higher share of cheese and oil, so the density climbs. The thin slice is lighter only because it weighs 76 g instead of 107 g.

Which makes the advantage entirely a portion effect, and portion effects evaporate. Four thin slices weigh 304 g; three regular slices weigh 321 g. If the thinner crust talks you into one more piece, you have eaten the same pizza and paid a slightly worse rate per gram.

Order thin crust because you like the crunch. As a calorie strategy it works only if the slice count stays fixed.

What USDA measured at the chains

These are lab analyses of chain pizzas with their own USDA record numbers, not menu claims. All are 14-inch pies, and each slice weight is USDA's own for that specific pizza.

At one identical 14-inch size, the slices land between 236 and 338 calories. Almost none of that hundred-calorie spread is density: the pizzas run 257 to 306 per 100 g, a narrow band. It is the knife. Little Caesars cuts the lightest slice in the set at 89 g, Papa John's the heaviest pepperoni at 123 g, and a Domino's crunchy thin slice is 70 g — half the weight of a stuffed-crust wedge.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. These samples were collected for a USDA fast-food survey and the chains have reformulated since, so treat them as measured anchors rather than today's menu. And a chain's own calculator will disagree, because it counts a different slice.

Costco, MOD and any pizza you can measure

Some of the most-searched pizzas have no measured record at all. The food-court slice has never been analyzed by USDA and is not a packaged product, so there is no label behind it either. Rather than repeat an unsourced number, here is the arithmetic, using the per-square-inch figure from the section above.

An 18-inch pizza covers 254.5 square inches. Cut into six, one slice is 42.4 square inches. At 6.2 g per square inch that slice weighs 263 g, and at 2.66 calories per gram it works out to about 700 calories, with roughly 1,420 mg of sodium — 62% of the day. That is a derived figure, shown so you can check it, not a company's claim.

The same three lines work for any pizza you can eyeball. Square the radius, multiply by 3.14, divide by the number of slices, then multiply by 16 calories per square inch for a medium crust, 12 for thin, 19 for thick. The fast-casual personal pie built to order at a counter has no USDA record and no verified panel either, so it gets no number from us — but its diameter gives you one in about ten seconds.

Sodium breaks before calories do

Calories are why people search for pizza. Sodium is the number that runs out first.

One slice is 643 mg, or 28% of the 2,300 mg daily limit, for 16% of a 2,000-calorie day. The ratio stays lopsided all the way up:

• Two slices: 633 calories and 1,285 mg — 56% of the day's sodium
• Three slices: 950 calories and 1,928 mg — 84%
• A whole 14-inch cheese pizza: 2,538 calories and 5,152 mg, or 224%

A single stuffed-crust pepperoni slice carries 1,163 mg on its own, 51% of the limit in one piece. Most sodium in the American diet arrives in restaurant and packaged food rather than from the shaker, and pizza is one of the clearest examples: nothing about a cheese slice tastes salty enough to warn you.

Practical version: if pizza is a weekly fixture, the slice count is a sodium decision as much as a calorie one. The CDC's guidance on sodium puts the target below 2,300 mg a day for adults, and three slices spend nearly all of it before anything else on the table is counted.

Pizza against the rest of the takeout menu

Our take: pizza is the cheapest calorie on this table, 266 per 100 g against 296 to 350 for everything else, and it returns 13.6 g of protein a slice. The slice is not the problem. Its companions are — one slice of garlic bread costs more than a slice of pizza, and six wings come to 1,068 calories, about three and a half slices. If you want the lowest-calorie item on the menu, order wings and stop at three. If you want the meal that actually ends hunger, two slices at 633 calories with 27 g of protein does it, and it does it with a fraction of the decision-making. Just skip the bread that arrives alongside.

Most popular frozen pizza 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.

Pizza FAQs

Similar foods

• New York Strip — 449 cal per 6 oz steak
• Pork Shoulder — 229 cal per 3 oz
• Beef — 223 cal for 3 oz cooked
• Burger Patty — 230 cal per patty
• Hot wings — 571 cal for 6 wings
• Fish taco — 275 cal per taco

Skip the slice math

Point the camera at the open box and BodyPal logs the slice, the protein and the sodium riding along with it.