How Many Calories in Turkey Deli Meat?

Two slices of turkey deli meat, 56 g and the guideline amount on a regular sandwich, come to 59 calories, or 106 calories per 100 g. A single slice is 30 calories. The number worth reading twice sits on the other side of the label: those same two slices carry 454 mg of sodium.

You'd need to walk about 12 minutes to burn the 59 calories in a 2-slice (56 g) serving.

On this page

• Turkey deli meat quick facts
• Sodium is the ceiling, not the calories
• US portions, slice by slice
• The cup is the number that ruins a salad
• Reduced sodium, turkey ham and low-salt breast
• The cut moves the protein, not the calories
• Deli turkey is not a zero-carb food
• How does turkey deli meat compare?
• FAQ

Turkey deli meat quick facts

The reference here is the packet most people are actually holding: prepackaged or deli-counter sliced turkey, sold ready to eat, no low-sodium claim on the front. That is USDA entry 2706215, and the serving is two slices, 56 g, which is what USDA treats as the amount that goes on a regular sandwich.

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

There is no added sugars row and no trans fat row on this page, and that is deliberate. The USDA survey release that carries the deli meat entries publishes neither value for this record, so there is nothing to quote and the rows have been left out rather than filled with an estimate.

Two figures sit outside the label block. Cholesterol is 49 mg per 100 g, which puts two slices at 27 mg. Potassium is 371 mg per 100 g, a useful amount for a food this light.

Sodium is the ceiling, not the calories

Line the two columns up and the whole food changes character.

Two slices are 59 calories, about 3% of a 2,000-calorie day. The same two slices are 20% of the sodium Daily Value. Deli turkey costs you roughly seven times more of your day's sodium than of your day's calories, and it does it in the quietest possible way, because nothing about two thin slices of white meat looks like a salty food.

The FDA sets the sodium Daily Value at 2,300 mg for adults, the same ceiling the Dietary Guidelines for Americans work from. A three-slice sandwich, 84 g, is 89 calories and 680 mg of sodium — 30% of that ceiling before the bread, the cheese or the mustard have said anything.

This is the pattern CDC describes for sodium in packaged food: most of it arrives from processing rather than the shaker. Turkey breast is not a salty animal. The brine, the curing solution and the phosphate blend that keep sliced meat pink and moist for two weeks in a refrigerator are what put 810 mg into every 100 g.

So the useful way to log deli turkey is upside down. The calories take care of themselves. Count the slices for the sodium.

US portions, slice by slice

Every gram weight above comes from the USDA portion table for the same record, so the slice is a real average slice rather than a rounded guess. It also lands almost exactly on an ounce, which makes the arithmetic easy: one slice, one ounce, 30 calories, near enough.

Raw versus cooked, the trap on most meat pages, does not exist here. Deli turkey is sold fully cooked, so the weight on the scale is the weight on the sandwich. That is the one thing this food makes genuinely simple.

Protein tracks the slices at a steady rate too: 4.1 g in one slice, 8.3 g in two, 12.4 g in three. A three-slice sandwich filling delivers a quarter of the protein Daily Value for 89 calories, which is why deli turkey earns its place in the protein foods group MyPlate builds a plate around.

The cup is the number that ruins a salad

USDA lists one more portion, and it is the one nobody weighs: 1 cup of pieces, 140 g.

Torn into a chef's salad or a wrap bowl, a cup of sliced turkey is 148 calories. Still modest. Still, by any calorie logic, a smart lunch. Then read the other column: 1,134 mg of sodium, 49% of the Daily Value, from a single cup of cold meat that takes ten seconds to add and does not feel like a portion at all.

That is the difference between counting food and counting calories. Two slices on bread feel like a decision, so people make it consciously. A cup of pieces feels like a garnish. It carries two and a half times the sodium of the sandwich.

If you build salads this way often, the fix is not smaller portions of turkey. It is knowing that the cup is where the day's sodium budget goes, and spending the rest of the day accordingly.

Reduced sodium, turkey ham and low-salt breast

The 56 g columns are our own scaling of each 100 g figure to the same two-slice sandwich, because 56 g is a USDA portion for the generic slice rather than for every variant on the list.

The reduced-sodium row is the one to act on, and the reason is what it does not change. Calories are identical at 106 per 100 g. Protein, fat, carbohydrate: identical. The only thing the manufacturer changed is the brine, and it takes two slices from 454 mg to 342 mg, from 20% of the day to 15%. Five percentage points of sodium for zero calories is about as cheap as a swap gets.

Turkey ham deserves an honest note rather than a paragraph of invented difference. In this USDA release it is modeled with the same nutrient profile as regular deli turkey, right down to the decimal: 106 calories, 14.81 g of protein, 810 mg of sodium. The name describes the cure and the shape, not a different set of numbers.

The row that should surprise you is the last one. A product labeled low salt turns out to run 772 mg per 100 g against the regular 810 — a drop of under 5%. The one labeled reduced sodium drops by 25%. Two similar-sounding claims, five times the difference in what they deliver. The claim on the front of the packet is not the number; the number is on the back.

The cut moves the protein, not the calories

Put the generic deli slice next to the low-salt turkey breast and the calories barely move: 106 against 109 per 100 g. Everything else moves a lot.

Same calories, 47% more protein, and a fifth of the fat. That is not two opinions about one food. It is two different products: one is whole breast muscle sliced thin, the other is a formed, chopped-and-pressed luncheon meat that happens to be made of turkey.

Per 56 g the breast gives 12.2 g of protein for 61 calories, against 8.3 g for 59. If you eat sandwiches five days a week, that gap is worth more than any calorie saving on this page, and it costs you nothing on the calorie side to take it. Look for whole breast in the description rather than "luncheon meat", and check the protein line: anything near 20 g per 100 g is the real cut.

Deli turkey is not a zero-carb food

Turkey has no carbohydrate. Deli turkey has 2.2 g per 100 g, with 0.91 g of it as sugars.

The gram-and-a-bit does not come from the bird. It comes from the curing solution — dextrose, sugar or corn syrup solids used alongside the salt, which is standard practice in cured meat and is why a slice tastes faintly sweet against plain roast turkey.

At sandwich scale it is trivial: 1.2 g of carbohydrate in two slices, 0% of the Daily Value, and 0.5 g of sugars. Nobody's day turns on that. It is worth knowing for one reason only, which is that it explains the label. If you are tracking carbohydrate closely and wondering why the packet reads 1 g instead of 0 g, the brine is the answer, and rounding is why some brands print zero anyway.

Fiber is a genuine zero here, at 0 g. That is not a gap in the data. Meat has no fiber, so the row is honest.

How does turkey deli meat compare?

Every row below is a prepackaged or deli-counter cold cut from the same USDA release, measured the same way, so the differences are the animal and the process rather than the method. The per-56 g column is our own scaling of each 100 g row to the same sandwich filling.

The reputation does not survive the table. Turkey is the sandwich meat America reaches for when it wants the light option, and it lands in the middle of the pack on calories and last on protein — 14.81 g per 100 g, below sliced chicken, ham and beef. The eight-calorie gap between chicken and turkey is nothing. The 2.6 g protein gap in chicken's favor, at fewer calories, is real.

Our take: for a plain calorie count, sliced chicken wins at 98 calories per 100 g with 17.4 g of protein — more food value per calorie than turkey, from a nearly identical product. For anyone eating deli meat most days, the low-salt turkey breast is the pick of the whole table, because 21.81 g of protein for 109 calories beats everything here by a distance and the fat is a rounding error at 0.83 g. And if you want the largest protein hit outside that breast row, beef deli meat delivers 18.62 g, though it is also the heaviest at 115 calories.

One caveat covers all five rows. These are cured, brined products, every one of them, and none of them is a low-sodium food. The 810 mg per 100 g verified above is the turkey figure specifically; treat the others as being in the same neighborhood rather than assuming one of them is an escape route.

Turkey deli meat FAQs

Similar foods

• Pork And Beans — 273 cal per cup
• Tuna steak — 185 cal per steak, 6 oz
• Masoor Dal — 207 cal per cup cooked
• Mexican rice — 279 cal per cup
• Olive — 26 cal for 5 large olives
• Chinese Chicken and Broccoli — 206 cal per cup

Count it without the math

Point the camera at the open packet and BodyPal counts the slices, logs the calories and the protein, and keeps the sodium running alongside them.