Does Avocado Have More Potassium Than a Banana?

Yes — and then no, depending on how you measure. Per 100g, raw California avocado carries 507mg of potassium against a raw banana's 358mg — about 1.4 times as much. Per 100 calories, the banana wins: 402mg against the avocado's 304mg. Both figures come from the same USDA FoodData Central rows (avocado FDC 171706, banana FDC 173944). Neither is a trick. They are answers to two different questions, and almost every article on this topic quietly picks one and calls it the answer.

The banana's potassium reputation is the interesting casualty here. It is not that bananas are poor — they are genuinely good, and they are the best of the two on the basis most dieters should care about. It is that the banana is not the potassium champion of the produce aisle by any measure, and per 100g it loses to the avocado outright.

Avocado vs banana, side by side

Both rows are raw, so this is a clean comparison — no cooking-state mismatch to correct for.

Full breakdowns: avocado and banana, or the two side by side on avocado vs banana.

What we can't tell you: per-fruit numbers

The obvious question is "does one avocado have more potassium than one banana", and we are not going to answer it, because the piece weights aren't in this dataset and inventing them would make the number worse than useless. Avocados in particular vary enormously — variety, ripeness, stone size and how much flesh you actually scrape out all move the edible weight by tens of grams.

What you can do is the arithmetic yourself, and it is one step. Weigh the edible part, then multiply by 5.07 for avocado potassium, or by 3.58 for banana potassium, to get milligrams. A 130g scoop of avocado flesh is about 659mg; a 118g peeled banana is about 422mg. Those two numbers are as good as your scale, which is the honest ceiling on this question.

The 47× fat gap is the real difference

Potassium is where this comparison gets searched, but it is not where the two foods actually differ most. Avocado carries 15.4g of fat per 100g against the banana's 0.33g — a 47-fold difference, and the single largest gap between them on any measure. That fat is most of why the avocado costs 167 calories to the banana's 89, and it is the entire reason the potassium ranking flips when you switch to a per-calorie basis.

It also cuts the other way, which is why "banana wins per calorie" is not the end of the story. The avocado's fat comes with 6.8g of fiber per 100g against the banana's 2.6g — 2.6 times as much — and fat plus fiber is a combination that tends to keep people full for longer than 22.8g of carbohydrate does. If the goal is getting through a morning without snacking, the more calorie-efficient fruit is not automatically the better choice.

So which should you eat?

If you are chasing potassium on a calorie budget, the banana is the better buy — 402mg per 100 calories against 304mg, and it is cheaper, more portable and easier to eat. That is the version of the question most people are actually asking.

If you are eating for satiety, or on a lower-carb plan, the avocado wins on every axis except calorie cost — more potassium per gram, 2.6 times the fiber, a quarter of the carbohydrate, and fat that makes a meal feel like one.

And if you want the potassium question settled properly, neither is the top of the table: per 100 calories, spinach delivers about 2,426mg — six times the banana. Potassium is a vegetable story that fruit gets the credit for.

The honest problem with all of this is that it only matters in aggregate. One avocado is not a decision; a fortnight of them is. That is the part Sunn is for — send a photo or type "avocado toast" and the day's totals update themselves, so the trade-off above stops being a thing you reason about and starts being a number you can check.

More reading: which foods give the most protein per calorie (the same per-calorie logic, applied to protein), the best foods for weight loss ranked by satiety, or check your own targets with the macro calculator.