How Much Protein Is in Each Chicken Cut? (Breast to Wing)

Here's the short answer, per 100g of raw chicken: breast has 22.5g of protein, thigh has 19.7g, and drumstick and wing both have 18.4g. That's the entire spread. From the leanest cut to the fattiest, protein moves by about four grams.

Which makes most of the internet's chicken advice slightly absurd. People agonise over breast versus thigh as if one is a protein source and the other is a treat. On protein, they're nearly the same bird. What actually separates the cuts is fat: 1.9g in a skinless breast, 10.6g in a wing with the skin on. Protein varies by a factor of about 1.2 across the cuts. Fat varies by a factor of more than five.

So if you're picking a cut to hit a protein target, pick whichever one you'll actually cook. If you're picking a cut to manage calories, that's a different question, and the answer is mostly about skin.

Protein by chicken cut, per 100g raw

All figures are USDA values for raw weight — the same numbers behind every food page on this site. Read the note on raw versus cooked below before you compare these to a chart you found elsewhere, because it explains most of the disagreements you'll see.

One caveat that matters more than it looks: the thigh row is meat only, while drumstick and wing include the skin. That's not a trick — it's how these cuts are actually eaten. But it means the fat column is partly measuring skin, not dark meat. Dark meat isn't the villain here. Skin is the variable.

Full breakdowns per cut: chicken breast, chicken thigh, chicken drumstick, and chicken wing.

How much protein in a chicken breast? (by size)

"A chicken breast" is not a unit of measurement. They range from about 120g to 220g raw, which is the difference between 27g and 50g of protein — an entire meal's worth of variation hiding inside the same word.

The 4 oz row is the one worth memorising, because it's the portion most recipes and most tracking apps assume: 4 oz of raw chicken breast is about 25g of protein. If you want to know how many of those you need in a day, the protein calculator will give you a target, and our guide to protein intake explains where that target comes from.

How much protein in a chicken thigh? (by size)

Thighs are more consistent than breasts, and smaller. These are meat-only raw weights — bone and skin removed.

A medium thigh and a 4 oz breast portion land within a gram of each other. Side by side, the two cuts are covered in more detail on chicken breast vs chicken thigh.

How much protein in a drumstick or a wing?

Per 100g, both are 18.4g of protein. Per piece, we're not going to give you a number, and you should be suspicious of charts that do.

Here's why. Drumsticks and wings are bone-in, and the bone is a large and highly variable share of what you're holding. A "per drumstick" protein figure is really a per-100g figure multiplied by someone's unstated guess at how much edible meat came off the bone. Change the guess, change the answer — which is exactly why the per-piece numbers you'll find online disagree with each other so wildly.

The reliable method takes ten seconds. Eat the drumsticks, weigh what you actually stripped off the bone (or weigh the bones afterwards and subtract), then multiply: every 100g of edible drumstick or wing meat is 18.4g of protein, so each gram is roughly 0.18g. 150g of picked meat is about 28g of protein. That's a real number for your plate rather than an average of someone else's.

For side-by-side comparisons against breast: breast vs drumstick and breast vs wing. Drumstick against dark meat's other option: drumstick vs thigh.

Why every chicken chart disagrees: raw versus cooked

This is the single biggest source of confusion in chicken numbers, and it isn't a dispute about chicken. It's a dispute about water.

Cooking drives water out of meat. The protein stays put — it doesn't evaporate — but the weight it's attached to drops. So the same piece of chicken has more protein per 100g after cooking than before, purely because there's less of it left to weigh. That's why you'll see chicken breast listed around 31g of protein per 100g on some sites and 22.5g on others. Both can be right. One is measuring cooked, the other raw.

Our figures are raw. The practical rule: weigh your chicken at the same stage as the number you're using. Raw number, raw weight. Cooked number, cooked weight. Mixing the two is how people end up thinking they ate 45g of protein when they ate 30 — or the reverse. If you're tracking, pick raw and stay there, because raw weight doesn't depend on how long you left the pan on.

Chicken versus the other birds

The same flatness shows up across poultry. Per 100g raw, turkey breast has 23.7g of protein, ground turkey 19.7g, and duck 18.3g — the entire bird aisle sits between roughly 18g and 24g.

Turkey breast is the one genuine outlier, and it beats chicken breast on both counts: more protein and less fat (1.5g versus 1.9g). If you like it, use it. If you don't, the gap is not big enough to eat food you dislike over. Compare directly: chicken breast vs turkey breast, chicken thigh vs ground turkey, drumstick vs ground turkey, chicken breast vs duck, and drumstick vs duck.

So which cut should you buy?

On protein, it genuinely doesn't matter much — four grams per 100g is a rounding error against a daily target measured in the low hundreds. Three things that do matter:

Skin is the real decision. The fat column above is mostly a skin column. Taking the skin off a drumstick moves it far closer to breast than switching cuts does.

The cut you'll cook beats the optimal cut. Dry breast you force down twice a week loses to thighs you actually look forward to. A four-gram protein edge is worth nothing if it comes with a meal you quietly stop eating, and that tradeoff is the one nutrition charts never show.

Portion size beats cut selection. The gap between a small and a large breast is 22g of protein. The gap between breast and wing is 4g per 100g. You will get further weighing your chicken than choosing it — which is the same conclusion our high-protein food rankings reach from the other direction.