Protein per dollar: which proteins are actually cheapest
Almost everyone compares proteins by price per pound. It is the number on the shelf tag, so it is the number that sticks. It is also close to useless for the question most people are actually asking, which is not what does this weigh but how much of the thing I am buying it for do I get.
A pound of chicken wings and a pound of chicken breast cost roughly the same and do not contain remotely the same amount of protein. Wings are skin and bone; breast is nearly all muscle. Price per pound cannot see that difference. Grams of protein per dollar can.
The ranking
Below is every cut we track that is priced per pound, ranked by how many grams of protein a dollar buys. Prices are this week’s USDA advertised averages for the Midwest; protein comes from USDA FoodData Central for the corresponding raw cut.
One adjustment matters. FoodData Central reports macros for the edible portion, but you pay for the bone as well, so for bone-in cuts we discount by an approximate edible yield — seventy percent for a whole chicken, fifty-five for wings and ribs, and so on. Without that, bone weight gets credited with protein it does not contain. Those rows are marked bone-in below, and their figures carry more uncertainty than the boneless ones because yield varies by bird and by butcher.
- Chicken Leg Quarters 49 g per $1 $1.10/lb · bone-in
- Chicken Drumsticks 49 g per $1 $1.17/lb · bone-in
- Chicken Thighs 44 g per $1 $1.33/lb · bone-in
- Pork Shoulder 44 g per $1 $1.79/lb
- Whole Chicken 40 g per $1 $1.49/lb · bone-in
- Pork Loin Roast 40 g per $1 $2.22/lb
- Chicken Breast 36 g per $1 $2.67/lb
- Boneless Chicken Thighs 34 g per $1 $2.64/lb
And the other end of the same list, for contrast:
- Filet Mignon 2 g per $1 $45.44/lb
- Beef Short Ribs 5 g per $1 $9.34/lb · bone-in
- New York Strip Steak 6 g per $1 $16.32/lb
- Ribeye Steak 6 g per $1 $15.12/lb
What the ranking keeps telling us
Run this every week for a couple of months and the same pattern shows up. Three things drive it:
- Bone is weight you pay for and cannot eat. It is the reason a cheap per-pound price on wings or ribs is less of a bargain than it looks, and the reason the adjustment above is necessary. Note that it does not sink the bone-in cuts: whole chickens and leg quarters still finish near the top, because they start so cheap that even a thirty percent haircut leaves them ahead.
- Fat costs the same as muscle at the register. Fattier grinds and belly cuts are cheaper per pound and worse per gram of protein. Whether that is a bad deal depends entirely on what you want from the meal.
- Tenderness is the thing you are actually paying for. Filet mignon and ribeye are near the bottom of every week’s list. They are not better protein, they are more comfortable eating, and that is priced in.
Where eggs land
Eggs are sold by the dozen rather than by weight, so they sit outside the table above. Converted onto the same basis, a dollar of eggs at this week’s Midwest price buys roughly 76 g of protein — which usually puts them at or near the top of the whole list, and is why they turn up in so much budget cooking.
What this number does not tell you
Protein per dollar is one axis, and optimising for it alone produces a diet of boiled chicken and eggs. Some honest caveats:
- It ignores everything except protein. Iron, zinc, B12, and fat quality vary a lot between these cuts and none of it shows up here.
- It uses raw weights. Cuts lose different amounts of water and fat in cooking, so the cooked ranking would shift somewhat.
- It ignores what the cut demands of you. Pork shoulder is excellent value and needs six hours. A rotisserie chicken is worse value and needs nothing. Time has a price too.
- These are advertised prices, not shelf prices. The USDA report covers what stores promoted, which skews cheaper than what you pay on a random Tuesday. See how we calculate cost per serving for the full explanation.
The practical use of the ranking is not to eat only the top item. It is to know roughly where a cut sits before you decide, so that when you do pay for the ribeye you know what you are paying for.
This week’s full prices are on the proteins page, and each cut has its own page with regional prices, macros, and notes on buying and storing it.
Questions or a correction? Get in touch. More on our data sources in About.