The Cheapest Protein Per Gram: 52 Foods Ranked by Cost (US Prices)

Part of The Protein Atlas — your complete guide to protein.

Pinto beans are the cheapest protein you can buy: about $0.011 per gram of protein — roughly a penny a gram. Every bean and lentil beats every cut of chicken. Peanut butter and canned tuna beat every cut of beef. And beef? It runs 7 to 17 times the cost of beans, gram for gram.

Ask the internet for “cheap protein” and you’ll hear the same three answers: eggs, chicken, and “buy in bulk.” Two of those are wrong, and the third is vague enough to be useless.

So we did the boring thing. We took 52 common protein sources, pulled each one’s protein content from the USDA’s FoodData Central, priced each against current US grocery data, and divided. The result is a single number for every food: cost per gram of protein. Not cost per pound. Not cost per serving. Cost per gram of the macronutrient you’re actually buying these foods for.

Most “cheap protein” lists rank by price per pound or per serving, which quietly rewards watery, low-protein foods and punishes concentrated ones. Cost per gram of protein is the only number that answers the real question — if I need 40 grams of protein today, what’s the least I can spend? This is the most rigorously sourced version of that ranking we know of, with every price dated and every assumption written down.

The Cheapest Protein Per Gram, Ranked

Here’s every food we could defensibly price, cheapest first. The number that matters is the last column: dollars per gram of protein.

A few foods cluster so tightly they’re effectively tied — pinto, kidney, chickpeas, and black beans sit within a fraction of a cent of each other, and eggs and chicken drumsticks land right on top of each other at ~$0.030/g. Treat differences smaller than about $0.005/g as a tie; the ranking is most meaningful in tiers, not exact rungs.

Rank	Food	$/g protein	Protein / 100g	Yield	Price basis
1	Pinto beans (dried)	$0.011	9.0 g	2.5x dry	Walmart, 5/30/26
2	Kidney beans (dried)	$0.012	8.7 g	2.5x dry	Walmart, 5/30/26
3	Chickpeas (dried)	$0.014	8.9 g	2.5x dry	Walmart, 5/30/26
4	Black beans (dried)	$0.016	8.9 g	2.5x dry	Walmart, 5/30/26
5	Peanut butter	$0.017	22.2 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
6	Lentils (dried)	$0.019	9.0 g	2.5x dry	Walmart, 5/30/26
7	Cottage cheese (nonfat) †	$0.025	12.4 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
8	Tofu (firm)	$0.028	17.3 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
9	Chicken drumstick	$0.030	28.3 g	0.45	BLS, Apr 2026
10	Tuna, canned in oil	$0.030	24.9 g	0.8	Walmart, 5/30/26
11	Eggs (whole)	$0.030	12.6 g	-	BLS, Apr 2026
12	Chicken thigh (skin-on)	$0.032	25.9 g	0.45	BLS, Apr 2026
13	Peas (green, canned)	$0.033	5.4 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
14	Tuna, canned in water	$0.033	25.5 g	0.8	Walmart, 5/30/26
15	Milk (whole)	$0.034	3.2 g	-	BLS, Apr 2026
16	Egg whites	$0.034	10.9 g	-	BLS, Apr 2026
17	Greek yogurt (nonfat)	$0.036	10.0 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
18	Whole chicken	$0.036	27.3 g	0.45	BLS, Apr 2026
19	Parmesan cheese †	$0.037	35.8 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
20	Mozzarella †	$0.037	22.2 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
21	Chicken breast (skinless)	$0.041	31.0 g	0.72	BLS, Apr 2026
22	Cheddar cheese	$0.042	24.9 g	-	BLS, Apr 2026
23	Sardines (canned) †	$0.042	24.6 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
24	Cottage cheese (4%)	$0.044	11.1 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
25	Ground pork	$0.046	25.7 g	0.75	Walmart, 5/30/26
26	Edamame (frozen)	$0.047	12.0 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
27	Tilapia (frozen) †	$0.048	26.2 g	0.78	Walmart, 5/30/26
28	Turkey (ground) †	$0.053	27.4 g	0.75	Walmart, 5/30/26
29	Ricotta (part-skim) †	$0.056	11.3 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
30	Pork chop (lean)	$0.056	25.7 g	0.7	BLS, Apr 2026
31	Salmon (pink fillet) †	$0.060	25.4 g	0.78	Walmart, 5/30/26
32	Ham (sliced) †	$0.063	21.0 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
33	Pork tenderloin	$0.065	26.2 g	0.7	BLS, Apr 2026
34	Whey protein isolate †	$0.065	58.1 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
35	Smoked salmon †	$0.065	18.3 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
36	Ground beef (85% lean)	$0.078	26.1 g	0.75	BLS, Apr 2026
37	Tempeh †	$0.083	18.5 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
38	Beef chuck	$0.084	26.0 g	0.7	BLS, Apr 2026
39	Italian sausage †	$0.084	13.9 g	0.75	Walmart, 5/30/26
40	Turkey breast †	$0.086	29.1 g	0.7	Walmart, 5/30/26
41	Almonds †	$0.088	21.2 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
42	Cod (Atlantic, raw) †	$0.102	17.8 g	0.78	Walmart, 5/30/26
43	Bacon	$0.107	37.0 g	0.38	BLS, Apr 2026
44	Beef jerky †	$0.122	33.2 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
45	Shrimp (cooked) †	$0.124	20.3 g	0.85	Walmart, 5/30/26
46	Mahi-mahi (cooked) †	$0.127	23.7 g	0.78	Walmart, 5/30/26
47	Lamb leg (lean) †	$0.131	20.3 g	0.7	Walmart, 5/30/26
48	Feta cheese †	$0.143	14.2 g	-	Walmart, 5/30/26
49	Bison (ground) †	$0.156	18.7 g	0.75	Walmart, 5/30/26
50	Beef brisket / stew	$0.172	21.0 g	0.6	BLS, Apr 2026
51	Beef tenderloin	$0.175	26.5 g	0.7	BLS, Apr 2026
52	Beef sirloin (lean)	$0.178	26.1 g	0.7	BLS, Apr 2026

All 52 foods we priced, cheapest first, with US prices and cooked-yield correction applied to meat and fish (see methodology). Bold rows are the reference points this article leans on: the two cheapest foods (pinto and kidney beans) and the two key beef anchors (cheapest ground beef and top-end sirloin). The “Yield” column shows the cooked-yield factor we applied — bone-in poultry at 0.45, boneless meat at 0.72, ground meat at 0.75, bacon at 0.38, dried legumes at 2.5x dry-to-cooked. Rows marked † are priced from our dated Walmart snapshot but weren’t individually re-verified in a live browser session — they’re sourced estimates, good for the overall picture but not as airtight as the rest. Every headline claim in this article rests only on an un-daggered row (a BLS official price or a price we confirmed in-browser). The cheapest tier — beans, peanut butter, canned tuna, eggs — is all verified or BLS.

A few things jump out immediately:

• The top of the list is almost entirely plants and pantry staples. Pinto beans, kidney beans, chickpeas, black beans, peanut butter, and lentils all land in the cheapest tier — under about $0.019 per gram, and every one of them beats every cut of chicken. Cottage cheese and firm tofu sit just behind them, the two cheapest non-legume foods on the list.
• Chicken is the cheapest meat, but not the cheapest protein. Drumsticks ($0.030/g) are the cheapest cut, but every bean and lentil still beats them.
• Beef is expensive protein. The cheapest beef in the set — 85% lean ground at ~$0.078/g — costs about seven times what pinto beans cost. Sirloin is the priciest common protein on the list.

The spread from cheapest to priciest is more than 16x. And here’s the quietly interesting part: a lot of that spread is not “plants versus meat.” Much of it is a cut-and-processing story within the same animal. A chicken drumstick ($0.030/g) costs well under what a chicken breast ($0.041/g) does per gram of protein, once you account for the bones you throw away. Ground beef costs less than half what sirloin costs. Same cow, same bird — wildly different protein economics depending on the cut, the bone, and how much water cooks off.

Are Beans Cheaper Than Meat?

Yes — and at the top of the list, it isn’t close.

Here’s the comparison most people get backwards. Per pound, chicken and beans look similar, and a pound of cooked chicken obviously has far more protein than a pound of beans. True — but it’s the wrong unit. Once you normalize to the gram of protein you’re actually buying — and correct chicken for the bone and water you don’t eat — dried pinto beans ($0.011/g) and kidney beans ($0.012/g) come in below every cut of chicken, including the cheapest one, drumsticks (~$0.030/g).

Stack beans against the meat people actually eat and the gap widens fast:

Food	$/g protein	Multiple of pinto beans
Pinto beans	$0.011	1.0x
Kidney beans	$0.012	~1.1x
Chicken breast (skinless)	$0.041	~3.7x
Ground beef (85% lean)	$0.078	7.3x
Beef sirloin (lean)	$0.178	16.8x

A gram of protein from sirloin costs nearly seventeen times what the same gram costs from pinto beans. Even the cheapest ground beef costs more than seven times as much. That’s the “7 to 17 times” range in plain numbers.

The catch is real and worth stating plainly: beans are a lower-density protein. You get about 9 g of protein per 100 g of cooked beans versus 28–31 g per 100 g of chicken. To hit 40 g of protein from beans you eat roughly 440 g of cooked beans (about two cups) versus ~130 g of chicken. Beans win on price but cost you volume — you eat more food, and that food brings carbohydrate and fiber along with the protein. For a tight grocery budget, that trade is usually worth it. For a cut weight or a high-protein, low-calorie goal, it often isn’t.

There’s a nutrition caveat too: beef protein is “complete” and comes with heme iron, B12, and zinc that beans deliver in smaller amounts or not at all. Beans bring fiber and folate and a fraction of the saturated fat. The point of this ranking isn’t “stop eating meat.” It’s that if your goal is grams of protein per dollar, beans are the most efficient tool in the store — and pairing them with a cheap grain or a little dairy closes most of the amino-acid gap.

Is Chicken or Beef Cheaper Protein?

Chicken, decisively. This one is not subtle: every chicken cut in the dataset is cheaper per gram of protein than every cut of beef.

Chicken	$/g protein	Beef	$/g protein
Drumstick	$0.030	Ground beef (85%)	$0.078
Thigh (skin-on)	$0.032	Beef chuck	$0.084
Whole chicken	$0.036	Brisket / stew	$0.172
Breast (skinless)	$0.041	Tenderloin	$0.175
—	—	Sirloin (lean)	$0.178

Even chicken breast — the cut people assume is “premium” — lands at about $0.041/g, roughly half the cost of ground beef per gram of protein and well under a quarter the cost of sirloin. There’s no cut of beef in our data that competes with any cut of chicken on price per gram of protein.

So if you eat meat and you’re optimizing for cheap protein, the order is clear: bone-in chicken first (drumsticks, then skin-on thighs), then breast, then everything else. Beef is a flavor, iron, and satiety purchase — not a protein-value purchase. (For the deeper nutrient trade-off, see Pork vs Beef and Chicken Breast vs Thigh.)

Eggs Are Actually a Good Deal

Here’s the finding people get wrong in both directions. Eggs are genuinely cheap protein — just not the outright champion.

Eggs land at $0.030 per gram of protein. A large egg is about 6 grams of protein in a 50-gram package, and at roughly $2.25 a dozen that works out to almost exactly the price of chicken drumsticks. The difference is that what you see is what you pay: eggs need no bone trimming, no cooking-yield correction, no soaking. The sticker price is the protein price.

So where do eggs actually sit? They’re competitive with the cheapest chicken — eggs and drumsticks both land at $0.030/g, which is a tie, not a win — and they beat the pricier chicken cuts, with skin-on thighs ($0.032), whole chicken ($0.036), and breast ($0.041) all costing more. They beat every cut of beef by a wide margin. The foods that clearly undercut eggs are beans, peanut butter, and nonfat cottage cheese; firm tofu and canned tuna land right alongside them.

Why does the “eggs aren’t cheap protein” myth persist in fitness circles? Because the comparison usually pits eggs against uncorrected raw chicken-breast prices, which look cheaper on the package than they are on the plate. Once you account for the water and trim you lose cooking that breast, eggs come out ahead. The honest verdict: eggs are a solid, convenient, complete cheap protein — keep them in the rotation.

The Pantry Beats the Butcher

The single most useful pattern in the data: shelf-stable, concentrated, ready-to-eat foods punch above their weight, and watery or bony fresh cuts punch below it.

Peanut butter and canned tuna both beat every cut of beef. Peanut butter lands at ~$0.017/g — right alongside the cheapest legumes — and canned tuna comes in at ~$0.030–0.033/g, in the eggs tier. (Counterintuitively, oil-packed tuna at ~$0.030/g edges out water-packed at ~$0.033/g: once you drain the oil, what’s left is more protein-dense than the water-packed solids.) Either way, two of the most “throw it in a sandwich” foods in the house are more protein-efficient than any steak — canned tuna sits as an eggs-tier, mid-pack convenience protein, well below the cheapest beef at $0.078/g.

Bacon, by contrast, is no bargain. It’s easy to assume cooked bacon’s high protein density (about 37 g per 100 g) makes it cheap protein, but once you account for how much fat and water render off — bacon keeps only about 38% of its raw weight — it lands at roughly $0.107/g, more expensive than most beef. The lesson cuts both ways: concentration helps a food’s density, but if you pay for weight you cook away, the per-gram price climbs.

The throughline: how concentrated, shelf-stable, and yield-friendly a food is matters as much as which animal it came from. Tuna and peanut butter win it outright. Bony chicken, watery raw beef and fish, and high-rendering bacon all lose ground once you price the part you actually eat.

Cost Efficiency and Calorie Efficiency Are Nearly Inverted

If you’ve read our Protein Per Calorie ranking, you might expect the cheap foods and the lean foods to be the same foods. They’re almost the opposite.

The most calorie-efficient proteins — the most protein per calorie — are lean animal foods: skinless chicken breast, white fish, nonfat Greek yogurt, canned tuna. The most cost-efficient proteins are beans and peanut butter, which are carb-heavy or fat-heavy and therefore calorie-dense relative to their protein.

Your goal	Best foods	The catch
Cutting cost	Beans, peanut butter	Calorie-dense; you eat more
Cutting calories	Chicken breast, white fish, nonfat dairy	More expensive per gram

Canned tuna is the rare food that scores well on both axes — cheap and lean. It’s the closest thing in the dataset to a free lunch. (For the protein-while-cutting angle, see Protein for Weight Loss.)

What to Buy This Week

Cost per gram of protein is one input, not the whole decision — volume, calories, convenience, and what you’ll actually enjoy eating all matter. But if cheap protein is the goal, here’s the move:

1. Build your base on dried beans (pinto, kidney, black) and lentils — the cheapest protein floor available, around a penny a gram. Cook a big pot, freeze portions.
2. Stock peanut butter, firm tofu, nonfat cottage cheese, canned tuna, and eggs for protein you can keep on hand with little or no cooking — all beat every cut of beef, and eggs are competitive with the cheapest chicken.
3. Make chicken your default meat — drumsticks and skin-on thighs are cheapest; breast is still about half the cost of ground beef per gram.
4. Buy beef because you want beef, not because you want protein. It’s the most expensive common protein on this list by a wide margin.

And the foods to stop thinking of as the cheapest protein: any beef (a flavor and nutrient buy), bacon (a high-yield-loss splurge, not a value cut), and protein powder (mid-pack on cost — you’re paying for the scoop, not the savings).

Want to build meals around the cheap end of this list? Start with our bean- and tuna-based recipes below, and use the Protein Ranker to compare any two foods head to head.

The Bottom Line

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cheapest source of protein per gram? Dried pinto beans, at roughly $0.011 per gram of protein (about a penny per gram), based on a verified Walmart price for dried beans converted to a cooked basis. Kidney and black beans are nearly identical. They’re cheaper per gram of protein than any meat, including the cheapest chicken (drumsticks at about $0.030/g).

Are beans really cheaper than chicken for protein? Yes — dried pinto and kidney beans ($0.011–$0.012/g of protein) come in below every cut of chicken, including the cheapest, drumsticks ($0.030/g). The tradeoff is density: beans have about a third the protein per 100 g, so you eat more food to hit the same protein. Canned beans cost more (~$0.028/g) and no longer undercut chicken; the deepest savings are in dried beans.

Is chicken or beef cheaper protein? Chicken, by a large margin. The cheapest chicken (drumsticks) is about $0.030 per gram of protein; the cheapest beef (85% lean ground) is about $0.078 — roughly 2.6x more. Lean sirloin is about $0.178/g. No beef cut competes with any chicken cut on price per gram of protein, once both are corrected for cooked yield.

Are eggs a cheap source of protein? Yes, genuinely. Eggs land at about $0.030 per gram of protein, which ties the cheapest chicken (drumsticks, also $0.030) and beats the pricier chicken cuts (skin-on thighs, whole chicken, and breast all cost more) as well as every cut of beef. Beans, peanut butter, and nonfat cottage cheese come in cheaper, while firm tofu and canned tuna land right alongside. The “eggs aren’t cheap protein” claim usually relies on uncorrected raw chicken-breast prices; correct for cooking yield and eggs come out ahead.

Why is peanut butter such a cheap protein? At a 40 oz jar with about 22 g of protein per 100 g, peanut butter works out to roughly $0.017 per gram of protein — cheaper than canned tuna and every cut of beef. The catch is that it’s calorie-dense and mostly fat, so it’s a budget protein, not a lean one.

Is protein powder cheaper than whole-food protein? No. Whey protein isolate lands mid-pack at about $0.065 per gram of protein — cheaper than beef, but far more expensive than beans ($0.011/g), peanut butter ($0.017/g), firm tofu ($0.028/g), canned tuna ($0.030/g), eggs (~$0.030/g), or most cuts of chicken. Powder wins on convenience and protein-per-calorie, not on cost.

How We Calculated This (Methodology)

Trust is the whole point of a ranking like this, so here’s exactly how every number was produced. Nothing here is estimated where a real source existed. This is a US ranking, based on US prices — a Canadian-price version is planned.

Protein content comes from USDA FoodData Central, expressed as grams of protein per 100 g of food. For foods normally eaten cooked (beans, fish, meat) we used cooked-basis values, because cooking concentrates protein as water cooks off and using raw values would understate density. For as-eaten foods (canned tuna, peanut butter) we used as-sold values. Canned-tuna protein is on a drained-solids basis (~25.5 g per 100 g for water-packed, FDC-verified) — correcting an earlier error that overstated tuna’s density; this is also why drained oil-pack tuna ends up slightly more protein-dense, and so slightly cheaper per gram, than water-pack.

Cooking and edible yield is the correction that matters most — and the one an earlier version of this ranking got wrong. Raw meat is priced as you buy it, but its protein is measured on a cooked basis, so a naive raw calculation overstates how much protein your dollar actually buys. We bridge the gap with yield factors: bone-in poultry drops to roughly 0.45 edible cooked weight, boneless meat to about 0.72 cooking yield, ground meat to about 0.75, and bacon to about 0.38 once the fat and water render off. Dried legumes go the other way, gaining roughly 2.5x from dry to cooked weight as they absorb water. This yield math is exactly why drumsticks, breast, and bacon end up more expensive than a back-of-envelope raw calculation suggests, and why bacon — high protein density notwithstanding — is no value cut.

Prices — fresh meat, eggs, and milk come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Average Price Data — the same series used to compute inflation — for US city average, April 2026. These are population-level average retail prices, not one store’s sale tag, which is exactly what you want for a reference ranking. A couple of honesty notes here: the BLS canned-tuna series is discontinued, so tuna uses a retailer price instead; and we proxy chicken thighs from the BLS chicken-legs series and label them as such, since BLS doesn’t break thighs out separately.

Prices — dairy beyond milk, peanut butter, canned goods, and specific legume varieties come from a dated Walmart.com snapshot taken May 30, 2026 (rows marked † in the table). We used these retailer SKUs where we needed a specific variety or package size that the BLS series doesn’t break out. Walmart is the largest US grocer and a reasonable national-floor benchmark.

The dried-to-cooked conversion is the one place the bean math isn’t a straight divide. USDA protein for beans is reported on a cooked basis (~9 g per 100 g cooked), but you buy beans dry. Dried beans roughly 2.5x their weight when cooked as they absorb water, so we took the dry-bag price, scaled the yield by 2.5 to get grams of cooked beans, and divided into the protein those grams contain. This is the single biggest assumption in the bean numbers; if your beans yield differently, the cost shifts proportionally.

Limitations — every ranking has them, and hiding them is how “cheap protein” lists lose credibility:

• It’s a US ranking. Prices, retail availability, and which cuts are common all differ in Canada and elsewhere. A Canadian-price version is on the way; until then, read the tiers (beans < eggs/cheap chicken < most chicken/dairy < beef) rather than the exact rungs.
• Treat differences under about $0.005/g as ties. Eggs and chicken drumsticks both round to $0.030/g — calling one “cheaper” would be false precision. The story is in the tiers.
• Prices are a point in time. April 2026 BLS and a May 30, 2026 Walmart snapshot. Grocery prices move. The rankings are far more stable than the absolute numbers — beans will beat beef next year too — but don’t treat $0.011 as gospel six months from now.
• Egg whites are derived from the whole-egg price (treating the protein as if it carried the whole egg’s cost), which is a ceiling, not an exact figure — real bottled egg whites may price differently.
• About a dozen foods were omitted because we couldn’t price them cleanly against a national benchmark (specialty items, regional cuts, and a few SKUs where the available price didn’t match the nutrition entry).
• Every headline claim uses only BLS prices or prices we verified in-browser. The surprising findings are surprising and sourced — if a number couldn’t stand up, it didn’t make the headline.