How many calories in an apple? By size and variety

An apple goes into your bag with no wrapper and no label, which is exactly why people hesitate when it comes to logging it. You often see a single number, 95 kcal per apple, but it comes from the USDA, the US Department of Agriculture’s food database, for its “medium apple” of 182 g. That is a big apple: it is heavier than the “large” apple in Norway’s food table, Matvaretabellen, which uses 90 g for a small apple, 125 g for a medium one and 165 g for a large one.

The starting point is the value per 100 g. According to Ciqual, the French national food composition table run by the food safety agency ANSES, 100 g of raw apple with the skin provides 54 kcal, 11.6 g of carbohydrate including 10.6 g of sugar, and almost no protein or fat. The rest, more than 85%, is water. The USDA lists 52 kcal per 100 g and Matvaretabellen 46 kcal.

These gaps come from the variety, ripeness and calculation methods; for one fruit, they add up to a few calories. What really matters is how much your apple weighs: between a small lunchbox apple and a very large one, the difference is more than 60 kcal.

Plenty of people peel their apples out of habit or for their kids. For calories, the effect is tiny: the Ciqual table lists 51.3 kcal per 100 g of peeled apple against 54 kcal with the skin, and the USDA 48 against 52 kcal. On a large apple, which goes from 182 g to 161 g once peeled according to the USDA, that adds up to 15 to 17 kcal depending on the table.

For fibre, on the other hand, the food tables contradict each other. The USDA finds almost twice as much fibre in apple with the skin (2.4 g against 1.3 g per 100 g). Ciqual finds the opposite (1.4 g with the skin, 2.4 g without), but its without-skin value is an average calculated across several varieties, and its variety analyses do not settle the question: 1.4 g with the skin against 2.5 g without for Golden Delicious, 2.8 g against 2.6 g for Granny Smith. Depending on the table, a medium apple therefore provides 2 to 4.5 g of fibre.

Is a sour green apple lower in calories than a sweet red one? Slightly, but much less than people think. The tartness of a Granny Smith hides its sugar without removing it: it has 48.6 kcal per 100 g in the Ciqual table, against 54.1 kcal for a Golden Delicious, a gap of about 8 kcal on a medium apple.

The table brings together the varieties for which an official food table gives a value. Fuji is the highest in calories on the list and Chantecler, a French variety, the lowest: between the two, the difference reaches about 15 kcal per apple. Ciqual analysed Chantecler, Gala and Pink Lady without the skin; for Golden Delicious and Granny Smith, which were analysed both ways, the skin shifts the value by 2 to 4 kcal per 100 g, in one direction or the other.

Apples are also eaten cooked, blended, pressed or dried, and that is where the gaps get big. Cooking does not create calories, but added sugar and drying change everything.

A plain baked apple keeps its calories: the Ciqual table lists 52.7 kcal per 100 g of baked flesh, against 51.3 kcal for raw flesh. Add a teaspoon of sugar and a knob of butter, and your medium apple goes from 80 to about 140 kcal.

Apple compote is trickier. Classic pre-packed French-style apple compote reaches 107 kcal per 100 g according to Ciqual, almost twice raw apple. Reduced-sugar versions sit around 64 kcal, and unsweetened apple purée, the “no added sugar” kind, stays close to the fruit at 56 kcal. In Norway, classic eplemos is sweeter still: 179 kcal per 100 g, including 40 g of added sugar, according to Matvaretabellen. To spot those sugars on a label, read our guide on added sugar.

Apple juice has about the same calories as the fruit per 100 g, but almost none of the fibre: 0.2 g. The NHS advises keeping fruit juice and smoothies to 150 ml a day in total, because juicing releases the sugars from the fruit. Dried apple, finally, has lost most of its water: 247 kcal per 100 g according to Ciqual (243 to 272 kcal in the other tables), so a 30 g portion has almost as many calories as a fresh medium apple.

In a pastry, the apple barely counts in the total: the dough, butter and sugar do the heavy lifting. In the Ciqual table, an apple tart has 227 kcal per 100 g, a tarte Tatin 245 kcal and an apple turnover 360 kcal, more than six times raw apple. A slice of shop-bought American apple pie comes close to 300 kcal according to the USDA, and a serving of Norwegian apple cake (eplekake) has nearly 230 according to Matvaretabellen.

These numbers vary a lot from one recipe, bakery and slice to the next. They still give a useful order of magnitude: a slice of apple dessert is often worth two to four raw apples in calories.

A medium apple contains about 16 g of sugar, mostly fructose (more than half according to Ciqual), with some glucose and sucrose. That number sometimes worries people, but whole fruit does not behave like added sugar, and the measurements show it.

In the international glycaemic index tables published in 2008, raw apple has a glycaemic index of 36, against 41 for apple juice, 51 for banana and 75 for white bread, with glucose as the reference at 100. That is a low index: blood sugar rises only moderately after an apple. To understand how to read that number, see our guide on the glycaemic index.

The World Health Organization draws a clear line here. It recommends keeping free sugars below 10% of energy intake, and ideally below 5%, which works out to 50 g and then 25 g a day on a 2,000 kcal diet. Sugars naturally present in whole fruit are not free sugars; those in fruit juice are. A 200 ml glass of apple juice, with its 22 g of sugar, almost reaches the WHO’s ideal target on its own, whereas an apple you bite into does not count at all.

With about 80 kcal, lots of water and some fibre, an apple is one of the most filling snacks for its calories. A Pennsylvania State University study showed this in 2009: 58 adults were given, fifteen minutes before lunch, either apple pieces, applesauce or apple juice with or without added fibre, always at 125 kcal, or nothing at all. After the whole apple, they ate 15% fewer calories over the whole meal, snack included, 187 kcal less than with nothing beforehand. Applesauce was less filling than the whole fruit, and juice even less, even with fibre added.

That does not make the apple a “fat-burning” food: it helps mostly because it replaces a higher-calorie snack and takes the edge off hunger before a meal. The saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” did not survive scrutiny either: a 2015 study in JAMA Internal Medicine of more than 8,000 American adults found no significant difference in doctor visits once other factors were taken into account. Apple eaters only used slightly fewer prescription medications.

A medium apple of about 150 g has 80 kcal and 16 g of sugar; count 55 kcal for a small apple and 98 to 120 kcal for a large one. To estimate without a table, divide the weight of the whole apple by two. The variety changes little (about 15 kcal between the extremes) and neither does the skin in terms of calories; for fibre, the food tables disagree, but keeping the skin costs nothing. The real gaps come from processing: sweetened compote, juice with almost no fibre, very dense dried apple and pastry desserts. Eaten whole, the apple remains one of the most filling snacks for its calories.