Calories in rice: white, brown, cooked and dry

Rice is the food where calorie logs go to die, because "100 g of rice" means two wildly different things. Cooked white rice is 130 kcal per 100 g in the USDA database. Dry white rice is 365. Log the wrong one and a normal dinner is off by a factor of nearly three — the single most common large error we see in food logs.

The numbers, both states

All values from USDA FoodData Central, per 100 g:

Two things stand out. First, dry rice is about 2.8× as caloric per gram as cooked — that's water absorption, nothing else. 100 g of dry rice cooks up to roughly 280–300 g on the plate, and the calories that were in the dry grains are now spread across three times the weight. If the mechanics of that interest you, we've written up the whole cooked-versus-raw problem in its own post.

Second: brown rice is not meaningfully lower in calories than white. Cooked, it's 123 vs 130 — a 5% difference. Brown rice earns its reputation on fiber (about 1.6 g per 100 g cooked vs 0.4 for white), micronutrients and slower digestion, not on the calorie line. If you're choosing brown rice to "save calories", you're saving about 18 kcal per generous portion.

Per cup, per portion

Most recipes and menus speak in cups, so here's the conversion. A cup of cooked rice weighs about 158 g; a cup of dry rice about 185 g:

That last row deserves attention. Home portions of rice tend to run 120–180 g cooked; restaurant portions routinely double that. When a takeaway meal "mysteriously" stalls your week, the mystery is often 350 g of rice logged as "a portion of rice, ~150 g".

The two classic logging mistakes

• Weighed dry, logged cooked (undercount). You measure 90 g of dry rice from the package — that's ~330 kcal — but log "90 g rice" against the cooked value and record 117. You just made 213 kcal disappear.
• Weighed cooked, logged dry (overcount). You weigh 250 g of cooked rice on your plate and log it against the dry value: 913 kcal for rice that actually carries 325. Now your log says you're in a huge deficit while the scale disagrees, and calorie counting "doesn't work".

The rule: packages and recipes speak dry; plates speak cooked. Say which one you weighed. In calorie.one, the cooked/raw state is a first-class field — "a bowl of rice" matches the cooked USDA row at 130, "I cooked 90 g of basmati" matches the dry row at 365, and the meal's line-by-line breakdown shows exactly which row was used so you can fix it if the guess went wrong.

Fried rice is a different food

Fried rice breaks the table above, because it isn't rice plus nothing — it's rice plus oil, egg, and usually soy sauce and meat. Oil is the dominant term: at 884 kcal per 100 g, a single tablespoon (~14 g) of cooking oil adds ~120 kcal, and restaurant fried rice typically absorbs several per wok batch. Depending on the recipe, fried rice lands around 165–200 kcal per 100 g — call it 1.3 to 1.5 times plain cooked rice, and those figures are approximate precisely because the oil pour varies from kitchen to kitchen.

The right way to log it is the way the app does it: decompose. "Egg fried rice, about 300 g" becomes cooked rice + oil + egg as separate lines, each matched to its own USDA entry, so the oil is visible instead of smuggled. A 300 g plate logged as "plain rice" (390 kcal) versus decomposed fried rice (~550 kcal) is a 160 kcal gap — every time you order it.

Bottom line

Rice itself is cheap, calorically: 130 kcal per 100 g cooked makes it comparable to boiled potato territory, and it's the portion size and the fat cooked into it that decide whether a rice dish is 300 or 700 kcal. Weigh it cooked when you can, name the state when you log it, and let the database do the arithmetic — the full pipeline is on our methodology page. And if you're wondering how much rice fits your day, the calorie calculator gives you the budget the portion has to fit into.

FAQ

How many calories are in a bowl of rice?

A typical bowl holds 150–200 g of cooked white rice, which is 195–260 kcal. A small bowl (120 g) is about 155 kcal; a large restaurant bowl (300 g) is about 390.

How many calories are in 1 cup of cooked rice?

About 205 kcal for white rice (158 g at 130 kcal per 100 g) and about 240 kcal for brown rice (195 g at 123 kcal per 100 g). Half a cup of cooked white rice is about 100 kcal.

How many calories are in 100 g of cooked rice?

130 kcal for white long-grain, 123 for brown, per USDA. So 140 g of cooked rice is about 182 kcal and 200 g is 260.

How many calories are in 2 cups of cooked rice?

About 410 kcal for white rice and 480 for brown — roughly the rice under a large burrito bowl.

Is rice high in calories?

Not per gram: cooked rice is 130 kcal per 100 g, similar to boiled potato and lower than bread (~265). It reads as high-calorie because portions are big and because fried rice adds oil at 884 kcal per 100 g.

Does brown rice have fewer calories than white rice?

Barely: 123 vs 130 kcal per 100 g cooked, a 5% difference. Brown rice's advantages are fiber and micronutrients, not the calorie line.