Calories in
a tablespoon.

The chart

Most pages that answer this cover one food. The useful version is the comparison, because the decision people are making is rarely "how many calories is peanut butter" on its own. It is which of two things to put on the spoon.

Per gram and per spoon are not the same ranking

This is the part single-food pages cannot show you, and it is the reason the last column is here.

Tahini is denser than peanut butter: 595 Calories per 100 g against 588. Per gram, tahini wins. But a tablespoon of peanut butter holds about 16 g while a tablespoon of tahini holds about 15, so on the spoon peanut butter comes out ahead, 94 Calories to 89. The ranking flips between the two columns.

Honey does the same thing more dramatically. At 304 Calories per 100 g it looks moderate, well under jam-adjacent spreads. But honey is heavy: a tablespoon is about 21 g, one of the heaviest on this table, which lifts it to 64 Calories. Maple syrup is lighter per spoon at 20 g and lower per gram, so it lands at 52 despite looking similar in the jar.

If you are choosing between two foods by the spoonful, the per-tablespoon column is the one that answers the question. The per-100 g column is what a label gives you and what a scale measures.

What is safe to log as zero

Vinegar at 3 Calories, salsa at 5, soy sauce at 8, plain Greek yogurt at 9, mustard at 10. Below roughly 10 Calories a tablespoon, the error from skipping them is smaller than the error already sitting in the rest of a day's log, and logging them costs attention you could spend on the top of the table instead.

The top of the table is where the same attention pays. Three tablespoons of oil in a pan is about 358 Calories, which is a meal's worth of energy that leaves no trace on the plate. Three tablespoons of salsa is 14. Both are the same gesture at the stove.

If the pan is the part you are unsure about, the cooking oil calorie calculator handles poured, sprayed and left-in-the-pan amounts separately.

Level, heaped, and poured are different measurements

Every figure here is a level tablespoon. A heaped spoon of peanut butter or jam can hold half again as much, which turns 94 Calories into something closer to 140 without looking meaningfully different.

Poured liquids are looser still. A tablespoon of oil "about" poured into a pan is a guess with a wide range, and it is almost always an underestimate rather than an over. If a food is at the top of this table and you are pouring rather than measuring, weighing it once tells you more than any chart will.

For scaling a label to what you actually ate rather than to a spoon, use the nutrition per 100g calculator.

What this chart will not do

It gives typical values for standard versions. Reduced-fat dressings, light mayonnaise, natural peanut butter with the oil poured off, and any branded product can differ substantially, dressings most of all. A label on the jar in front of you beats this table every time.

This is general information for adults, not dietary advice. Speak with a qualified clinician or registered dietitian for personal guidance, and stop tracking if it starts causing guilt or compulsive checking.