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Butter Chicken Calories Per Serving

November 10, 2026 · Viral Tandel

Butter chicken calories is one of the most searched Indian food questions on this site, and it is also one this page cannot answer with a specific number. Butter chicken is not in the USDA source this site uses, and its gravy varies enough by kitchen that a single figure would be a guess wearing the costume of a fact. Here is what we can tell you honestly instead.

Key takeaways

• There is no verified calorie figure for butter chicken in this site's sources. None of the two allowed sources covers it.
• The gravy, built on butter, cream and often sugar, is almost certainly where most of the calories come from, not the chicken itself.
• A 100 g serving of cooked chicken breast alone comes to 144 kcal per USDA, which gives you a sense of the protein baseline before any gravy is added.
• Rice and naan, common sides, both have verified figures and are worth logging as their own items.
• Scanning your actual plate is more reliable here than any generic number could be, because this is exactly the kind of dish where recipes genuinely diverge.

Why butter chicken doesn't have a verified number here

This site only prints a calorie or macro figure when it comes from USDA FoodData Central or from a restaurant chain's own published nutrition data. Butter chicken appears in neither. That is different from a dish like chicken curry or biryani, which do have entries in the USDA data this site draws from; butter chicken specifically, with its cream-and-butter makhani gravy, simply is not covered.

Rather than borrow a number from a different curry and present it as if it were butter chicken's own figure, or invent one that sounds plausible, the honest move is to say so plainly: it varies by recipe, so scan it. That is the same standard applied to chicken tikka masala and lassi elsewhere on this site, and butter chicken belongs in the same category for the same reason. Logging Indian food in a calorie tracker covers why this gap exists across the cuisine, not just for this one dish.

What we can source: the sides and the protein baseline

While the finished dish is not sourced, some of what typically surrounds it is.

The chicken figure above is for a plain, cooked breast, not a butter chicken piece, and restaurant butter chicken is more commonly made with thigh, which runs higher in fat than breast to begin with, before any gravy is added. Treat it as a rough floor on the protein side of the dish, not as the dish's actual total. Rice and naan, on the other hand, are exactly what most people eat butter chicken with, and both have real figures you can log with confidence.

What actually swings the gravy itself

Butter chicken's makhani gravy is built from a fairly small list of ingredients, but the quantities are where kitchens disagree. Butter and cream are the two biggest fat contributors, and restaurant versions frequently use more of both than a home cook would for the sake of a richer, glossier sauce. A spoon of sugar is common to round out the tomato's acidity, adding carbohydrate that a lean-sounding chicken dish would not otherwise carry. Some recipes fold in cashew paste for body, which adds both fat and calories again.

None of butter, cream, sugar or cashew paste has a verified per-tablespoon figure in the sources this site uses, so stacking assumptions about each one would only compound the guesswork. The honest summary is the same one used for chole calories and other gravy-based dishes on this site: the base ingredient rarely tells the whole story, the fat added during cooking usually does.

How to log it without guessing

This is precisely the situation a photo estimate is built for: a dish with no reliable generic database entry, where the fat content depends entirely on a specific kitchen's recipe. Log your plate in KalTrack rather than searching for a butter chicken number that does not exist anywhere trustworthy, and correct the portion afterward if anything looks off, especially a visible pool of gravy or ghee.

Add the rice or naan you ate it with as their own line items using the figures above, since neither is folded into any butter chicken estimate automatically. For a comparably rich gravy that does have a verified figure, see chole calories; for a dish where portion size matters as much as the gravy does, see biryani calories. The Indian food calories guide covers the wider set of dishes this site can and cannot put a number on.

This is general information about tracking food, not medical advice. If you are managing a health condition or working to a clinical target, talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian before changing how you eat.