High Protein Fish and Seafood: Grams per Serving

High protein fish and shellfish give 19 to 29 g of protein for every 100 g (3.5 oz) you cook. Yellowfin tuna tops my table at 29.2 g, sockeye salmon follows at 26.5 g and shrimp comes in at 24.0 g. Each figure comes from a USDA FoodData Central record that I read first.

A standard serving, 3 oz (85 g) cooked, lands between 16 and 25 g of protein. Which species you pick changes that less than the calories do, or than whether the fish was weighed raw or cooked.

Which high protein fish has the most protein per serving?

Snapper and tilapia sit right behind yellowfin and sockeye, so four fish land at 26 to 29 g per 100 g cooked. The table lists 16 fish and shellfish in the state each USDA record describes, sorted by protein in an 85 g (3 oz) serving. I picked 85 g because most of these records list 3 oz as a portion.

Fish or seafood (state)	Protein per 100 g	Energy per 100 g	Protein in 85 g (3 oz)	Energy in 85 g (3 oz)
Tuna, yellowfin, cooked, dry heat	29.2 g	130 kcal	24.8 g	111 kcal
Salmon, sockeye, cooked, dry heat	26.5 g	156 kcal	22.5 g	133 kcal
Snapper, cooked, dry heat	26.3 g	128 kcal	22.4 g	109 kcal
Tilapia, cooked, dry heat	26.2 g	128 kcal	22.2 g	109 kcal
Sardines, Atlantic, canned in oil, drained, with bone	24.6 g	208 kcal	20.9 g	177 kcal
Shrimp, cooked	24.0 g	99 kcal	20.4 g	84 kcal
Mackerel, Atlantic, cooked, dry heat	23.9 g	262 kcal	20.3 g	223 kcal
Trout, rainbow, farmed, cooked, dry heat	23.8 g	168 kcal	20.2 g	143 kcal
Mussels, blue, cooked, moist heat	23.8 g	172 kcal	20.2 g	146 kcal
Cod, Atlantic, cooked, dry heat	22.8 g	105 kcal	19.4 g	89 kcal
Halibut, cooked, dry heat	22.5 g	111 kcal	19.2 g	94 kcal
Salmon, Atlantic, farmed, cooked, dry heat	22.1 g	206 kcal	18.8 g	175 kcal
Scallops, steamed	20.5 g	111 kcal	17.5 g	94 kcal
Pollock, Alaska, cooked	19.4 g	87 kcal	16.5 g	74 kcal
Crab, Alaska king, cooked, moist heat	19.4 g	97 kcal	16.4 g	82 kcal
Tuna, light, canned in water, drained	19.0 g	90 kcal	16.2 g	77 kcal

Among the top few the differences are tiny. Sockeye, snapper and tilapia sit within 0.4 g of each other per 100 g, so choose among them by taste and price. The gaps open further down: canned light tuna, crab and pollock give about 16 g per serving, a third less than yellowfin. A can of light tuna (107 g drained) gives 20.3 g of protein for 96 kcal.

Energy is the other half. An 85 g serving of Atlantic mackerel carries 223 kcal. The same weight of cod carries 89 kcal. Both give 19 to 20 g of protein. Weigh fish after cooking and read the state in the record name, because a raw fillet and a cooked one are different rows.

The gap can be big. Raw Atlantic cod has 16.1 g of protein per 100 g, and cooked cod has 22.8 g. Log 100 g of raw cod as cooked and you add 6.8 g of protein you never ate. That’s 42% more than the raw record says. These are two different samples, so the gap shows how big the trap is. It doesn’t measure a cooking yield.

Which high protein fish gives the most protein per calorie?

Shrimp does, with 24.2 g of protein for every 100 kcal. I got that by dividing the protein by the energy in each USDA record. Yellowfin tuna and pollock follow at 22.4 g, haddock at 22.2 g and cod at 21.7 g.

Fish or seafood (state)	Protein per 100 kcal	Fat per 100 g
Shrimp, cooked	24.2 g	0.3 g
Tuna, yellowfin, cooked, dry heat	22.4 g	0.6 g
Pollock, Alaska, cooked	22.4 g	1.0 g
Haddock, cooked, dry heat	22.2 g	0.6 g
Cod, Atlantic, cooked, dry heat	21.7 g	0.9 g
Salmon, sockeye, cooked, dry heat	17.0 g	5.6 g
Salmon, Atlantic, farmed, cooked, dry heat	10.7 g	12.4 g
Mackerel, Atlantic, cooked, dry heat	9.1 g	17.8 g

Oily fish sit at the bottom. Mackerel gives 9.1 g of protein per 100 kcal and farmed Atlantic salmon 10.7 g. They carry 17.8 g and 12.4 g of fat per 100 g. If you eat to a calorie budget, I would use lean fish most days and keep an oily serving for one meal a week.

How much protein does salmon have?

Half a fillet of cooked sockeye salmon (155 g) has 41.0 g of protein and 242 kcal, using the sockeye record. Farmed Atlantic salmon is close on protein per fillet and far apart on energy.

Salmon record (state)	Portion in the record	Protein	Energy
Salmon, sockeye, cooked, dry heat	half a fillet, 155 g	41.0 g	242 kcal
Salmon, Atlantic, farmed, cooked, dry heat	half a fillet, 178 g	39.3 g	367 kcal
Salmon, coho, farmed, cooked, dry heat	one fillet, 143 g	34.7 g	255 kcal
Salmon, pink, canned, drained	3 oz, 85 g	19.6 g	117 kcal
Salmon, chinook, smoked	3 oz, 85 g	15.5 g	99 kcal

Compare the first two rows. The Atlantic half fillet weighs 23 g more, yet it has only 1.7 g more protein and 125 kcal more energy. Fat explains most of that: 5.6 g per 100 g in the sockeye record against 12.4 g in the farmed Atlantic one. Both are fine fish. Which one you log changes your calorie total, so pick the record that matches the label on your fillet.

Canned pink salmon is the pantry route: 3 oz drained gives 19.6 g of protein for 117 kcal. Smoked chinook gives 15.5 g in the same 3 oz, and its record lists 672 mg of sodium per 100 g. Check the label.

How much protein does shrimp have?

Cooked shrimp has 24.0 g of protein per 100 g. An 85 g (3 oz) serving gives 20.4 g for 84 kcal, per the USDA record for cooked shrimp. Raw numbers are lower. They don’t agree with each other either.

Shrimp record	Protein per 100 g	Energy per 100 g
Shrimp, cooked	24.0 g	99 kcal
Shrimp, raw	20.1 g	85 kcal
Shrimp, farm raised, raw	15.6 g	76 kcal
Shrimp, mixed species, raw (may contain additives to retain moisture)	13.6 g	71 kcal

Three raw records give three answers: 13.6, 15.6 and 20.1 g per 100 g. Cooked shrimp reads higher. Cooking drives out water. The last record is for shrimp that may contain additives to retain moisture, and it has the lowest protein of the four.

My rule: log shrimp the way it sits on the scale. A bag marked raw gets a raw record. A plate of cooked shrimp gets the cooked one. Mix them up and you’re off by 4 to 10 g of protein per 100 g. Not small.

How much fish can I fit into a week?

The FDA and EPA fish advice cites the Dietary Guidelines as recommending at least 8 oz (227 g) of seafood a week on a 2,000 kcal diet. At 26.5 g per 100 g that is about 60 g of protein a week from sockeye, or 8.6 g a day. Fish helps, but it fills a slice of the day, and how much protein you should eat a day has the whole sum. Two servings a week won’t carry it, so the other meals matter: high protein cereal covers a breakfast bowl and high protein mac and cheese a pasta night. If you want fish to do more of the work, eat it more often and check the mercury lists below.

That page also sorts fish by mercury. Most of my table sits under Best Choices, including salmon, shrimp, cod, sardines and canned light tuna. Halibut, snapper and yellowfin tuna are under Good Choices. King mackerel, marlin, orange roughy, shark, swordfish and bigeye tuna are under Choices to Avoid. The advice is written for people who are pregnant or breastfeeding and for children. If that’s you, follow its amounts: 8 to 12 oz a week, or 2 to 3 servings of 4 oz from the Best Choices.

The protein calculator shows how many servings of fish your own target needs. It uses the 1.2 to 1.6 g per kg range of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines, with a floor of 60 g.

Weigh fish cooked and match the state in the table. I log it in Calsa, where each entry shows its “per 100 g × grams” math, so a raw record picked for a cooked fillet shows at a glance.