Which foods are highest in potassium?

1 cup of Carrot, dehydrated gives 1879.6 mg of potassium. That is 40% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.

This ranking is per typical portion rather than per 100 g. Lists built per 100 g end up full of dried herbs and fortified bars, which is technically correct and practically useless, because nobody sits down to 100 g of thyme. Items marked fortified rank where they do because nutrients were added during manufacture, not because the food itself is rich in them.

How to read this list

Notice how low the percentages are. The top food in our data covers 40 per cent of the Daily Value in a large portion, and nothing else clears a third. Potassium is not a nutrient you fix with one item. You reach 3,400 mg by eating several ordinary things across a day.

Notice also how many entries are dried or dehydrated. Drying removes water and concentrates everything else, so dried apricots and banana powder rank high per cup while the fresh versions sit further down. That is real, and it comes with the sugar that concentrates alongside.

The practical sources are duller and better. Potatoes with the skin, beans, avocado, cooked greens, dairy and fish.

The potato against the pill

Thirty adults with raised blood pressure lived on weighed food for four sixteen-day stretches, taking an extra 1,000 mg of potassium a day as baked or boiled potato, as chips, or as a potassium gluconate tablet. The tablet won on the laboratory measures. It was absorbed slightly better, 91.9 per cent against 88.3 on the control diet, and the body held on to nearly twice as much of it, 1,093 mg a day against 568. The potatoes won on the thing people care about. Systolic pressure fell 6.0 mmHg on baked or boiled potato against 2.6 on the control diet, and the supplement did not beat the potato. That blood pressure comparison is a contrast inside a small short trial whose own overall model found no significant difference between treatments, so hold the numbers loosely and the direction firmly.

One more number these tables cannot show you. How much potassium a vegetable carries depends partly on the dirt it grew in. Across 140 studies of peppers, fruit grown in soil at pH 6.5 to 7.5 came out richer in potassium than fruit from acid soil, and quality tracked temperature and rainfall as well. That is one crop pooled across very different laboratories. Take it as the reason a composition table is an average of somebody else's harvest rather than a promise about the thing in your hand.

What cooking does to it

Two groups ate the same 350 g of vegetables a day for a fortnight. Only the group whose vegetables were cooked without added water raised the potassium coming out in their urine, from 1.6 to 2.0 grams a day, and their sodium to potassium ratio fell from 3.7 to 2.6 while nobody else's moved. The trial cannot separate a pot that leaches less from a pot that makes the food nicer, and it describes itself as double blind while serving visibly different food.

Unsettled. If you are here to take potassium out rather than put it in, the evidence is worse than the confident cooking advice online suggests. In the study most often quoted, pressure cooked spinach came in at 74.85 mg per 100 g and courgette at 93.62, which is genuinely low. The same paper's own analysis found no statistically significant difference between cooking methods for either vegetables or legumes, and its abstract contradicts itself about whether pressure cooking lost the most potassium or preserved it. Sautéing left everything except beetroot above 200 mg per 100 g and dry oven cooking stayed far above. If a clinician has put you on a potassium limit, the number to work to is theirs, and the cooking trick is not reliable enough to spend your allowance on.

Half of this list is the salt cellar

What moves blood pressure is the balance between sodium and potassium rather than either one on its own. Trials that shifted that balance downwards took about 1 mmHg more off the top number than trials that only worked on one side of it. So the beans and the tomatoes do more for you on a day when the packaged food goes down as well.

Salt substitutes do both jobs at once, which is why they produced the strongest results potassium has anywhere. Swapping ordinary salt for a potassium-based one took about 5 mmHg off systolic pressure and 2 off diastolic. In the largest trial ever run on this, replacing a quarter of household salt with potassium chloride cut strokes by 14 per cent and deaths from any cause by 12 per cent over almost five years.

Myth. You do not have to fix potassium first for salt reduction to work. Across 68 trials, how much potassium people were eating at the start made no difference to how far their pressure fell when they cut salt. Two separate levers, and either one works on its own.

Not for everyone. If you have chronic kidney disease, or take an ACE inhibitor, an ARB or a potassium-sparing diuretic, this table is not advice for you. In that situation even ordinary intakes can push blood potassium into dangerous territory, and your target comes from your own clinician. The salt substitute in the paragraph above is the part to be most careful with, because most of them are potassium chloride and they sit on the shelf looking like the healthy choice.

Written from the evidence cards and the data on this page, then checked back against the sources. Bioma Learn has no human medical reviewer at this time and we say so rather than invent one. Information, not medical advice. How we verify.

Full ranking →

Full guide: Potassium: the mineral most people under-eat, and the one some people must limit

Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 4700 mg. Checked 2026-09-15.