Which foods are highest in vitamin D?
1 piece (5-1/2" x 1-1/2" x 1/2") of Mackerel, salted gives 20.2 µg of vitamin D. That is 101% of the Daily Value, and it is the highest of the 1000 foods on this site that has not been fortified.
Share of the Daily Value (20 µg) in one portion.
| Food | Portion | Amount | % DV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mackerel, salted | 1 piece (5-1/2" x 1-1/2" x 1/2") (80 g) | 20.2 µg | 101% |
| Salmon, sockeye, canned, drained solids | 3 oz (85 g) | 17.9 µg | 89% |
| Salmon, sockeye, cooked | 3 oz (85 g) | 14.2 µg | 71% |
| Trout, rainbow, farmed, cooked | 1 fillet (71 g) | 13.5 µg | 67% |
| Salmon, pink, canned, drained solids | 3 oz (85 g) | 12 µg | 60% |
| Salmon, pink, canned, total can contents | 3 oz (85 g) | 11.6 µg | 58% |
| Salmon, Atlantic, farmed, cooked | 3 oz (85 g) | 11.1 µg | 56% |
| Salmon, pink, cooked | 3 oz (85 g) | 11.1 µg | 55% |
| Salmon, coho, wild, cooked | 3 oz (85 g) | 9.61 µg | 48% |
| Salmon, chum, canned, drained solids with bone | 3 oz (85 g) | 8.16 µg | 41% |
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
This table is almost entirely fish, and that is not a quirk of our data. Few foods contain vitamin D naturally, and oily fish and fish liver oils are the best of them.
What the table cannot show you is where most Americans actually get their vitamin D, which is fortified food. Almost all milk in the United States carries about 3 micrograms a cup. That is a small number next to salmon, and it adds up because people drink milk more often than they cook mackerel.
So read this list as the answer to "what should I eat more of" rather than as the answer to "am I getting enough". The second question is settled by a blood test, not by a shopping list.
Two things make the blood test the honest answer here. A low reading is common, which surprises people. About one person in six worldwide is below 30 nmol/L and nearly half are below 50. And the amount of vitamin D it takes to reach a given blood level is not the same for everyone. The recommendation was worked out largely on white populations, and people with darker skin living far from the equator need two to four times as much to arrive at the same number. No food table adjusts for that, and no amount of salmon tells you where you started.
One thing this list is not is a fracture-prevention plan. Trials covering more than 50,000 people found that vitamin D supplements do not reduce fractures in people who are not deficient, and the evidence is now precise enough to say so. Oily fish is worth eating for other reasons. The full review of that evidence is on its own page.
One group gets less out of this table than the numbers suggest. Orlistat, taken for weight loss with a reduced-fat diet, reduces absorption of vitamin D from both food and supplements. Since vitamin D needs fat to be absorbed at all, the same fish on the same plate delivers less.
What happened when someone actually fed people the fish
Sixty-three adults in south-western Norway ate 750 g of salmon a week for eight weeks through the autumn, which is five salmon dinners. Their blood vitamin D fell anyway. It fell less than in the people given cod and less than in the people given no fish, and it still fell. Autumn at that latitude is stronger than the plate.
The form the fish arrives in changes the answer too. A hundred and twenty young women in Poland were given either 25 g of smoked salmon a day or 100 g of a fattier salmon sausage, both carrying the same 5 micrograms of vitamin D. Over the study the sausage group lost 4.3 nmol/L against 15.0 nmol/L in the group who changed nothing. The smoked salmon group came out no different from doing nothing at all.
Mushrooms, and what the pan takes back
Mushrooms treated with ultraviolet light are the one plant entry on lists like this, and the vitamin D in them is fragile. In 43 adults eating a daily meal built around 100 g of them, the D2 content was significantly lower after cooking and blood levels barely moved. The researchers named cooking loss first among the reasons, ahead of anything about the people eating them.
How much a mushroom carries before it reaches your pan is decided in the factory rather than in the field. The dose of ultraviolet light, the wavelength and whether it was sliced all move the answer, and for sliced button mushrooms the best setting found yielded 16.27 micrograms per gram. Past that point more light degraded the nutrients instead of making more vitamin D.
Where the vitamin D in most diets actually comes from
Fortified food, and it has been measured properly. Across 34 publications in 2,398 adults and 1,532 children, fortified food at an average of 16 micrograms a day raised blood levels by 21 nmol/L, with more movement in people who started low and a curve that flattens near 21 micrograms a day. D3 did more than D2, which is the same order this table puts them in.
Unsettled. The one piece of kitchen advice everyone repeats about vitamin D, that it needs fat to be absorbed, is only half supported. A review of 46 studies found absorption is better with a fat-containing meal and that it happens without fat as well. Whether the kind of fat matters is unsettled, and the trial that asked the question said so about its own answer. Fish brings its own fat. For everything else on this table, a normal meal is enough.
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 guide: Vitamin D: what supplements do for bones, and what large trials found they do not do
Data: USDA FoodData Central. % Daily Value against the FDA DV of 20 µg. Checked 2026-09-15.