Dried vs. Canned Beans: Cost Per Gram of Protein, and the Break-Even Wage

The dried side of this comparison has something unusual going for it: a free, deterministic, national price series that anyone can check. The U.S. government prices dried beans every month as part of the Average Price Data program, under item 714233, "Beans, dried, any type, all sizes, per lb."

Before building anything on it, we confirmed the series is still alive — data series get quietly retired, and a comparison built on a dead one is worthless. It is live. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics time-series files, the series runs from July 1995 through August 2026, which makes August 2026 the most recent published month.

That month, the U.S. city average price of dried beans was $1.630 per pound. The series has been remarkably steady: across 2024, 2025 and 2026 it moved between $1.547 and $1.713, a band of roughly plus or minus five percent around the current level. That steadiness matters, because it means the conclusion below is not an artifact of one strange month.

One footnote you will see in the data if you go looking: October 2025 is blank across the entire Average Price program, marked with an "X" for the lapse in appropriations that year. It is missing for every food, not just beans.

What you do not get from this series is a brand, a store, or a bean type. It is an average across all of them, which is precisely what makes it honest as a national benchmark and useless as a shopping list. If your local bulk bin sells pinto beans at $1.10 a pound, your version of the arithmetic below will look better than ours.

Series like this one are also what make longer-run grocery comparisons possible at all, as What $50 of Groceries Bought in 1995 vs. Today shows across a fuller basket.

Here the ground gets softer, and it is worth explaining why rather than quietly papering over it.

There is no live government average-price series for canned beans. The only canned-bean item the program ever carried was 718631, "Pork and beans, canned," and it was discontinued in January 1986. So the two sides of this comparison cannot come from the same source, and the canned side has to be built from something else.

That something else is the Purchase to Plate National Average Prices dataset from USDA's Economic Research Service, which prices thousands of specific foods per 100 edible grams using retail scanner data. It is free, it is granular, and it has one significant limitation: the current public vintage is built on 2017/2018 sales, so it is a historical relativity that has to be brought forward, not a shelf price.

The one row that works

Filtering the 2017/2018 vintage to bean codes returns 159 rows, and almost all of the useful-looking ones turn out to be unusable. The dataset flags how each price was built, and "method 2" means the price was imputed from some other food code rather than observed. Canned black beans, dried black beans and black beans not further specified all carry the identical price of $0.313588 — because all three are imputed from the same source. Pricing canned black beans against dried black beans in this dataset would be comparing a number to itself. Kidney beans fail the same way.

Exactly one plain canned-bean code is method 1, directly scanner-priced: 41104080, "Pinto beans, from canned, no added fat," at $0.285413 per 100 edible grams.

That is why this article runs on pinto beans. The brief that commissioned it called for black beans, and the data does not support them. Pinto is the bean the evidence can actually price, and the rest of the arithmetic follows it.

Bringing 2017/18 money forward

To convert that price into today's dollars, we deflate it with the Consumer Price Index item that actually covers the product — SS14021, "Canned vegetables." Its 2017 and 2018 monthly values average 165.7492, and August 2026 stands at 251.674, which gives a factor of 1.51840.

Applied to the scanner price, that puts canned pinto beans at $0.43337 per 100 grams of drained beans in August 2026 money. As a sanity check, a 15.5-ounce can holding roughly 289 grams of drained beans lands at about $1.25 — which is about where a store-brand can sits.

The deflator work produced a finding worth pausing on. Over the same period, the index for dried beans, peas and lentils rose 27.4 percent while canned vegetables rose 51.8 percent. The convenience premium built into a can has not been a fixed fact of life; it has widened by roughly 19 percentage points in eight years.

Where you shop moves this number too, which is its own line of inquiry in Which Grocery Stores Offer the Best Nutrition Per Dollar?.

Now for the part that almost every published comparison skips, and the reason the gap in this article is wider than the gap in theirs.

Comparisons of this kind are almost always run cup for cup, or can against cooked-cup. That quietly assumes a cup of canned beans and a cup of home-cooked beans are the same thing. They are not, and USDA's own composition records say so plainly.

Per 100 grams, canned drained pinto beans carry 6.99 grams of protein. Pinto beans cooked at home from dry carry 9.01 grams. The FoodData Central record for canned drained pinto puts the water content at 70.6 grams per 100 against 63.0 for the home-cooked bean — a difference of 7.6 grams of water in every hundred.

So a gram of canned bean carries 22.4 percent less protein than a gram of bean you cooked yourself. The can is a little wetter, and that extra water is sold to you by weight.

The same two records answer a second question people wonder about at the sink: how much of a can is actually bean? Protein sits in the solids, not the liquid, so comparing the solids-and-liquids record at 4.60 grams of protein per 100 with the drained-solids record at 6.99 gives the drained share directly. It comes out at 65.8 percent — meaning about 34 percent of a can by net weight is liquid headed for the drain. That figure triangulates neatly with the widely published observation that a 15-ounce can yields about one and three-quarter cups drained.

If you have ever wondered whether the convenience of a can is worth the premium, the related question of which protein sources deliver most per dollar is worth a look too.

The Best Protein Per Dollar: 25 Foods Ranked puts beans alongside two dozen other options on the same per-gram basis.

The conversion from a bag of hard little stones to a container of cooked beans is where most kitchen math goes soft, because almost everybody repeats the same folk ratio without checking it.

Rather than repeat it, we computed the factor two independent ways from USDA composition records, and published both. The FoodData Central record for raw pinto beans gives 21.4 grams of protein and 11.3 grams of water per 100 grams; the cooked-without-salt record gives 9.01 grams of protein and 63.0 grams of water.

• Protein basis. Protein is not destroyed by boiling, so 21.4 divided by 9.01 gives a yield factor of 2.375.
• Dry-solids basis. The dry bean is 88.7 percent solids and the cooked bean is 37.0 percent, so 88.7 divided by 37.0 gives 2.397.

Those two numbers agree within 0.9 percent, which is unusually tight for a cooking-yield figure and tells you something extra: essentially no protein escapes into the cooking water. One pound of dry pinto beans becomes about 1,077 grams cooked — roughly 6.3 cups.

Compare that to the ratio everyone quotes. The Bean Institute's widely repeated chart says one pound of dry beans yields six cups cooked, which works out to about 2.26 — an understatement of roughly five percent. Extension guidance that says two cups of dry beans make four to five cups cooked understates it further. None of these are wrong enough to matter for dinner, but they are wrong enough to matter for a cost comparison, and they all err in the same direction: against the dried bean.

So a pound of dried beans at $1.630 delivers 97.1 grams of protein, and that is the figure the rest of the arithmetic hangs on.

This is the section the whole article exists for.

Ask someone how long dried beans take and they will say "all afternoon," and they are right about the wall clock and wrong about the thing that matters. Some of those minutes require you; most of them do not. A soak requires nothing but a bowl and patience. A simmer requires a lid and an occasional glance. Charging yourself for a two-hour simmer is like charging yourself for the time your laundry spends in the dryer.

The routine below comes from published university extension guidance rather than a single timed cooking session, because one person's Sunday afternoon is not reproducible and should not be the backbone of anyone's arithmetic.

North Dakota State University Extension publication FN1701, reviewed April 2024, lays out seven steps for using dry beans: inspect and remove broken beans or foreign material, rinse in cold water, soak, drain and rinse the soaked beans, cook, drain and rinse again immediately, then use them wherever a can would have gone. It puts the quick-soak boil at one to three minutes and the cooking at one to two hours.

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, in guidance last modified in September 2026, is more specific about the bean we are pricing: a short soak of a two-to-three-minute boil followed by one to four hours standing covered, then a simmer of two hours for pinto beans, using ten cups of water for a one-pound bag.

Colorado State University Extension, reviewed in October 2025, describes the same quick soak as a three-minute boil followed by an hour off the heat, with stovetop cooking of about one to three hours. Three services, three review dates, and close agreement: the simmer sits in the one-to-three-hour band, and pinto beans land at or near two hours.

Splitting the minutes

Sorting the published routine into attended and unattended time gives this:

An honest caveat about that table: the step list and the soak and simmer durations are published and dated. The minute allocations for sorting, rinsing, draining, portioning and washing up are not — no extension service publishes them — so those are our estimates, built on a deliberately simple model of 32 minutes of fixed setup and cleanup plus 23 minutes per pound. If your kitchen runs faster or slower, the model is transparent enough to substitute your own clock, and the sensitivity table further down shows how much that would move things.

Elapsed time for one pound: three hours and fifty-five minutes. Attended time: fifty-five minutes. Those are the two clocks, and the distance between them is the whole argument.

Canned beans are not zero on either clock, incidentally. Opening, draining and rinsing three cans runs to a few minutes, which is small enough that leaving it out only makes the case against the pot slightly stronger than it deserves.

Energy is the input people either ignore entirely or wildly overestimate, usually by looking at the wattage stamped on a burner and assuming a simmer draws all of it.

It does not, and there is a federal definition of what it does draw. The Code of Federal Regulations sets out the test method for measuring the energy consumption of conventional cooking products, and it defines the simmering setting numerically: for an electric cooking top, it is the power setting whose power density comes closest to 0.8 watts per square centimeter of the pot's base. For a gas top, the equivalent figure is 4.0 Btu per hour per square centimeter.

A 22-centimeter pot has a base of about 380 square centimeters. At the federally defined simmering density, that is 304 watts — not the 1,500 watts and up that a burner's nameplate suggests.

Running the full routine for one pound of beans:

• Bringing ten cups of water to a boil, twice, takes roughly 0.44 kilowatt-hours. That figure is a thermodynamic floor calculated at perfect conversion; a real cooktop is less efficient, so the true number is somewhat higher.
• A two-hour simmer at 304 watts adds about 0.61 kilowatt-hours.
• Total: about 1.05 kilowatt-hours, or roughly 4,540 Btu on gas.

At the August 2026 U.S. city average of $0.196 per kilowatt-hour for electricity and $1.714 per therm for piped gas — the same month and the same Bureau of Labor Statistics program as the bean price — that comes to about 21 cents of electricity, or about 8 cents of gas.

So the burner adds around 13 percent to the cost of a pound of beans on an electric stove, and about 5 percent on gas. Real, worth including, and nowhere near the doubling that intuition suggests.

Everything above assembles into one worksheet. Here it is, for a one-pound batch of pinto beans, in August 2026 money.

Canned beans cost about 3.3 times as much per gram of protein as beans cooked from dry. Cooking a pound instead of buying the equivalent in cans saves $4.18.

Now solve for the wage. The break-even wage is the rate w at which the two routes cost the same:

dried cost + (attended hours × w) = canned cost

Which rearranges to:

w = (canned cost − dried cost) ÷ attended hours

Putting the numbers in: $4.18 divided by 0.92 hours gives $4.56 an hour.

Run the identical calculation on elapsed hours instead — 3 hours 55 minutes, the clock most people carry in their heads — and it gives $1.07 an hour. Same beans, same stove, same person; a fourfold difference that comes entirely from whether you charge yourself for the soak.

This same break-even logic applies anywhere convenience is sold by the container, and Bottled Protein Shakes vs. a Blender: Cost Per Gram of Protein, and What the Bottle Buys You runs it on a different aisle.

Does it survive a sanity check?

Worth testing against someone else's shopping. The Vegetarian Resource Group priced beans at supermarkets in five states in mid-2025 and found canned black beans at about $0.33 per half cup against $0.15 cooked from dry.

Our model, converted to the same unit, gives $0.373 for half a cup of canned and $0.147 for half a cup cooked from dry. Two completely different methods — a five-state store sweep against a deflated national scanner price — landing within a few cents of each other. The cost-per-gram ratio here is wider than theirs only because per-gram-of-protein accounting also charges the can for its extra water.

The single biggest lever in this entire calculation is not the price of beans, the price of electricity, or the brand of can. It is how much goes in the pot.

The reason is structural. Sorting, draining, portioning and storing scale with the quantity of beans. Filling the pot, bringing it to a boil twice and washing up afterwards do not. So the fixed half of the attended clock gets spread across more and more beans while the savings scale in a straight line.

Read against a wage, the picture sharpens. The U.S. Department of Labor sets the federal minimum wage for covered nonexempt employees at $7.25 per hour, and notes that where a state minimum is higher, the higher one applies. On the attended clock, the break-even crosses $7.25 at a batch of about 2.7 pounds of dry beans. Below that, the arithmetic does not clear the lowest legal wage in the country. Above three pounds, it does.

The ceiling nobody mentions

Here is the result that surprised us most, and it is the one worth carrying away.

The break-even wage does not keep climbing. Push the batch to twenty pounds and it reaches $10.39 an hour. Push it to two hundred and it reaches $11.09. The curve flattens because the variable half of the attended time scales right alongside the beans: the marginal saving of about $4.27 per pound, divided by the marginal 23 minutes per pound, converges on roughly $11.15 an hour against store-brand canned beans and about $16.20 against a national brand.

That is a hard ceiling, and it reframes the whole argument. There is no batch size — not a five-pound bag, not a restaurant-scale sack — at which cooking dried beans pays a professional wage. What the batch size determines is only whether the practice clears a low wage or fails to.

Which means the honest version of this comparison is not "dried beans are cheaper." It is: dried beans are dramatically cheaper as an ingredient, modestly rewarding as an hour of work, and never lucrative. The can is buying you about fifty minutes, and the going rate for those fifty minutes tops out somewhere near eleven dollars.

The same structure shows up whenever a bulk-cooked staple is set against its ready-made version.

I Did the Math: Batch-Cooked Chicken vs. Deli Meat on Cost, Protein, and Sodium runs the same comparison on a different shelf.

Every worksheet has edges, and this one has several worth stating plainly.

The canned price is a deflated relativity. It comes from 2017/18 scanner data brought forward with a CPI factor of 1.51840. It behaves like a national average, and it sanity-checks against real can prices, but it is not a price anyone paid in a store this month.

The attended-minutes model is an estimate. The published guidance gives the steps and the soak and simmer durations; the minute-by-minute allocations are ours.

Bulk and store-brand pricing are outside the series. The dried price is a national average across all package sizes, so a bulk bin will beat it and a boutique bag will lose to it. The national-brand column in the table above uses a published ratio of about 1.32 between store-brand and national-brand canned beans.

There is no federal floor on how much of a can is bean. We checked, because a minimum drained weight would have been the cleanest possible source for that 65.8 percent figure. The Agricultural Marketing Service grade standard for canned dried beans, effective September 1976, grades the product on color, absence of defects and character — and sets no minimum drained weight at all. The canned lima bean standard defines a sieve-and-drain procedure; the dry bean standard does not.

Sodium is not priced here, only measured. For the record, analytically determined: pinto beans cooked from dry without salt read 1 milligram per 100 grams; canned drained read 239; canned drained and rinsed read 212 in the older record and 202 in a 2023 analysis. Those are measurements of what is in the food, offered as facts rather than as guidance.

The slow cooker is a different problem entirely. Two of the three extension services describe a six-to-eight-hour low setting that is almost entirely unattended, which would collapse the attended clock further. It deserves its own set of numbers rather than a footnote in someone else's.

If the wider question of stretching a grocery budget across protein sources is the one you came in with, there is a companion piece built on the same per-gram logic.

Can You Hit 100g of Protein a Day on $5? Meal Plans Costed to the Cent works the same arithmetic across a full day of eating.