Pumpkin Seeds vs. Almonds vs. Walnuts: Protein, Magnesium and Price Per Ounce

Here is what a plain, unsalted ounce (28.35 grams) of each contains. Every figure comes from a named record in USDA FoodData Central, converted from the database's per-100-gram values, with percentages of the Daily Value shown for protein, magnesium and zinc.

A few things stand out right away. Pepitas carry more than twice the magnesium of almonds and about four times that of walnuts, and they lead on protein too. The calorie spread is narrow, from 158 to 185, which means none of the three looks better or worse here just because it's more or less energy-dense. Almonds quietly take the fiber column with roughly double the other two. And walnuts, last on protein and magnesium, sit in a category of their own on omega-3.

The Daily Values behind those percentages are the ones on every Nutrition Facts panel: 420 milligrams of magnesium, 50 grams of protein and 11 milligrams of zinc, as listed in the FDA's Daily Value reference.

Raw or roasted?

Roasting drives water out of pumpkin seeds and nudges the numbers slightly. Roasted, unsalted pepita kernels come to about 8.4 grams of protein and 156 milligrams of magnesium per ounce, which is still 37% of the Daily Value. Roasted almonds barely move, at about 79 milligrams. Because the pepitas we priced at Target are a roasted tub, we matched that product to the roasted record in the cost math below, and used the raw record for the raw bags.

This is where price enters, and where the tidy per-ounce ranking starts to wobble. Here's what we found on live product pages on September 22, 2026, choosing plain, unsalted packages in everyday sizes.

Per ounce, almonds are the cheapest thing on the list and pepitas are the priciest. Divide each price by the protein in an ounce, though, and the order changes.

The best almond and the best pepita are two cents apart per 10 grams of protein, a gap of about 3%. That is a tie in every practical sense, and it goes to almonds only because the large Walmart bag is so inexpensive.

Look at each store on its own and the tie breaks in opposite directions. At Target, the pepita tub beats Target's own almonds by about 18% on protein per dollar. At Walmart, the only unsalted pepitas on the shelf were third-party brands at $0.81 an ounce, so almonds win there comfortably. The seed didn't change and neither did the nut. The shelf did, which is the same lesson the Almonds vs. Walnuts vs. Pecans comparison found when it priced the same almonds at the same two stores earlier this month.

Walnuts trail in both stores. Getting 50 grams of protein, a full Daily Value, from walnuts costs about $6.16, against roughly $3.66 from almonds and $3.76 from pepitas. Walnuts do carry protein, but it costs more per gram than the other two.

Now run the same division on magnesium, and the close race turns into a clear result.

Even the priciest pepitas we found, the marketplace bag at $0.81 an ounce, deliver magnesium more cheaply than the cheapest almonds. The best pepita beats the best almond by about 1.4 times and the best walnut by more than three times. In everyday terms, a full 420-milligram Daily Value of magnesium costs about $1.71 from pepitas, $2.41 from almonds and $5.54 from walnuts.

This is the column where the cheapest item per ounce is clearly not the cheapest per nutrient. Almonds cost less per ounce, but an ounce of pepitas holds so much more magnesium that the higher price stops mattering.

It's also a nutrient many of us come up short on. According to the NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, national survey data show that 48% of Americans get less magnesium from food and beverages than their estimated average requirement, and the recommended intake for adults over 30 is 420 milligrams a day for men and 320 for women. We share that for scale, not as a target. One ounce of pepitas covers about half of a woman's recommended intake and about 40% of a man's.

Prices change, so it helps to know how hard each result would be to overturn. We worked backward from each ranking to find the price change that would flip it.

The protein verdict could flip with an ordinary weekly promotion. The magnesium verdict would take a price cut much larger than a typical sale.

That's not a hypothetical worry, either. When the sibling nut comparison checked these shelves on September 10, the same Good & Gather almonds read $7.99 on Target's product page. Twelve days later they were $5.79, down 28%. Diamond walnuts at Target dropped from $9.99 to $8.49 over the same stretch, while Walmart's Great Value walnuts didn't move a cent. A per-dollar ranking is only as steady as the prices underneath it, which is why every figure here carries a date and a store name.

Where you shop can matter as much as what you buy, a pattern we looked at across whole baskets in Which Grocery Stores Offer the Best Nutrition Per Dollar?

If walnuts lose both races, it's fair to wonder why they belong in this comparison at all. The answer is one column that the other two nearly leave blank.

An ounce of walnuts carries about 2.57 grams of alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA, the plant form of omega-3. Pepitas carry about 0.03 grams, and almonds about 0.001 grams. The NIH omega-3 fact sheet lists the same 2.57 grams for an ounce of English walnuts and sets the adequate intake of ALA at 1.6 grams a day for adult men and 1.1 grams for adult women, so a single ounce comes in above either.

At Target's $0.53 an ounce, that works out to roughly 21 cents per gram of ALA. Neither of the other two can offer that at any price, because the ALA simply isn't there to buy.

So walnuts aren't a worse pepita. They're an answer to a different question. If omega-3 is part of what you want from your topper, they earn their place in the pantry alongside a magnesium-focused choice.

If you tend to reach for these foods in spreadable form, Nut Butters Ranked: Protein Per Dollar and the Added-Oil Tax runs the protein-per-dollar numbers on the jar aisle.

Two things behind the numbers can quietly change what you think you're getting, and both came up while we were checking shelves and search results.

The salted-pepita catch

The cheapest pepitas we found at either store were Walmart's store-brand Great Value Pepitas, at $3.94 for 8 ounces, or about 49 cents an ounce. They're also roasted and salted, with 160 milligrams of sodium per 28-gram serving on the label, while the unsalted tub at Target lists 5 milligrams. We didn't find an unsalted store-brand pepita at Walmart, and every unsalted option there came from a third-party brand.

Salting changes nothing but the sodium. USDA's salted and unsalted roasted kernel records match on protein and magnesium and differ only on sodium, 256 milligrams against 18 per 100 grams. If a salted snack suits you, that bag would lead both columns, at roughly $0.58 per 10 grams of protein and $0.32 per 100 milligrams of magnesium. Our headline rankings stick to unsalted products so all three foods are compared on equal terms.

Whole seeds are not pepitas

The green pepitas in a tub are hulled kernels. The white, flat seeds you scoop out of a jack-o'-lantern still have their shells on, and that shell dilutes nearly everything. USDA's record for whole roasted seeds shows 262 milligrams of magnesium per 100 grams, against 592 for the hulled kernels, or roughly 74 milligrams an ounce compared with 168.

This is likely why pumpkin seed numbers online don't always agree. At least one nutrition comparison site lists pumpkin seeds at 262 milligrams, which matches the whole-seed record, and concludes that walnuts carry more protein than pumpkin seeds. For hulled kernels, the data say the opposite by a wide margin.

The serving size on the label can mislead you too. The Target tub declares a quarter-cup serving that works out to about 31 grams, with 10 grams of protein, while the Great Value bag uses 28 grams. Both are honest, but they aren't directly comparable, which is why everything in this article is normalized to 28.35 grams.

Putting the two races together, here's how the three shake out.

Pepitas get the overall nod because they win one race decisively and tie the other. Almonds remain a strong everyday value, especially at Walmart's bag price, and they bring roughly twice the fiber of either competitor. Walnuts are the pick when omega-3 matters to you. Plenty of pantries have room for more than one.

If you enjoy seeing a pantry staple weighed this way, The Best Protein Per Dollar: 25 Foods Ranked runs the same arithmetic across the whole grocery store.

We want you to be able to check every number here, so this is exactly how we got them.

Composition. All nutrient values come from USDA FoodData Central, read directly by record ID. We used SR Legacy record 170556 for raw pumpkin seed kernels, 170557 for roasted unsalted kernels, 169415 for roasted salted kernels and 170188 for whole roasted seeds. Almonds use 170567 (raw), with 170158 (dry roasted, unsalted) for the roasting comparison. Walnuts use 170187 for protein, calories and omega-3.

One data disagreement. For walnut magnesium, the older SR Legacy record (170187) reads 158 milligrams per 100 grams and the newer, analytical Foundation record (2346394, published 2022) reads 142, a gap of more than 10%. We report the newer figure, 40 milligrams an ounce. The older one would give 45 milligrams, and walnuts finish last on magnesium either way. For almonds the two record types differ by only 4%, so we kept the SR Legacy values, which also include calories and omega-3.

Normalization. Every per-100-gram value was multiplied by 0.2835 to give a 28.35-gram ounce. Percent Daily Values use the FDA's current figures.

Prices. Shelf prices were read from live Target and Walmart product pages on September 22, 2026, not from search-result tiles, following the method used for our earlier nut comparison. We chose plain, unsalted packages. Two are worth flagging: Walmart's almond bag is 25 ounces, larger than a typical everyday size, and Walmart's unsalted pepitas are sold through a third-party seller. Each product was paired with the USDA record matching its state, so the roasted Target tub uses the roasted-kernel record and the raw bags use raw records.

Derived metrics. Cost per 10 grams of protein is price per ounce divided by grams of protein per ounce, times 10. Cost per 100 milligrams of magnesium works the same way. The price-flip figures in the sensitivity table are the price at which two products' cost per nutrient would be equal.

What this doesn't cover. Two retailers on one day make a snapshot, not a national average. Prices vary by region and change week to week, and yours will differ. The composition figures are the stable part, and the method works with whatever prices your store posts that day.

This is the same worksheet approach behind Cottage Cheese vs. Greek Yogurt vs. Skyr: A Full Nutritional + Price Showdown, applied to the dairy case.