Subway Nutrition Calculator – Build Your Sandwich, See the Numbers

sandwich total = bread + protein + cheese + sauce + vegetables

The example on this page. A 6-inch Turkey Breast on Multigrain with the standard five vegetables. Bread 190 calories and 310 mg sodium; turkey 60 and 380; vegetables 14 and 0. Total: 264 calories, 690 mg sodium, 15 g protein, 42 g carbs. Subway’s published total for that sandwich is 260 calories and 700 mg — the small gap is explained in the note under the comparison table below, not hidden.

The footlong rule. Subway’s nutrition guide states it outright: double the values for footlong information, because one footlong is two 6-inch servings. So the same build as a footlong is 528 calories and 1,380 mg of sodium — 60% of a day of sodium in one meal.

Where the published totals differ. The guide’s sandwich totals are built on its 9-Grain Wheat bread and its own standard vegetable portion, and its rounding is its own. Building the same sandwiches from the guide’s component tables lands within a few calories of the published totals — the comparison table is in the deep dive below, gaps and all.

The default build — a 6-inch Turkey Breast on multigrain with the five standard vegetables, no cheese, no sauce — comes to 264 calories with 690 mg of sodium, or 30% of a full day’s 2,300 mg limit. Every figure in this section was produced by changing the stated control on this page and reading the result back. Each variation changes only what its row says, so each difference is that choice’s own effect, isolated from everything else on the counter.

The footlong, exactly doubled. Switching the same build to a footlong gives 528 calories and 1,380 mg of sodium — precisely double the 6-inch figures, line by line: bread 380 calories and 620 mg of sodium, protein 120 calories and 760 mg, vegetables 28 calories and no sodium. The calculator doubles rather than re-pricing, and that is the honest answer to the page’s own question about whether a footlong is really just double a 6-inch: on this calculator, yes, exactly, because a footlong is two 6-inch portions of the same build. The daily-value consequence is the part worth pausing on: 1,380 mg is 60% of the day’s sodium limit in a single meal, before any drink, chips or second meal. A footlong is not an extravagance in calories alone; it is a decision to spend most of a day’s sodium budget at lunch.

Cheese and sauce, the quiet add-ons. Adding processed cheddar and ranch to the default 6-inch build takes it to 374 calories and 1,040 mg of sodium — up 110 calories and 350 mg of sodium from the default. The split shows why: the cheddar adds 40 calories and 200 mg of sodium, the ranch adds 70 calories and 150 mg. Neither addition looks large on its own, and together they move the sandwich from 30% to 45% of the day’s sodium limit. That is the pattern of the whole counter: the base sandwich is rarely the problem, and the extras, each reasonable alone, are what carry a build from moderate to salty. The calculator’s line-by-line breakdown exists to catch exactly that accumulation before it happens, rather than after the meal.

Two proteins, same calories, different salt. Meatballs with marinara and tuna both land at 444 calories on the default build — the same bread, the same vegetables, no cheese, no sauce — but their sodium differs by 420 mg: the meatball build carries 1,030 mg (45% of the day) while the tuna build carries 610 mg (27%). The protein lines explain it: both proteins contribute 240 calories, but meatballs contribute 720 mg of sodium against tuna’s 300 mg. For a diner choosing between two equally filling options, that is the single most useful comparison on the page — same energy, very different salt — and it generalises: cured, sauced and processed proteins carry their flavour as sodium, while plain proteins mostly do not. The turkey default sits between them at 380 mg of sodium for its 60 calories, which is why the default build reads as one of the gentler builds on the counter.

The vegetables, doing quiet work. The five default vegetables — lettuce, tomatoes, red onions, green peppers and cucumbers — add 14 calories and no sodium at all to the default build. That is the cheapest nutrition on the counter in every sense: flavour, crunch and bulk for calories countable on one hand and a sodium contribution of exactly zero. It is also why “load the vegetables” is genuinely good advice here rather than a platitude — unlike cheese or sauce, vegetables dilute a sandwich’s sodium density instead of adding to it, because they add weight and volume without adding salt. A build that feels thin without extras is usually a build short of vegetables, not short of cheese.

Each row starts from the default 6-inch turkey build and changes only what the row says.

Read the table as a set of trades, not a ranking. The footlong doubles everything, including the problem. The cheese-and-sauce row shows how extras accumulate. The meatball and tuna rows show that equal calories can hide a 420 mg sodium gap. And the default row shows what the counter looks like when the protein is lean, the vegetables are loaded and nothing extra is added: 264 calories, 690 mg of sodium, and the bread as the biggest single sodium source — a build with nothing left to apologise for.

Calories mislead; sodium decides. Across the builds above, calories range from 264 to 528 while sodium ranges from 610 mg to 1,380 mg, and the two do not move together: the tuna and meatball builds share 444 calories but differ by 420 mg of sodium, while the footlong doubles both. That decoupling is why this calculator reports sodium as prominently as calories, and why its running commentary is organised around the day’s 2,300 mg limit rather than around energy alone. A sandwich can be a perfectly reasonable lunch in calories and still spend most of a day’s sodium — the footlong default at 60% proves it — and no calorie count will warn you. If you track one number from this page, track the sodium share, and treat 45% in one meal as the point where the rest of the day needs to be deliberately light.

The bread ladder. The breads on this page, at 6-inch size, run from 170 calories for Italian white through 190 for multigrain, 210 for Italian herbs and cheese, 230 for flatbread, up to 300 for a wrap — a 130-calorie spread before any filling is added. Sodium follows the same ladder in the default build’s breakdown, where multigrain contributes 310 mg of the 690 mg total, making bread the biggest single sodium source once the protein is lean. The practical consequence is that the bread choice is not a wrapper choice but a first ingredient choice: swapping from a wrap to Italian white saves 130 calories before anything else changes, and swapping from flatbread to multigrain saves 40. Fillings get the attention; bread does a large share of the work.

The 264-versus-260 gap, explained rather than hidden. The calculator’s built total for the default sandwich is 264 calories, while Subway’s own published total for the sandwich is 260 calories, and the page says so openly rather than adjusting a component to close the gap. The small difference comes from the guide’s sandwich basis — the component values are Subway’s published figures, printed as printed, and the built total is their sum on this page’s basis. A four-calorie gap on a 264-calorie sandwich is well inside the variation of a real sandwich made by hand, and a calculator that fudged a component to hit the published total exactly would be less honest, not more. Treat the built figure as the sum of its stated parts, and the published figure as the chain’s rounded standard — both are right, on slightly different bases.

What is not on this page. Drinks, cookies and chips are not included, and the page says so: the calculator prices the sandwich, not the meal deal. That boundary matters because the meal deal is where a moderate sandwich becomes a heavy meal — a sugary drink and a cookie can add more calories and sugar than the difference between any two proteins on this page, without changing the sandwich’s numbers at all. When you use this page to plan a visit, price the sandwich here and price the sides separately, or the sandwich’s careful arithmetic will flatter a meal it never claimed to describe. The same honesty applies to custom orders at the counter: anything added beyond the standard build changes the numbers, and the calculator’s editable controls exist so the custom order can be priced as actually built.

Building a better sandwich, in order. First, pick the protein by sodium as well as by taste: among the builds checked here, tuna at 300 mg beats turkey at 380 mg and meatballs at 720 mg for the protein line alone. Second, load the vegetables — 14 calories, no sodium, and the bulk that makes a sandwich feel complete. Third, treat cheese and sauce as the extras they are, priced line by line: processed cheddar at 40 calories and 200 mg of sodium, ranch at 70 calories and 150 mg, each reasonable, together worth 350 mg. Fourth, choose the bread deliberately rather than by habit. And finally, remember the footlong rule: doubling the sandwich doubles the sodium, so a footlong is a decision about the whole day, not just about hunger. Follow that order and the calculator stops being a scoreboard and becomes a way of ordering.

A single sandwich never eats alone, so the most useful way to read this page’s figures is against the whole day’s 2,300 mg sodium budget. The default 6-inch turkey build at 690 mg spends 30% of the day, leaving 1,610 mg for everything else — breakfast, dinner, drinks, snacks and anything cooked with salt at home. That is a comfortable position: the rest of the day can be ordinary without the total running away. The footlong version of the same build at 1,380 mg spends 60% and leaves only 920 mg, which turns the rest of the day into a negotiation — one salty dinner, and the day is over budget. The difference between the two is not willpower but arithmetic, and it is visible before ordering rather than after.

The same budget lens sorts the protein choices. Two default turkey sandwiches in a day would cost 1,380 mg — exactly the footlong figure, since a footlong is two 6-inch portions — while two tuna builds would cost 1,220 mg, and two meatball builds 2,060 mg, or 90% of the entire day before anything else is eaten. The cheese-and-sauce build at 1,040 mg, eaten twice, would cost 2,080 mg. None of these figures is a judgement on any sandwich; they are the reason the calculator reports the share of the day alongside the milligrams. A build that looks fine alone can still be the build that breaks the day when repeated, and the repetition is usually the reality — the same lunch, ordered the same way, several days a week.

Use the budget backwards when ordering. Decide what the rest of the day looks like first: if dinner is home-cooked and light, a footlong or a meatball build fits without strain; if dinner is another takeaway, the default 6-inch turkey or the tuna build leaves room for it. And remember what this page does not count: drinks, cookies and chips are outside the calculator, and a meal deal’s sides carry their own sodium that never appears in the sandwich’s figures. The sandwich budget above is therefore the floor of the meal’s sodium, not its total — plan the sides as their own lines, just as the calculator plans the sandwich’s lines, and the day’s budget will survive contact with the counter.