Caffeine in Tea: How Much Is in Black, Green, White, Oolong and Matcha, and Which Teas Are Caffeine-Free

The tea bush makes caffeine for its own reasons. Our training deck explains that caffeine is the main methylxanthine in tea, alongside two chemically similar compounds, theobromine and theophylline, and that “the tea plant creates these chemicals as a way to ward off insects and other animals.” Peter G. W. Keen, writing for our blog in 2016, called caffeine one of the most effective natural pesticides, one that seems to have evolved from the bushes themselves and discourages many of the 300 or so tiny predators of the tea plant.

Many people still believe some types of tea come from a different plant. When our 2022 Teabox Masterclass took up that myth, the answer was plain: “All teas come from the same plant, Camellia Sinensis. They are different by the way they are made.”

Our Tea 101 archive makes a point that surprises most people: the dry leaves of black, green, white and oolong teas hold broadly similar amounts of caffeine. The differences in the cup come from the tea itself and from how you brew it: “the plant cultivar, type of tea, season of plucking, and the duration of infusion,” as well as how much leaf goes into the pot. So the label on the tin is a starting point, not a measurement.

The one family of “teas” with no caffeine is herbal tea, or tisane: chamomile, hibiscus, tulsi, butterfly pea flower and other blends made from flowers, herbs, roots or spices, with no tea leaf in them. We cover those below. Our tea expert Mohona Banerjee gave a whole 2022 masterclass to the question “What is Tisane? Are they really caffeine-free?” If you are new to the main types, start with What is green tea? and What is black tea?

These are approximate figures from our Tea 101 caffeine posts. Caffeine varies with the leaf, the quantity, the water temperature and the steeping time, so treat every number here as a guide, not a lab result.

Bars show the upper end of each range. Figures: Tea 101, “Caffeine in tea” and “Why everyone should drink chai.”

Caffeine in the leaf, caffeine in the cup

It helps to keep two numbers apart. One is the caffeine in the dry leaf, a percentage of its weight. The other is the caffeine that actually reaches your cup, in milligrams, which depends on how you brew.

For the leaf, the best figures we hold come from tea scientists, not from us. A review by M. N. Dev Choudhury, F. Rahman and B. C. Barbora of the Tea Research Association’s Tocklai Experimental Station in Jorhat found that the made teas of North East India contain “between 3 and 5 per cent” caffeine. A German study of four commercial black tea bag blends measured 3.21 to 3.85%.

For the cup, the same Tocklai review notes that “in normal brewing, around 80% of caffeine present is extracted from the tea particles.” The rest stays in the wet leaf, which is why time, temperature and the amount of leaf matter so much.

Teabox has never lab-tested its own teas for caffeine, so we do not print milligram figures of our own. Our 2016 caffeine article drew a chart of popular drinks that put coffee at about 120 mg a cup, cola 50, black tea 40, oolong 30, green 20 and white about 16, and called the figures “just approximations.” The order is the same as Tea 101’s; the numbers are a little lower, a reminder of how much any single figure depends on the cup being measured.

The short version: Tea 101 puts green tea at about 20 to 45 mg a cup, and every green tea and green blend we sell is rated “Low.” Our matcha is rated “High.” In the dry leaf, though, published research puts a bud-rich white tea above black, green and oolong; whether that reaches your cup depends on its cooler, gentler brew.

Our breakfast blends, chais and matcha are rated High; most single-estate Assam and Darjeeling blacks, our Moonlight whites and our oolong are Medium; our green teas and Silver Needle are Low; and our tisanes and herbal chais are Caffeine Free. Readers have long used these labels. One thanked us, on our 2016 caffeine article, for rating every tea High, Medium or Low: “It means I can select something low/medium for an afternoon cuppa.”

• The leaf. Tea 101 lists the plant cultivar, the type of tea and the season of plucking among the factors. The Tocklai review adds that the bud holds the most caffeine, with each older leaf holding less, and that in Assam caffeine peaks in June and July. Small CTC granules, the kind in most chai and many tea bags, brew fast and strong; whole leaf gives its strength up more slowly. More in Orthodox vs CTC tea.
• How much leaf. More leaf, more caffeine. A standard cup is about 2 to 2.5 g of leaf, roughly one heaped teaspoon, to 250 ml (8 oz) of water.
• Water temperature. Hotter water draws caffeine out faster. That is one reason a black tea brewed at 95–100°C (203–212°F) usually ends up stronger than a green brewed at 75–80°C.
• Steeping time. Time matters a great deal. Our 2016 article put black tea at around 20 mg after two minutes and around 50 mg after five.
• The cup. A large mug holds more tea than a standard cup, and more caffeine with it.

Milk does not remove caffeine. It softens the taste, and if it takes the place of some water each cup is a little less concentrated, but the caffeine is set by the leaf and the steep. Nor can you rinse it away: a quick first infusion poured off takes flavor with it and leaves much of the caffeine behind. For brewing times by tea, see How to brew loose leaf tea.

Yet gram for gram, dry tea leaf actually holds more caffeine than coffee beans. The difference is extraction: steeping draws out only part of the caffeine in tea leaf, while brewing coffee extracts much more from the bean.

The research we hold puts numbers on both halves. Tea leaves average about 3.5% caffeine against 1.1 to 2.2% for coffee beans, according to a 2009 study in the Czech Journal of Food Sciences that cites earlier coffee research. But coffee is brewed with far more grounds: filter coffee made at 20 g a liter held 310 to 410 mg of caffeine per liter in the German brewing study. Our own 2016 chart put a cup of coffee at about three times a cup of black tea.

Tea also contains an amino acid, L-theanine, that coffee does not. How it interacts with caffeine is still being studied, and we make no claims for it here. We first put the tea-versus-coffee caffeine question to our readers in 2016: “Ever wondered how much caffeine is in that cup of tea you’re drinking?” Taste, ritual and everything else are compared in our dedicated guide, Tea vs coffee.

Not every white is low. Bud-only whites start with the most caffeine in the leaf, and our Moonlight whites are rated Medium, while Silver Needle is rated Low. The bush matters too: in the Tocklai trials the China-type cultivars Indochina and Lingia were the lowest in caffeine of 16 grown side by side. China-type bushes are the ones behind Darjeeling’s chinary teas.

For a gentler cup without leaving the tea plant:

• Choose a green or a gentle white. A spring white such as our Darjeeling Special Spring Silver Needle White, light and refined with gentle floral notes, or an everyday whole-leaf Darjeeling Green Tea, both rated “Low.” See also White tea vs green tea.
• Try a light oolong. Glenburn Spring Moonshine Oolong is light-bodied and sweet-floral, with notes of peony, muskmelon and vine peach, and is rated Medium.
• Brew at the low end. Use a little less leaf, cooler water where the tea allows it and the shorter steeping time. Our earliest caffeine article, from 2013, gave the same advice: “Use a little less leaf and brew your teas with cooler water, and reduce the brewing time too.”
• Keep matcha and strong chai for earlier in the day. Save the gentler teas for the afternoon and a tisane for the evening.

Low caffeine is not the same as good tea. As Peter Keen put it in 2016, “That a tea is low caffeine doesn’t mean it’s a good tea,” and he warned against whites sold on that basis alone.

They are not technically tea at all but tisanes, infusions of herbs, fruits and flowers. Our training deck puts the rule simply: “if it isn’t from the Camellia sinensis plant, it’s not tea,” and lists mint, chamomile, hibiscus, lemongrass, ginger, yerba maté, guayusa and rooibos among the herbal infusions. One caution on that list: yerba maté is not tea, but it does contain caffeine of its own, about 1% of the dry leaf in one study, so it is not caffeine-free.

Our caffeine-free range includes Pure Chamomile, whole flowers from the foothills of Uttarakhand that brew a floral, honeyed cup with notes of crisp apple; Hibiscus Lemongrass Tisane, tart and citrusy with a hint of spice; and Butterfly Blue Pea Flower. There are also caffeine-free chais, Ayurvedic blends of herbs and flowers with no tea leaf, in our Herbal Chai collection; read each ingredient list, since they combine several herbs. In the summer of 2022 we also made three iced tisanes, Kokum Hibiscus, Mint Jamun and Vanilla Grape, sold as “100% caffeine free with No Sugar Added.”

Read the ingredients, not just the name. Some blends that sound herbal are built on tea: green tea chamomile or green tea mint is still green tea, with green tea’s caffeine, and a traditional Kashmiri kahwa is made with green tea too. Our own Green Tea Chamomile Sleep is one of these: Pure Chamomile is a caffeine-free tisane, while the Chamomile Green blends chamomile with green tea, so it does contain caffeine, and customers have bought it expecting none. Likewise, our Rasayana Ayurvedic Chai, sold for the evening, is made with black tea. Caffeine-free also does not mean right for everyone; if you are unsure about an herb, check with your doctor. More in Herbal tea (tisanes).

If you need none at all, choose an herbal tea instead. Any tea can be decaffeinated, though black and green teas are the usual candidates. Our Tea 101 archive describes four methods in use:

• Carbon dioxide. Pressurized liquid carbon dioxide draws the small caffeine molecules out of the leaf and leaves the larger flavor molecules behind. It is the method most often credited with keeping the most flavor.
• Ethyl acetate. The leaf is soaked in ethyl acetate, a compound that also occurs naturally in tea leaves and some fruits. Some drinkers say it leaves a flat or chemical taste. Because the compound is found in plants, Peter Keen noted in 2016, packs made this way can legally say “naturally decaffeinated.”
• Methylene chloride. A solvent that bonds with the caffeine so the leaf can be separated from it. Its use is debated.
• Water processing. Hot water extracts the caffeine along with the flavor; the water passes through a carbon filter that catches the caffeine, and the leaf reabsorbs the flavor. Common for coffee, less explored for tea.

Whatever the method, decaffeination tends to take some flavor away with the caffeine. Tea scientists explain why: caffeine is part of what makes a black tea brisk, and the Tocklai review warns that removing it “is likely to have adverse effect on the liquor characters.” If you buy decaf, look for a seller who says which method was used.

Teabox does not sell decaf tea. Customers do ask us for decaf black tea, decaf chai and a caffeine-free English Breakfast, and we understand why. For a lighter cup, we would rather point you to a white, a green brewed gently or a caffeine-free tisane.

Our 2016 article’s view was that caffeine is part of what tea is, not something to fear: choose your tea for the enjoyment it offers and keep caffeine “very much in the back of your mind.” Aravinda Anantharaman, then our senior editor, put the house view in a line: “We feel you should drink coffee or tea or both for pleasure.” That interview with the coffee and tea trader Ian Bersten, Tea or coffee? I swing both ways!, is worth reading in full.

Caffeine is also part of what makes tea taste like tea. Tea scientists tie it to a black tea’s briskness and to the “cream,” the haze that forms as a strong black tea cools.

If caffeine does not suit you, the practical answers are the ones above: lighter teas, gentler brewing, smaller cups and herbal teas later in the day. If you are pregnant, have a health condition or take medication, ask your doctor what is right for you; our guide to tea during pregnancy covers that question in more detail. For what research has and has not shown about tea more broadly, see Health benefits of tea and Tea and health myths.