Does chai have caffeine?

Does chai tea have caffeine?

Yes, whenever there is tea in it. Chai is black tea brewed with spices, usually cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and pepper, and masala chai adds milk and sugar to the pot. The tea leaf brings the caffeine. The spices bring none, so the only questions that matter are how much tea went in and how long it sat in hot water.

USDA's survey food database files brewed chai tea under hot black leaf tea, at 20 mg of caffeine per 100 g. Its entry for hot tea with milk, which covers chai tea latte and Indian masala chai, is 9 mg per 100 g: a recipe of 480 g of brewed black tea to 488 g of milk, calculated, not measured in a cup of chai. 106105

So a plain brewed chai is a cup of black tea as far as the national food database is concerned, and on our drinks page a 200 ml black tea is 40 mg. If anything, a chai bag should carry a little less, because the spices take up room the tea would have had. That is one maker’s reasoning, not a measurement.

Stash says it does not test its teas for caffeine content. It also says mixed teas like chai have less caffeine than an all-black tea, because the other ingredients leave less tea in the bag. It gives no figure. 117116

The cinnamon is innocent

How much caffeine is in a cup of brewed chai?

Two makers put a figure near chai, and they agree. A laboratory that brewed commercial teas found a far wider spread than either label admits.

Twinings US gives 31 to 45 mg of caffeine for one flavored black tea bag in a 200 ml serving, and 40 to 76 mg for an unflavored one; it does not name chai. Tazo places its Organic Chai tea bags in the 31 to 45 mg band of its guide; the page tells you to steep one bag in 8 fl oz of water, and the guide itself names no serving. It is a band on a five-step guide, not a printed figure. 114111

A laboratory that brewed commercial teas found 14 to 61 mg of caffeine per serving of 6 or 8 oz, with no observable trend by variety of tea. Decaffeinated teas held less than 12 mg per serving and no caffeine was detected in the herbal teas. Read from the abstract only. 89

The width of that range is mostly the clock. Steep time is the dial you actually control, and one recent study measured it.

One 2025 study steeped 2 g of black tea in 200 mL of water at 100 °C. Cup tea bags, a mean of 12 teas, gave 23 mg of caffeine after 2 minutes, 33 mg after 5 and 39 mg after 10. Loose leaf, a mean of 19 teas, gave 18, 22 and 24 mg. These are one laboratory's plain black teas, not chai blends. 120

A bag left for ten minutes gave up 39 mg, where the same bag pulled at two gave 23 mg. Loose leaf moved less, from 18 mg to 24 mg. Nobody in the sources behind this page has measured chai simmered on a stove the traditional way. It spends longer in hotter water than a dunked bag, so expect the long end of the range, and treat that as an inference.

Milk changes nothing but the volume. It has no caffeine of its own, so a splash in a brewed cup leaves the total where it was. The same goes for the other milk teas, from Thai tea to boba.

How much caffeine is in a chai latte?

Less than in the same cup of plain tea, because a chai latte is half milk. USDA’s recipe is 480 g of brewed tea to 488 g of milk, which is how it lands on 9 mg per 100 g where black tea is 20 mg per 100 g. A coffee shop does the same thing with a pump: sweetened tea concentrate first, steamed milk on top.

A chai latte is warm milk with a rumour of tea

If the page you read before this one gave a higher figure for the grande, check its date and its source. Starbucks’ own listing today is 55 mg, and the United Kingdom guide, a separate document, lands within a few milligrams of it. I could not find the higher number on any current Starbucks page, so I cannot tell you whether it was ever right. It is not what Starbucks lists now.

Starbucks US builds a hot Chai Latte from 2, 3, 4 and 5 pumps of chai concentrate for a short, tall, grande and venti, and an Iced Chai Latte from 3, 4 and 6 pumps for a tall, grande and venti. Dividing each listed caffeine figure by its pumps gives 11.7 to 15 mg a pump hot and 15 mg a pump iced at every size. Starbucks states the pumps and the totals, not a figure per pump, and gives no reason for the gap. 102103

That is the whole rule: count the tea, not the cup. A bigger chai latte has more caffeine only because it gets more pumps.

Put on the same 8 fl oz cup, plain black tea is about 47 mg of caffeine and USDA's chai latte recipe about 21 mg; Starbucks US lists its short hot chai latte, which is 8 fl oz, at 25 mg. The first two are our sums, not figures any source states. 106105102

Does chai have more caffeine than coffee?

No, and it is not close. At Starbucks US a grande chai latte is 55 mg. The caffè latte in the same cup is 150 mg, and the brewed coffee is listed at 315 mg to 390 mg.

At home the gap is smaller and still real: a 200 ml black tea is 40 mg and a filter coffee of the same size is 80 mg. If you are choosing between powders and leaves, matcha is its own story, and a cup of coffee is a wider guess than its fans admit.

How much caffeine is in a dirty chai?

A dirty chai is a chai latte with a shot of espresso in it. No chain in our data lists one, which is fine, because it is addition.

A dirty chai is a chai latte with espresso added. Starbucks US lists no such drink, so this is a sum: a grande Chai Latte at 55 mg plus one Starbucks espresso shot at 75 mg is 130 mg, and with two shots 205 mg. 10247

A dirty chai is a chai that gave up pretending

One shot more than doubles the drink, and the espresso does most of the work: of the 130 mg in a grande with one shot, 75 mg is coffee. Shots vary a great deal from one counter to the next, which is why the caffeine in a shot of espresso has a page of its own. Made at home with the figures on our drinks page, it is a 40 mg tea plus a 63.6 mg shot.

What about chai concentrate, and is any chai caffeine-free?

The cartons are where the numbers stop lining up, because every maker picks its own serving, or names none. Read the middle column before the last one.

Oregon Chai tells you to mix its concentrate with an equal part of milk, so its serving becomes a latte twice that size with the same 19 mg in it. Tazo’s Classic band starts at 46 mg and Tazo does not say for how much. Same shelf, same word on the box, and neither Tazo nor Bhakti says what its range is a range of.

Chai without tea leaf has no caffeine. Celestial Seasonings lists its Bengal Spice, which it calls a caffeine-free interpretation of chai, at 0 mg, and Yogi lists its Chai Rooibos as caffeine free. Rooibos is described in the research literature as a caffeine-free tea. 118119121

Decaffeinated chai is low, not zero. USDA lists decaffeinated hot black tea, chai tea included, at 1 mg of caffeine per 100 g, and Twinings UK puts a typical decaffeinated tea bag at about 3 mg. 107115

So there are three kinds of low. Herbal and rooibos chai are zero because there is no tea in them, and herbal tea has its own article, zeros and exceptions included. Decaf chai is nearly zero, which is not the same word, as decaf coffee drinkers find out. And a small chai latte is low only because it is mostly milk.

Will chai keep you awake?

It can, and the dose decides. The amount tied to worse sleep in the evidence is not large.

A single 100 mg dose of caffeine, about 1.4 mg/kg body weight for a 70 kg adult, may increase the time it takes to fall asleep and reduce sleep duration in some adults, particularly when taken close to bedtime. 2223

A brewed chai or a grande chai latte sits under that line. A venti iced chai latte, at 90 mg, is close to it, and a dirty chai is over it. Then there is the clock: caffeine’s half-life in healthy adults averages 4 hours and runs from 2 hours to 8 hours, so how long it stays in your system matters as much as the cup. The chart below is drawn at five hours, the instrument’s default, which you can drag.

Tonight’s sleep was decided at 3 pm