A cup of tea has roughly 25 to 50 mg of caffeine, compared with about 95 mg in a cup of coffee — so most tea lands somewhere around a third to half of coffee's caffeine.
But the range is wide, and how you brew matters as much as which tea you choose.
Rough amounts by type
Per 8 oz cup, brewed normally:
- Black tea: 40–70 mg
- Pu-erh: 30–70 mg
- Oolong: 30–50 mg
- Green tea: 25–45 mg
- White tea: 15–30 mg
- Matcha: 60–70 mg (you drink the whole leaf, not an infusion)
- Herbal tea (chamomile, mint, rooibos, hibiscus): zero
For comparison, brewed coffee is commonly around 95 mg per 8 oz cup, and the FDA considers 400 mg a day an amount not generally associated with negative effects for healthy adults.
Treat all of these as approximations. Real cups vary a great deal.
Why the numbers vary so much
This is the part most caffeine charts leave out: your brewing choices change the result more than the tea type does.
A 2025 analysis of tea infusions found that longer steeping raised caffeine substantially — one tea rose several-fold when brewed for ten minutes rather than briefly — and that tea bags released more caffeine than loose leaf of the same tea.1
So the things that push caffeine up:
- Longer steeping. The biggest single factor you control.
- Hotter water. Extracts more of everything.
- More leaf per cup.
- Finer or broken leaf, including most tea bags — more surface area, faster extraction.
Which means a strong ten-minute green tea can contain more caffeine than a quick two-minute black tea, despite black tea "having more caffeine."
Herbal teas have none
Worth stating plainly, because the labeling confuses people: chamomile, peppermint, rooibos, hibiscus, ginger, and lemon balm contain no caffeine at all. They aren't made from the tea plant.
The exception is yerba mate and guayusa, which are herbal in the sense of not being Camellia sinensis but do contain meaningful caffeine.
Decaffeinated tea isn't caffeine-free either — decaffeination typically leaves a small residual amount, usually a few milligrams per cup.
Does L-theanine change how it feels?
Tea contains an amino acid called L-theanine, and you'll often read that it makes tea's caffeine feel calmer and smoother than coffee's.
It's a plausible idea with genuinely mixed evidence. Some studies report that caffeine and L-theanine together improve attention and alertness, but a 2025 review concluded that the science does not yet match the popular claims, citing inconsistent findings and small trials.2
So: many people find tea's lift gentler than coffee's, and that experience is real to them. Whether L-theanine is the reason is not settled. A simpler explanation is that a cup of tea just has less caffeine in it.
If you're cutting back
- Steep shorter. The most effective lever, and it costs you the least flavor.
- Switch to white tea in the afternoon, or to herbal in the evening.
- Use loose leaf rather than bags, which extracts somewhat less.
- Ignore the "rinse away the caffeine" trick. Briefly steeping and discarding the first infusion is widely claimed to remove most caffeine. It removes only a modest fraction, along with a lot of flavor.
The practical summary
If you drink two or three cups of tea a day, you're taking in roughly the caffeine of one cup of coffee. For most people that's well within a comfortable range — and if caffeine affects your sleep, the useful change is usually the hour you stop, not the type of tea you choose.