How much lactose is in cheese? A chart, by type
Last updated 17 August 2026
Cheese is the food people get most wrong about lactose, in both directions. Some cheeses contain less lactose than a teaspoon of milk, and a few contain more than the milk they were made from. The difference comes down to two steps in how the cheese was made.
The chart
Values per 100 g, ordered from least lactose to most. The right-hand column matters more than the left, because nobody eats 100 g of parmesan.
| Cheese | Lactose per 100 g | In a real portion |
|---|---|---|
| Parmesan, grana padano (aged 12 months+) | trace, under 0.1 g | ~0.01 g on a bowl of pasta |
| Aged or sharp cheddar (9 months+) | under 0.1 g | ~0.03 g in a 30 g slice |
| Gruyère, emmental, comté, aged gouda | under 0.1 g | ~0.03 g in a 30 g slice |
| Blue cheeses (stilton, roquefort, gorgonzola) | ~0.1 g | ~0.03 g in a 30 g portion |
| Brie, camembert | ~0.1 g | ~0.03 g in a 30 g wedge |
| Mild cheddar, young gouda, edam | ~0.1 g | ~0.03 g in a 30 g slice |
| Mozzarella (low-moisture or fresh) | ~0.5–1 g | ~0.6 g on a 125 g pizza’s worth |
| Feta | ~0.5–1 g | ~0.4 g in a 50 g crumble |
| Halloumi | ~1–2 g | ~1 g in a 75 g portion |
| Cream cheese | ~2–3 g | ~0.8 g on a bagel (30 g) |
| Cottage cheese | ~2.5–3.5 g | ~6 g in a 200 g tub |
| Ricotta | ~3 g | ~3 g in a 100 g portion |
| Quark | ~3–4 g | ~5 g in a 150 g pot |
| Processed slices, cheese spread, squeezy cheese | ~2–6 g | ~1.5 g in a 25 g slice |
For scale: cow’s milk is about 4.8 g per 100 ml, so a 250 ml glass is roughly 12 g. Every cheese on that list is lower per 100 g, and the aged ones are lower by a factor of several hundred.
Brands vary, and a label can be a gram out either way. If you want the wider picture, here are the numbers for milk, yogurt, kefir and butter too.
The two things that decide the number
Draining the whey. Lactose is water-soluble, so it leaves with the liquid. When curd is separated and the whey is poured off, most of the lactose goes with it. This is why a hard, pressed cheese starts out low and a wet, fresh one doesn’t.
Ageing. Whatever lactose survives draining gets eaten by the bacteria in the cheese over the following weeks and months. They ferment it to lactic acid — which is also what makes an aged cheese taste sharp.
So the rule of thumb is simple, and it predicts the whole table:
Hard and old means almost no lactose. Wet and young means some. Made from whey means the most.
Ricotta is the instructive case. It’s traditionally made from the whey — the very liquid that carries the lactose away from other cheeses — which is why it sits at the bottom of the chart rather than the top, despite being a “soft” cheese people assume is fine.
The specific questions people ask
Is sharp cheddar lower in lactose than mild? Yes, slightly — sharpness comes from longer ageing, and longer ageing means more of the lactose has been fermented. Both are already so low that the difference is academic for almost everyone.
Does parmesan have any lactose? Effectively none. A 12-month grana is among the lowest-lactose dairy foods that exists.
Cottage cheese or milk — which is worse? Per 100 g, cottage cheese has less. Per portion, it’s closer than you’d think, because a 200 g tub is a normal serving and 200 ml of milk isn’t much less lactose. If cottage cheese bothers you and cheddar doesn’t, that’s the reason.
What about butter? Around 0.6 g per 100 g, and you don’t eat 100 g of it. A slice of toast carries about 0.06 g. It’s almost entirely fat.
Why does “lactose-free” cheese exist if cheese has no lactose? Mostly for the fresh and processed ones, where there’s genuinely something to remove. A lactose-free aged cheddar is solving a problem the cheese had already solved.
Why this cuts both ways
The good news is real: if you have lactose intolerance and you’ve been avoiding cheese, most of the cheese board was never the problem. Aged cheese is one of the few dairy foods you can eat freely at almost any intake.
But low-lactose foods can't train your gut. What improves over time is how well the bacteria in your colon handle lactose that reaches them — and a food with no lactose in it gives them nothing to practise on. Aged cheese is a way to enjoy dairy today, not a way to widen what you tolerate. That takes lactose you can actually feel, in gradually rising amounts. It's the same reason lactase pills don't build tolerance either.
This is also why Lactico won’t count a wedge of cheddar as your daily dose or step you up for it. It would make the graph look good and change nothing about your gut.
Two caveats
Individual thresholds vary, and a minority of people genuinely react to very small amounts — if mozzarella reliably troubles you, believe yourself over the table.
And none of this applies to a cow’s-milk protein allergy. That’s a reaction to casein or whey, the proteins, which ageing and draining do not remove — an aged parmesan is full of them. Here’s how to tell the two apart, and it matters, because an allergy gets worse with exposure rather than better.
Sources: USDA FoodData Central composition data; Harju, Kallioinen & Tossavainen, International Dairy Journal 2012 (lactose in dairy products and lactose hydrolysis); Suarez, Savaiano & Levitt, New England Journal of Medicine 1995 (tolerance of 240 ml milk in self-reported severe lactose intolerance); NIDDK patient guidance on lactose intolerance.