The short answer is no. We refresh the full United States menu every week and check every item against live restaurant listings, and there is no salad on it. Not a Southwest Salad, not a Bacon Ranch Salad, not a plain side salad. The category is gone, and it has been gone long enough that most people asking the question are remembering a menu that stopped existing in 2020.
That leaves a real question behind it, though, which is what you order instead when you walked in wanting something light. We price 15 calorie sides and 250 calorie sandwiches the same way we price everything else, so this post answers the salad question and then does the more useful thing: it shows you what is actually on the menu, what it costs, and how the lighter options really compare.
When McDonald's Removed Salads
Salads disappeared from US restaurants in the spring of 2020, when McDonald's cut its menu back hard to speed up drive-thru and delivery during the pandemic. Plenty of items pulled in that round came back within months. Salads did not. All-day breakfast went the same way in the same cull and has stayed gone too.
The reasoning was never only about the pandemic. Salads are awkward for a kitchen built around a grill and a fryer: they need refrigerated space, separate prep, ingredients with short shelf lives, and they waste more stock than a bun ever will. They also never sold in the volume the marketing suggested. A restaurant selling a handful of salads a day is carrying the cost of an entire category to do it.
We only publish what our weekly refresh actually finds. If salads return to the US menu they will appear in our data and on the menu pages here before we get round to rewriting this post, so the menu is always the more current answer.
What the Lighter End of the Menu Looks Like Now
With the salad gone, the genuinely light choices are a short list. These are the lowest-calorie items on the menu that are actually food rather than a drink or a sauce packet, with the prices we currently track.
| Item | Price | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Slices | $1.35 | 15 Cal |
| Hash Browns | $2.99 | 140 Cal |
| Small French Fries | $4.49 | 230 Cal |
| Hamburger | $2.94 | 250 Cal |
| Cheeseburger | $3.39 | 300 Cal |
| Egg McMuffin | $5.64 | 310 Cal |
Prices are our weekly medians across live restaurant listings and vary by restaurant.
Apple Slices are the only item a salad orderer would recognise as being in the same spirit, and at $1.35 they are the cheapest thing we track anywhere on the menu. They are also 15 calories, which is less a meal than a gesture. The honest answer for most people is that the light option at McDonald's is now a small sandwich rather than a bowl of leaves.
The Hamburger Is the Closest Thing to a Diet Order
This surprises people, so it is worth saying plainly. A plain Hamburger is 250 calories and $2.94. That is fewer calories than a Small French Fries at 230, and fewer than most of the drinks people order alongside a salad without thinking about it. If your goal is to leave having eaten something reasonable, a Hamburger and a black coffee is a better order than anything the salad menu used to offer once the dressing was on it.
The old salads were never the health food the photographs implied, either. A crispy chicken salad with a full packet of ranch landed in the same calorie territory as a Big Mac and cost more than one. Their disappearance took an option away, but it did not take away as much as the branding suggested it did.
Is Losing the Salads Actually a Problem?
We think it depends entirely on why you wanted one. If you were after something fresh, cold and vegetable-based, then yes, McDonald's has nothing for you now and no amount of ordering around the menu fixes that. Apple Slices are fruit, not a meal, and there is no side salad to add to anything. That is a real gap and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
If you wanted to keep the calories down, though, losing the salads costs you very little. The menu still carries several items under 350 calories, and our nutrition calculator will total any combination of them before you order. What actually moves the number is portion size and drink choice, not the presence or absence of lettuce.
Where we would push back on McDonald's is the middle ground. There is no item on the current US menu aimed at someone who wants a normal-sized, lower-calorie meal rather than either a small sandwich or a full combo. That customer is served better by almost every competitor, and it is the one place the salad's absence genuinely shows.
What to Order Instead, Depending on What You Wanted
- Wanted something light: a Hamburger at 250 calories, or Apple Slices at 15 calories alongside a smaller main.
- Wanted something fresh: nothing on the current menu fills this, and that is the honest answer.
- Wanted low calories overall: drop the fries and the soft drink before you change the sandwich, because that is where the calories actually are.
- Wanted protein without the bulk: the breakfast side of the menu carries more protein per calorie than the burgers do.
Ordering the Menu Lighter Without a Salad
Since there is no salad to fall back on, the other lever is modification, and it works better than most people assume. Removing a component is free, it happens at the till, and it moves the numbers immediately because the published nutrition describes the standard build.
- Skip the cheese slice. It is one of the easiest hundred-odd calories to lose from any burger and it does not change how the sandwich is assembled.
- Ask for no mayonnaise-style sauce. The creamy sauces carry more calories per spoon than anything else on a sandwich.
- Take the meal apart. Ordering the sandwich on its own and adding Apple Slices at $1.35 instead of fries changes a combo more than any swap inside the sandwich does.
- Drink something that is not a soft drink. A black coffee is a few calories; a medium soft drink can be two hundred or more.
None of this is dieting advice so much as arithmetic, and it is the reason we built the nutrition calculator the way we did. You can strip an order down to what you actually intend to eat and watch both the calories and the price fall as you go, which is the closest the current menu gets to giving you the control a salad used to.
One warning worth carrying with you: the published figures describe the standard recipe. A restaurant that builds your sandwich generous on the sauce is serving slightly different numbers than the sheet, and no calculator can see that. Treat every figure here as what you should expect rather than a guarantee.
Whatever you land on, the numbers sit on the item pages here with the price beside them, which is the part McDonald's own site does not publish. You can build the whole order in our nutrition calculator and watch the calories and the cost move together before you spend anything.
