How many calories are in an average slice of cheese pizza?

How to get close to this number

Estimate the slice as bread plus cheese and work from there. A slice carries roughly a large bread roll's worth of dough plus a handful of cheese and a spoonful of sauce. Those three components put it in the high two hundreds, and the component method is reliable because pizza is unusually simple in composition.

The variance is the real subject, and the explanation spells it out: a thin-crust slice and a deep-dish slice differ by a factor of two or more while sharing a name. A "slice" is not a defined unit — it depends on the diameter of the pizza and how many cuts were made — so any single figure for one is a statement about an assumed standard.

Which is why this number is best used as an anchor rather than a count. It comes from a national nutrition database describing a regular-crust cheese slice, and its value is in giving you a starting point you can adjust: thinner crust down, extra cheese up, pepperoni up again. That adjustment habit is worth more than the figure itself.