Every McDonald's Breakfast Sandwich, Ranked

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McDonald's is still a market dominator. According to a January 2025 YouGov survey, 66% of consumers had visited McDonald's for breakfast in the past year. That was more than any other fast food place on the list. Ever since McDonald's debuted the Egg McMuffin back in 1975, the breakfast sandwich has become synonymous with a quick morning bite. Over the past 50 years, McDonald's has added a plethora of breakfast sandwiches to its menu — just don't expect a hash brown breakfast sandwich anytime soon. But which of these sandwiches reigns supreme?

It's a tough question to answer — ever since the addition of the McGriddles in 2003 and bagel sandwiches in 2020, it's been tricky to nail down a favorite. As the interiors of each sandwich have remained the same for decades, narrowing down the best of the breakfast really comes down to how well McDonald's uses its sandwich delivery system. So I decided to try them all, whether they're served on an English muffin, a buttermilk biscuit, a bagel, or a McGriddles pancake bun. Based on my taste test along with a few other factors detailed at the end of this story, here is a definitive ranking of McDonald's breakfast sandwiches.

McDonald's bagel breakfast sandwiches are the fast food restaurant's new kids on the block — they've been brought back to the menu indefinitely thanks to popular demand. That said, the Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel is a huge disappointment. For starters, it's ridiculously expensive — my local McDonald's is charging $13 for this particular breakfast sandwich. Sure, this type of steak is a higher quality protein, but for something that's only slightly better than a ground beef burger patty, it's an insane price point.

Granted, the creamy breakfast sauce — food snobs would call this an aioli — is pretty good, and it works very well with the egg, cheese, and protein. However, based on Chowhound's overall ranking of fast food breakfast sandwiches, swapping out the Steak-EZE protein for a burger patty to make something closer to the breakfast burger at Carl's Jr. would be much more effective. While the Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel at McDonald's is a decent breakfast sandwich, it's not as good as some of the classics, and it's simply not worth the price point, thus its placement at the bottom of our ranking.

In contrast with the Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel, the Sausage McMuffin is one of the cheapest items on the menu. While that is a convincing enough argument to pick one of these up for breakfast when you're on a budget, it lacks some of the elements that make a classically good breakfast sandwich. As it's just a sausage patty with cheese on an English muffin, there are just a whole lot of better options on the menu.

I do think the McDonald's sausage patty is one of the best you can get in the fast food realm — it's got a nice texture, it's well-seasoned, and it can hold its own as a protein. However, just slapping a sausage patty on an English muffin doesn't cut the mustard when there are so many superior options on the menu.

One of the reasons people visit McDonald's for breakfast is to get that signature flavor combo that comes from something like the Egg McMuffin. Since the Sausage McMuffin can be easily recreated at home with store-bought sausage as long as you've got a decent English muffin, it's not very well suited to be the centerpiece of a fast food breakfast journey.

The Sausage Biscuit has a lot of the same drawbacks as the Sausage McMuffin — there's just not a lot to this sandwich when you consider the other options on the menu. Swapping the English muffin out for a buttermilk biscuit, however, is a decent upgrade. It's a culinary choice that dates back to 1986, when McDonald's first added biscuits to its breakfast menu. This new addition helped boost traffic for the chain, which supplies about 25% of all breakfasts not cooked at home in the U.S., according to a 2019 timeline from CNN. The biscuit didn't just improve the quality of McDonald's sausage sandwiches but also the overall business.

The Sausage Biscuit is better than the Sausage McMuffin because the particular spice blend that McDonald's uses in its sausage patty just works better with a buttermilk biscuit. McDonald's cured sausage patty is made with sugar, dextrose, and rosemary extract, and the buttery flavor of a biscuit complements these flavors better than the English muffin. It's the same reason biscuits and gravy are such a great combo.

McDonald's more economical versions of its breakfast bagels are all good — they're just not great. As all of McDonald's sandwich fillings are the same, the deficiency really comes down to the bagel. I get that McDonald's breakfast bagels are popular enough to warrant a Facebook group, and the news of their permanent placement on the restaurant's menu was a big deal, but these just fall flat with me. I may need to try a burger or even a McDouble on a bagel to make a more informed decision on the subject.

That said, I do think the Bacon Egg and Cheese Bagel has some positive qualities. For starters, the restaurant's breakfast sauce has got that creamy, mayo-based richness. But then there are some unexpectedly savory notes that come from the processed American cheese. It does a lot of legwork to make the bagel's dry texture work for the sandwich. McDonald's bacon isn't anything special, and it seems like there's never enough of it, but a bagel slathered with that great sauce and then stuffed with bacon and eggs is going to work in a pinch.

I'm noticing a pattern of enjoying McDonald's breakfast sandwiches more if they have sausage on them. In this case particularly, the Sausage Egg and Cheese Bagel helps us realize why bagels are such an important breakfast staple. I'd definitely take the sausage patty over the weird break-away steak patty on the Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel any day of the week. There's something familiar about the sausage patty that grounds this sandwich, and I think it's the protein that works best here.

The bagel's breakfast sauce also works better with McDonald's sausage — you'd think the fat content of both items would want to fight with one another, but the opposite is true. Both items do have rich flavors, but it's a richness that combines in all the right ways, and that combination is facilitated by the bagel itself. It's dense, unyielding texture helps keep these two flavor profiles from getting too far out of hand.

McGriddles have been on the McDonald's menu for over 20 years minus a brief off-menu stint during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were invented by culinary scientist Tom Ryan who also blessed the world of fast food with Pizza Hut's stuffed crust pizza. Meant to be McDonald's answer to fold the sweet and savory combo of its Big Breakfast into a handheld sandwich, the McGriddles have a sizable cult following and plenty of homemade copycat recipes. I get it — there is something irresistible about those pillowy flapjack-adjacent buns — but they lean a bit too much on the sweet side for their own good.

That lack of balance is especially profound with the Sausage McGriddles, since the versatile sausage patty easily gets swallowed up by two McGriddle buns. For those who get the McGriddles solely for the fluffy pancake buns, this is as good as it gets. If you're after more from your breakfast sandwich, however, the Sausage McGriddles just aren't going to cut it when a more complex version of the sandwich is available.

I get that putting a burrito on a sandwich list is a good way to open a semantic can of worms, but it just seemed odd to make a definitive McDonald's breakfast sandwich list without the Sausage Burrito. Added to the McDonald's menu in 1989 thanks to franchise owner Nelly Quijano and her husband, Dominic, the Sausage Burrito is one of the unsung heroes of the fast food restaurant's breakfast menu.

As one of the few menu items to lean into a spicier flavor profile — it's also served with salsa — the Sausage Burrito occupies a unique space on the McDonald's breakfast menu. With some chopped peppers thrown into the classic mix of egg, sausage, and cheese, you get something more akin to an omelet inside the Sausage Burrito's tortilla, which is also unexpected at McDonald's. All in all, the flavor composition of the Sausage Burrito is good enough to land it solidly in the middle of the pack in this ranking. It's great for when you're after a McMuffin break, and it's an excellent milestone in the storied history of the beloved breakfast burrito.

As I mentioned earlier in the list, McDonald's bacon leaves much to the imagination, so pressing it between two maple-flavored pancake buns is going to cause it to get lost in the flavor shuffle. That said, the combination of sweet maple syrup and salty bacon is an incredible pairing and stands as a shining example of the science that explains why bacon tastes good with everything. It's this universally acknowledged delight that lands the Bacon Egg and Cheese McGriddles in sixth place.

Though the sandwich isn't quite top five material, I have to admit that there is a completeness to the breakfast flavors that you don't get with other sandwiches on the list. Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to the perfect breakfast, but those preferences usually contain one or more of the flavors on display with this sandwich. There's the sweet and salty from the griddle bun and the bacon, a mild flavor buffer with the egg, and some richness from the cheese and breakfast sauce. Regardless of what you like in a breakfast meal, you'll find a decent variation of classic breakfast flavors in this sandwich.

Though the Bacon Egg and Cheese McGriddles consist of a near-perfect combination of breakfast flavors, the Sausage Egg and Cheese McGriddles simply have more of those flavors. As the McDonald's bacon just doesn't pack much punch in the flavor department, the sausage ramps up the porcine flavors. When those flavors are assisted by the fluffy egg and melted cheese, you get the best of the McGriddles bunch.

All of the other McGriddles struggle to hit that perfect balance between sweet and savory, but the Sausage Egg and Cheese McGriddles get everything right. Even from a textural standpoint, everything works much better here — each sandwich component shares varying degrees of softness, which makes it a nice experience overall. As with all of the McGriddles sandwiches, the Sausage Egg and Cheese McGriddles simply feel like a bit much for my personal breakfast needs, which is why they've ranked a bit lower on the list.

At this point in the ranking, I think it's safe to say that the buttermilk biscuit is the best non-English muffin delivery system that McDonald's has. Bagels and McGriddles are nice every so often, but it's the biscuits and English muffins that will always define the McDonald's breakfast experience. The Sausage Biscuit with Egg is a good example of why the biscuit sandwiches are a success.

As I found with the Sausage Biscuit, there is something instantly harmonious about the flavors of the sausage and the biscuit. There are times when the biscuit is a bit dry or maybe too crumbly, but even then it's still a great combination of flavors. One of the reasons the Sausage Biscuit with Egg is a bit lower on the list is because of the egg — one downside of the McDonald's biscuits, bagels, and McGriddles is that it's got one of those dishwasher-sponge-looking eggs hanging out with the sausage and cheese. These eggs are fine, but they're just not as good as the freshly cracked eggs that show up on an Egg McMuffin.

In a surprising departure from the pattern I had initially set up with sausage sandwiches handily beating bacon sandwiches, the Bacon Egg and Cheese Biscuit is a tasty anomaly. Normally I would be griping about how there is never enough bacon to make an impression on my taste buds, but that's not the case here. Since the biscuit is smaller than the bagel and the McGriddles, the bacon dispersal ratio is a lot better.

Like the sausage versions of the biscuit sandwich, something in the buttermilk biscuit's DNA just works with bacon, eggs, and cheese. Even though this sandwich has the pre-pressed egg square, it still tastes like something homemade, and that is a rarity in the fast food world. Like the Sausage Biscuit with Egg, the only thing that is really holding this sandwich back from taking the No. 1 spot is that previously cooked egg. A fresh egg on this sandwich — or maybe using some bologna instead of bacon on your breakfast sandwich — would really take it to the top.

There are definitely days when the Sausage McMuffin with Egg would take the No. 1 spot in a ranking like this. It's a hearty, flavorful breakfast sandwich that gets a lot of mileage out of every ingredient. I've already touched on this, but looking down on the other sandwiches on the list, it's easy to see how crucial that fresh egg is to the McDonald's breakfast sandwich. When that is paired with a sausage patty and some melty American cheese, it's just hard to find fault in this wonder of fast food engineering.

As the only real difference between this sandwich and the Egg McMuffin is its protein, that's what the final decision really came down to. While the McDonald's sausage patty really shines in this sandwich, it can sometimes be a bit too much for that first meal of the day. I typically go for this option when I'm particularly famished in the morning. It's so good that it's hard not to give it a first-place ranking. But I didn't.

There's a reason the Egg McMuffin is a classic. I used to think it was just the ham, which is the perfect middle ground between sausage and bacon. But the reason this sandwich takes top billing is because of its reputation. It's been the centerpiece of the McDonald's breakfast menu since its wide release in 1975, and throughout that time it's worked its way into the cultural zeitgeist as shorthand for fast food breakfast.

That's not to say that the Egg McMuffin isn't delicious. The buttery English muffin, the fresh egg, the grilled ham, the American cheese — the layers of flavor just fit so nicely together that it's hard not to be inspired by its construction.

While I do think that a lot of the sandwiches that ranked lower on this list could be improved with a slice of ham, there's a good reason that hasn't happened — the Egg McMuffin's reputation lives and dies by its exclusivity. Part of that mystique would be damaged if McDonald's just started throwing its ham around willy nilly. The Egg McMuffin was, is, and will always be a classic.

As I got deeper into this ranking, I realized that most of my rationale was based on the buns of each respective breakfast sandwich. The toppings are pretty much the same regardless of the sandwich, so you always know what you're getting there. That said, I ranked each sandwich by its respective carb component and how well that worked with the McDonald's toppings. 

I also evaluated how each sandwich tasted, prioritizing how well its breakfast components worked together to create a singular item. Some combinations of toppings work better together than others, and the sandwiches that ranked higher on the list were the ones that seemed most complementary. It was interesting to see how a particular bun helped or hindered the existing balance among different ingredients, so I made sure to take note of those aspects for each sandwich on the list.

Finally, I factored the price of each sandwich into the overall ranking. That mostly affected the last-place ranking for the Steak Egg and Cheese Bagel. We're talking fast food breakfast sandwiches here, so a good one has to provide a reasonable bang for your buck.