Our TUNA PASTA SALAD is loaded with creamy avocado, red onion, and diced tomatoes. This is a summer staple that makes a great lunch or side dish at any cook out!

Pasta salad is arguably the best part of summer.

Cool, refreshing, and infinitely adaptable. What’s not to love about that?

We have quite a few pasta salad recipes, including our famous Italian pasta salad (it’s loaded with so much goodness) and Amish macaroni salad.

I also make this BLT pasta salad all summer long and it’s a winner too!

I mean, I’m excited about summer for a lot of reasons, but pasta salad definitely ranks high on the list!

Table of Contents

Ingredients:

Pasta – Campanelle is our favorite, but farfalle, macaroni, and penne will work.

Tuna – Use your favorite brand of the canned/bagged stuff and drain it well.

Avocado – It adds so much creamy goodness to the salad.

Tomatoes – Juicy, colorful, what’s not to love?

Red Onion – You can skip these if you have onion haters, but we love the bite of an onion in pasta salad.

Lemon – A little citrus just brightens up the whole dish. We prefer fresh lemon juice vs. bottled.

Mayo – Use full fat or low fat mayo here.

Seasonings – We’re seasoning this with a mix of chives, dill, salt, and pepper. Simple, but flavorful.

What We Love About This Recipe

This tuna pasta salad makes for a cool, refreshing dish that is especially awesome during the summer! We love that you don’t need to heat up the kitchen and that this can be served as a side dish at dinner or as a quick lunch. Plus, the avocado is creamy and filling and the lemon adds loads of bright flavor.

cold pasta salad with tuna in glass bowl

How to make Pasta Salad with Tuna:

Pasta: You’ll want to start with cooked pasta. Any small shape that you love will work well here.

I’ve used a mix of campanelle and farfalle this time around, because I had a couple open boxes. Macaroni and rotini are great choices too.

I like to rinse my cooked pasta under cold water to quickly cool it down. You really don’t need the starch in pasta salad, so rinsing it is just a quick way to get the recipe going.

Dice: You’ll dice up an avocado, some cherry tomatoes, red onion, and chives to add to the cooked pasta along with some tuna.

Mix & Chill: In a mixing bowl, mix together the mayonnaise, dill, lemon juice, salt and pepper and finally add that to the bowl with the pasta, tuna, and veggies.

Toss gently to coat everything in the dressing mixture.

I prefer to let this cold tuna pasta salad chill out in the fridge for an hour or two before eating. It helps the flavors meld together and I like my pasta salad very cold.

Be sure to cover the dish tightly. No one wants their fridge smelling like tuna. 😉

This tuna pasta salad recipe is so easy and it’s got great flavor.

What to serve with cold tuna pasta salad:

This makes a great lunch – double the tuna if you’d like it to be extra filling and just serve with some fresh fruit or grilled veggies on the side. Our air fryer zucchini makes a great side too!

These are the best turkey burgers! So juicy and perfect on the grill!

If you’d like to serve this as a side, it will work well with any of your standard barbecue fare – turkey burgers, grilled BBQ chicken, or hot dogs and brats.

Don’t want to fire up the grill? Make your brats in the air fryer.

My Jiffy corn casserole, baked beans recipe, and broccoli cheese casserole all go well alongside this pasta salad.

For dessert, try my Bisquick peach cobbler.

Hope you guys love this cold tuna pasta salad as much as we do!