The Lane–Emden inequality controls \(\iint _{\mathbb {R}^{2d}}\rho (x)\rho (y)|x-y|^{-\lambda }\,\textrm{d}x\,\textrm{d}y\) in terms of the \(L^1\) and \(L^p\) norms of \(\rho \). We provide a remainder estimate for this inequality in terms of a suitable distance of \(\rho \) to the manifold of optimizers.