Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) have shown great potential for sub-mm instrumentation because of the high scalability of the technology. Here, we demonstrate for the first time in the sub-mm band (0.1–2 mm) a photon noise limited performance of a small antenna coupled MKID detector array and we describe the relation between photon noise and MKID intrinsic generation-recombination noise. Additionally, we use the observed photon noise to measure the optical efficiency of detectors to be 0.8?±?0.2.