Cups to Grams Converter

How to use this tool

Type the amount, pick the unit, pick the ingredient, and read the grams. Go the other way by choosing grams as the unit, or press Flip to swap the answer back into the input box. The ingredient list is the part that matters: a cup of cocoa powder and a cup of honey differ by a factor of four, so nothing sensible can come out until the tool knows what it is weighing.

For flours and powders a fourth box appears asking how you fill the cup. That is not a gimmick. Spooning flour into the cup and levelling it gives about 120 grams; dipping the cup into the bag and sweeping gives around 150; sifting first gives about 106. The tool defaults to spoon and level because that is what the reference chart assumes and what most recipe writers mean, but if you know you dip, switch it and the answer will be closer to what you actually produce.

The What to scoop panel turns any answer back into the cups and spoons you would actually reach for. Ask for 250 grams of flour and it tells you two cups, one tablespoon and one teaspoon. That is the awkward part of converting a metric recipe by hand, and it is why the panel is there rather than leaving you with 2.083 cups and a shrug.

Every ingredient in the list is a link, as is every row of the table, so the answer for a specific amount of a specific thing has its own address you can bookmark or send to someone. The exports carry your numbers and the reference figures, nothing preloaded.

Why there is no single cups to grams number

A cup measures how much space something takes up. A gram measures how much it weighs. Converting between them needs the density, and density is a property of the ingredient, not of the cup. Water is the easy case at almost exactly one gram per millilitre, so a US cup of water is 236 grams. Everything else in a kitchen sits somewhere either side of that.

The range is wider than people expect. Cocoa powder is 84 grams a cup, which is a density of 0.36. Honey is 336, a density of 1.42. That is a factor of four for the same cup. Flour at 120 is 0.51, sugar at 198 is 0.84, butter and milk are both 227 and sit essentially at the density of water for different reasons. Any converter that offers one number for all of them is quietly assuming water and will be wrong for almost everything you bake with.

There is a second, sneakier problem on top of the first. Powders compress. A cup is a fixed volume but the amount of powder you can get into it is not fixed, because it depends on how much air is trapped between the particles. Flour, cocoa, icing sugar and oats all behave this way. Liquids, syrups, oils and whole nuts do not, which is why the fill method box disappears when you pick those.

The flour problem, in detail

All purpose flour is the most converted ingredient on the internet and the one where the answer is least settled. The King Arthur Baking chart, which this page follows, puts a cup at 120 grams. A great many American cookbooks and food sites use 125. Measure it by dipping the cup into the bag and sweeping the top level, which is what most people do without thinking about it, and you will get somewhere around 150.

Those are not competing claims about a fact. They are descriptions of different actions. 120 and 125 both assume you fluff the flour, spoon it into the cup and level it off, which leaves it loose. Dipping the cup compacts the flour against the sides and bottom, and 150 is what that produces. Sifting first does the opposite and gets you down near 106. The full spread from sifted to scooped is about 42 percent, and over four cups that is 176 grams of flour, which is another cup and a half.

This is why bread and pastry recipes written by anyone serious are given in grams. A twenty percent error in the flour changes the hydration of a dough from workable to either soup or concrete, and no amount of feel or experience recovers a ratio that was wrong before you started. Cakes are more forgiving, and a stew does not care at all, which is roughly the order in which it is worth buying a scale.

Grams per cup for the ingredients people convert most

Exact arithmetic from the reference chart. Read across for the common fractions of a cup, and note how little the quarter cup column varies for the light powders and how much it varies once you reach the syrups.

Grams, for a US cup of 236.588 ml, from the King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart. Flours are the spooned and levelled figure. Each ingredient is a link that opens the converter on it.

Cups, spoons and the units around them

The internal arithmetic of US volume measures is clean. There are 16 tablespoons in a cup, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, and therefore 48 teaspoons in a cup. A US cup is 8 US fluid ounces and 236.588 millilitres. A US pint is 2 cups, a quart is 4 and a gallon is 16. None of that changes with the ingredient, because it is all volume.

The trap is the word ounce, which does two jobs. A fluid ounce is a volume, about 29.57 millilitres. An ounce is a weight, 28.35 grams. They are close enough in number to be confusing and they are not the same thing at all. Eight fluid ounces of flour is a cup, which weighs about 4.2 ounces. Eight ounces of flour is nearly two cups. Recipes from the United States use both words, sometimes in the same list, and the only reliable clue is whether the ingredient is a liquid.

The other trap is the cup itself. A US cup is 236.588 millilitres. The metric cup used in Australia and New Zealand is exactly 250, and modern UK recipes that bother with cups use 250 as well. Six percent does not sound like much until it compounds across a recipe, and a British or Australian recipe converted with US cup figures will run consistently light. The report on this page gives both figures side by side so you can see which you are dealing with.

A worked check you can repeat on paper

Two cups of all purpose flour. The chart says 120 grams a cup, so 2 times 120 is 240 grams, which is 8.47 ounces, because an ounce is 28.3495 grams. In volume that is 2 times 236.588, or 473.2 millilitres, and 32 tablespoons, and 96 teaspoons. The density works out at 120 divided by 236.588, which is 0.507 grams per millilitre, about half the density of water.

Now the other direction. A European recipe asks for 250 grams of flour. 250 divided by 120 is 2.083 cups. Two cups leaves 0.083 of a cup, which is 1.33 tablespoons, so one tablespoon and one teaspoon. The panel on this page gives exactly that: two cups, one tablespoon, one teaspoon. In a 250 millilitre metric cup the same flour would be 120 times 250 divided by 236.588, which is 127 grams a cup, so the recipe would be 1.97 metric cups, near enough to two.

And the honey check, because it is the extreme. The chart gives 21 grams a tablespoon, and there are 16 tablespoons to a cup, so a cup is 336 grams. Divide by 236.588 and the density is 1.42 grams per millilitre, which matches the published density of honey closely and is a good sign that the chart is internally sound rather than a collection of rounded guesses.

Mistakes that catch people out

Using one cups to grams figure for everything. The most common error, and it is off by a factor of four between cocoa and honey. Always pick the ingredient.

Confusing fluid ounces with ounces. One is volume, one is weight, and for flour they differ by about a factor of two. If a recipe says 8 oz of flour, it almost certainly means weight.

Dipping the cup into the flour bag. It packs the flour and adds around a quarter. Spoon it in and level it, or better, weigh it.

Assuming a cup is a cup worldwide. US 236.588 ml against metric 250 ml is a six percent difference that runs one way through a whole recipe.

Packing brown sugar when the recipe did not say to. The 213 gram figure here is for packed brown sugar, because that is what recipes almost always mean. Loose, it is much lighter.

Converting a recipe halfway. Convert all of it or none of it. A recipe with the flour in grams and the liquid in cups is the easiest way to lose track of a ratio that mattered.

Popular conversions

The amounts people look up most. Each opens the converter on that ingredient and amount with its own address.

Cups of flour and sugar to grams

One cup of everything else

Half and quarter cups

Grams back to cups

Tablespoons and teaspoons

Sifted and scooped

How this was checked

Every weight per cup was taken from the King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart and normalised to one US cup before being entered, so figures the chart gives per tablespoon or per half cup were multiplied up rather than guessed. Two independent checks were run on the result. First, the internal consistency: honey at 21 grams a tablespoon becomes 336 grams a cup, which is a density of 1.42 grams per millilitre, and the published density of honey is about 1.42, so the chart and physics agree. Water comes out at 236 grams a cup, which is a density of 0.998, and water is 1.000 at room temperature, so the small shortfall is the chart rounding rather than an error.

Second, the arithmetic: every unit in the list was checked to round trip, so converting a cup to grams and back returns the same cup to twelve significant figures, and the same for tablespoons, teaspoons, millilitres, fluid ounces, ounces and pounds. The scoop breakdown was checked to reconstruct the original volume exactly for whole cups, thirds, quarters, eighths and awkward decimals, and to leave a stated remainder rather than silently rounding when a figure does not fall on a standard measure. The live page was then opened at every address linked above and each was checked for a distinct title, the right headline, charts that rendered, and clean CSV, image and print output containing only that conversion, at desktop, tablet and phone widths.

Common questions

How many grams are in a cup?

It depends entirely on what is in the cup, because a cup is a measure of volume and a gram is a measure of weight. A US cup holds 236.588 millilitres of anything, but that volume weighs 84 grams if it is cocoa powder, 120 if it is all purpose flour, 198 if it is granulated sugar, 227 if it is butter or milk, and 336 if it is honey. Any page that gives you one number for cups to grams is either assuming water or is wrong. That is why this converter asks which ingredient before it answers.

How many grams is 1 cup of flour?

120 grams on the King Arthur Baking chart, which is the reference this page uses and the one most American recipe writing follows. Many American cookbooks use 125 instead, and if you dip the cup straight into the bag and sweep it level you will get closer to 150, which is a quarter more than the spooned figure. That range is not sloppiness, it is what happens when you measure a compressible powder by volume. If your recipe gives grams, use grams and the problem disappears.

How many grams is 1 cup of sugar?

198 grams for granulated white sugar, and 213 for brown sugar packed into the cup. Confectioners or icing sugar is much lighter at 113 grams a cup because it is milled fine and holds a lot of air. Sugar is far less of a problem than flour because granulated sugar does not compress appreciably, so a cup of it weighs close to the same however you fill it.

How many grams is a stick of butter?

113 grams, which is a quarter pound or half a US cup. A full cup of butter is 227 grams, two sticks. In recipes written outside the United States butter is usually given in grams already, and a 250 gram block is the common European size, which is about two and a quarter sticks.

Is a UK or Australian cup the same as a US cup?

No, and the difference is worth knowing. A US cup is 236.588 millilitres, defined as half a US pint. The metric cup used in Australia and New Zealand is exactly 250 millilitres, and most modern UK recipes that give cups use 250 as well. That is about six percent more, so a recipe calling for four cups of flour means roughly a quarter of a cup more flour if it came from Sydney than if it came from Seattle. This page always uses the US cup, and the report shows the 250 millilitre figure alongside it.

Why do recipes in grams turn out better?

Because weight is unambiguous and volume is not. A gram is a gram whoever measures it, while a cup of flour depends on whether you sifted it, spooned it, or dipped the cup in the bag, and on how humid the kitchen is. For bread and pastry, where the ratio of flour to water decides the result, a twenty percent error in the flour is the difference between a dough you can work with and one you cannot. A cheap digital scale removes the whole class of problem, and it also means fewer cups to wash.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Tablespoons to Cups Converter: for counting a cup measure out in spoons.
• Grams to Cups Converter: the same chart the other way round, for when the scale reads grams and the recipe wants cups.
• ML to Cups Converter: for liquids, where a cup is a volume rather than a weight, in every size of cup.
• Grams to Ounces Converter: exact weight conversion with pounds and ounces, sticks of butter and troy ounces, plus why a fluid ounce is not an ounce.
• Volume Converter: litres, gallons, pints and fluid ounces, when the recipe is about liquid volume rather than ingredient weight.
• Weight Converter: grams, kilograms, ounces and pounds, for scaling a recipe up or reading an imperial ingredient list.
• Temperature Converter: oven temperatures between Celsius and Fahrenheit, with gas marks.
• Percentage Calculator: for scaling a recipe by a percentage, and for baker percentages in bread.
• Ratio Calculator: for holding a flour to water ratio while changing the batch size.
• Cups to Ounces Converter: fluid ounces and ounces by weight for any cup.
• King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart: the reference every weight per cup on this page comes from.