A recipe from another country can be hard to follow when it lists cups and your scale reads grams, or the other way round. The trouble is that a cup measures how much space something takes up, and a gram measures how heavy it is. A cup of flour is light and fluffy, and a cup of honey is dense and heavy, so there is no single conversion. This guide explains how to convert between cups and grams, and why weighing is the more reliable way to bake.
Volume is fixed, weight depends on the ingredient
Cup and spoon sizes are fixed amounts of volume. One US cup is 236.588 ml and holds 16 tablespoons or 48 teaspoons. One US tablespoon is about 14.8 ml and one teaspoon about 4.9 ml. To go from a cup to grams you also need the ingredient’s density, meaning how many grams fit into a cup. The cooking converter has 16 common ingredients built in.
Grams per cup for common ingredients
| Ingredient | 1 cup | 1/2 cup | 1/3 cup | 1/4 cup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 120 g | 60 g | 40 g | 30 g |
| Bread flour | 127 g | 64 g | 42 g | 32 g |
| Whole wheat flour | 113 g | 56 g | 38 g | 28 g |
| Granulated sugar | 200 g | 100 g | 67 g | 50 g |
| Brown sugar (packed) | 213 g | 106 g | 71 g | 53 g |
| Powdered sugar | 113 g | 56 g | 38 g | 28 g |
| Butter | 227 g | 114 g | 76 g | 57 g |
| Vegetable oil | 218 g | 109 g | 73 g | 54 g |
| Honey | 340 g | 170 g | 113 g | 85 g |
| Rolled oats | 90 g | 45 g | 30 g | 22 g |
| Cocoa powder | 85 g | 42 g | 28 g | 21 g |
| Uncooked rice | 185 g | 92 g | 62 g | 46 g |
| Table salt | 288 g | 144 g | 96 g | 72 g |
Typical weights per US cup, rounded to the nearest gram. Brands, moisture and how you fill the cup all change them.
Why cups are less accurate than a scale
The way you fill a cup can change the weight by 20% or more. Flour scooped straight from the bag packs down and can weigh noticeably more than flour that is spooned into the cup and leveled with a knife. Brown sugar is meant to be pressed firmly into the cup, while powdered sugar is often sifted first. In a bread or cake recipe, a fifth more flour can turn a soft crumb into a dry one. That is why most professional bakers and many recipe writers give weights: a gram is a gram, however you fill the bowl.
Converting a recipe, step by step
Take a recipe that needs 2¼ cups of flour, 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of butter.
- Flour: 2.25 × 120 g = 270 g
- Sugar: 1 × 200 g = 200 g
- Butter: 0.5 × 227 g = 114 g (about 113 g, which is one US stick)
Put the mixing bowl on the scale, press the tare button to set it to zero, and add each ingredient in turn, taring after each one. You wash fewer cups and get the same result every time.
Not all cups are the same
A US cup is about 237 ml, a metric cup used in Australia, New Zealand and Canada is 250 ml, and older UK recipes may use a larger imperial cup. Spoons differ too: an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, compared with about 15 ml in the US. For 2¼ cups of water, the difference between US and metric cups is 532 ml against 563 ml, about 6%, which is enough to change a recipe. If a recipe does not say which it uses, check where it comes from.
Tips
- Weigh dry ingredients when a recipe gives grams, and use cups only when it asks for them.
- Spoon flour into the cup and level it, rather than scooping.
- For sticky ingredients such as honey, weigh straight into the bowl, or lightly oil the cup so it slides out.
- Round sensibly. A gram or two does not matter, but five percent might.
- For other conversions, such as ounces, pounds and liters, use the unit converter.
The weights here are typical averages, based on common reference values. For a specific product, the label or a food database such as USDA FoodData Central will give more precise figures.
Sources and further reading
- Cup (unit) (Wikipedia)
- USDA FoodData Central
- International yard and pound: exact definitions of the inch and pound (Wikipedia)
Numbers in worked examples are calculated by code and checked by automated tests. How we test.