Cups to Grams Converter

How the Cups To Grams works

Most of the world bakes by weight and most American recipes bake by volume, so anyone who cooks from more than one country's books ends up converting. The catch is that a cup measures space, not weight. A metric cup of water weighs 250 g. The same cup filled with plain flour weighs about 133 g, and with honey about 355 g. There is no single cups-to-grams number, only one per ingredient, which is why this converter asks what you are measuring.

The cups to grams formula

Grams = cups × millilitres per cup × density in grams per millilitre.

Each ingredient has a typical density, measured spooned into the cup and levelled with a knife, which is how most recipe writers measure. Flour is light and airy at 0.53 g/mL. White sugar packs tighter at 0.85. Butter is close to water at 0.96, and honey and syrups are about 40 % heavier than water. Grams to cups runs the same formula backwards.

Example: one US cup of flour. 1 × 236.6 × 0.53 = 125.4, shown as 125 g. That is why US recipe sites quote anything from 120 to 130 g per cup of flour: they are rounding the same volume their own way.

Example: 200 g of sugar in metric cups. 200 ÷ 0.85 ÷ 250 = 0.94 cups. The result is not close enough to a whole cup to snap to one, so it shows as 0.94 cups. In practice, that is a cup less about a tablespoon.

Which cup is the recipe using?

Three cup sizes are in common use, and recipes rarely say which one they mean:

• US cup, 236.6 mL. Used by American books and most recipe websites.
• Metric cup, 250 mL. Used in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and modern British recipes that give cups at all.
• Imperial cup, 284 mL. Half an imperial pint, found in older British and Commonwealth cookbooks.

The imperial cup is a fifth bigger than the US one, so a cup of flour ranges from 125 g to 151 g depending on where the recipe came from. That is enough to turn a moist cake into a dry one. Look for clues: Fahrenheit oven temperatures and "stick of butter" point to a US cup, while Celsius and "caster sugar" point to metric.

How many grams in a cup of common ingredients?

Grams per cup of common ingredients, spooned and levelled, by cup size

Reading the result

• Grams is the headline weight. Under 100 g it shows one decimal place; above that it rounds to the nearest gram.
• Ounces gives the same weight in avoirdupois ounces (28.35 g) for scales that only show imperial units.
• Millilitres is the volume you entered, converted from cups, handy for a measuring jug.
• In grams-to-cups mode, Cups snaps to ¼, ⅓, ½, ⅔ or ¾ when the answer is within 0.03 of one, and shows the decimal alongside. "¾ cup (0.76 cups)" is a good match. "0.58 cups" on its own falls between ½ and ⅔, so round one way or make up the rest with a spoon. Metric tablespoons gives the amount in 15 mL spoons for exactly that.

The table under the result repeats the conversion at common cup fractions, or common gram amounts, for the ingredient and cup you picked.

Tips and pitfalls

• Scooping adds weight. Dipping the cup into the flour bag and levelling it compacts the flour and can add 20 % or more. Spoon it in instead, or better, weigh it.
• "Packed" means packed. Brown sugar is pressed into the cup until it holds its shape when turned out; that is why it weighs more than white sugar.
• Sticky ingredients cling. Oil the cup before measuring honey or syrup and it will slide out, so the weight you get matches the weight you meant.
• Weigh when ratios matter. Bread, pastry, macarons and anything using baker's percentages depend on exact flour-to-liquid ratios. Soups, stews and crumble toppings will forgive any of these figures.

For small amounts, tablespoons to grams uses the same densities by the spoon. To make more or less of a recipe after converting it, use the recipe scaler, and the oven temperature converter handles the other half of a US recipe.

Sources: NIST unit conversion; USDA FoodData Central.

Checked against: 1 US cup = 236.6 ml (NIST)

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