Cooking Measurement Converter
Cups to grams by ingredient, across five different sizes of cup.
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Recipe fractions work: 1 1/2, 3/4.
Required — a cup of honey and a cup of oats are not the same weight.
The cup in American cookbooks — 8 US fluid ounces, or half a US pint.
1 cup of all-purpose / plain flour = 125 g
1 cup of all-purpose / plain flour, in every unit
- Tablespoon (tbsp)16
- Teaspoon (tsp)48
- Fluid ounce (US) (fl oz)8
- Millilitre (ml)237
- Litre (L)0.24
- Gram (g)125
- Kilogram (kg)1/8
- Ounce (oz)4.41
- Pound (lb)0.28
- Density
- 0.53 g/ml
- One cup of this
- 125 g
- One tablespoon
- 7.8 g
- One teaspoon
- 2.6 g
Based on the us customary cup of 237 ml and a 14.78676478125 ml tablespoon.
Spooned and levelled. Scooped straight from the bag the same cup holds about 145 g.
Dry ingredients do not have one density. These figures assume the ingredient is spooned into the cup and levelled off; scooping the cup straight through the bag compacts it and can add 15–25%. If a recipe matters, weigh it — that is the reason weight-based recipes exist.
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How it works
To convert cups to grams, pick the ingredient above as well as the amount — a cup is a volume and a gram is a mass, so the answer depends entirely on what is in the cup: one US cup is 125 g of flour, 200 g of granulated sugar, or 340 g of honey.
There is no such thing as "1 cup in grams". A cup measures volume and a gram measures mass, and converting between them requires the density of the specific ingredient. A cup of flour is 125 g, a cup of granulated sugar is 200 g, and a cup of honey is 340 g — nearly three times the flour. That is why this tool will not give an answer until you have chosen an ingredient, rather than quietly assuming water and being wrong by a factor of two.
The second required input is which cup. The US customary cup is 236.588 ml, the "legal" cup on US nutrition labels is 240 ml, the metric cup used across Europe and Canada is 250 ml, and the imperial cup in pre-1970 British cookbooks is 284.131 ml — a 20% spread. Spoons diverge too: the Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, four teaspoons rather than the three everyone else uses, which is enough to ruin a raising agent.
The density figures are the spooned-and-levelled convention published by King Arthur Baking and used by most modern recipe developers. That method matters as much as the number: flour scooped straight out of the bag with the measuring cup compacts and can weigh 15–25% more than the same cup spooned in and levelled off. For a stew this is invisible; for bread or pastry it is the difference between a recipe working and not. Where the ingredient is one that packs down, the tool says so under the result.
Salt is the worst case and gets its own warning: a cup of table salt is 292 g, a cup of Diamond Crystal kosher salt is 142 g, and a cup of Morton kosher salt is around 240 g — all of them "salt". Weigh it, or match the brand the recipe names.
One US cup, by ingredient
The most-searched conversions, all for the same 236.588 ml US customary cup. The spread across this table is the reason the ingredient picker is not optional.
| Ingredient | Grams per US cup |
|---|---|
| All-purpose / plain flour | 125 g |
| Bread flour | 127 g |
| Cake flour | 114 g |
| Granulated sugar | 200 g |
| Brown sugar (packed) | 213 g |
| Powdered / icing sugar | 113 g |
| Butter | 227 g |
| Milk | 244 g |
| Water | 237 g |
| Honey | 340 g |
| Rolled oats | 90 g |
| Rice (uncooked) | 185 g |
| Cocoa powder | 85 g |
How big is a cup?
Five standards are in active use and a recipe rarely says which one it means. As a rule: American recipes use the customary cup, British and European recipes that use cups at all use the metric one, and anything from before about 1970 in the UK or Commonwealth may be imperial.
| Standard | Volume |
|---|---|
| US customary (American recipes) | 236.59 ml |
| US legal (nutrition labels) | 240 ml |
| Metric (UK, Europe, Canada) | 250 ml |
| Australian | 250 ml, but a 20 ml tablespoon |
| Imperial (pre-1970 UK) | 284.13 ml |
Spoons and small quantities
Teaspoons and tablespoons are where the Australian difference bites. Everywhere else a tablespoon is three teaspoons; in Australia it is four. A recipe calling for a tablespoon of baking powder is asking for a third more of it if the recipe is Australian.
| Measure | Volume |
|---|---|
| US teaspoon | 4.93 ml |
| US tablespoon | 14.79 ml (3 tsp) |
| Metric teaspoon | 5 ml |
| Metric tablespoon | 15 ml (3 tsp) |
| Australian tablespoon | 20 ml (4 tsp) |
FAQ
How many grams is one cup of flour?
125 g for all-purpose flour spooned into a US customary cup and levelled off. Scooped straight from the bag the same cup holds around 145 g, which is why weight-based recipes exist.
Why does a cup of sugar weigh more than a cup of flour?
Because sugar is denser. Granulated sugar packs to about 0.85 g per millilitre where flour is about 0.53, so the same volume holds 200 g of sugar against 125 g of flour.
Is a UK cup the same as a US cup?
No. The metric cup used in the UK, Europe, and Canada is 250 ml; the US customary cup is 236.59 ml. Older British recipes may use the imperial cup of 284.13 ml, which is 20% larger than the US one.
How many tablespoons in a cup?
Sixteen in the US and metric systems, where a cup is 16 tablespoons of 3 teaspoons each. In Australia a 250 ml cup holds 12.5 of its 20 ml tablespoons, so the usual "16 tablespoons" rule does not hold there.
Can I convert grams back to cups?
Yes — set the "from" unit to grams and the "to" unit to cups. The result is shown as a kitchen fraction where one is close enough to be honest, and as a decimal where it is not.
How accurate are these conversions?
The cup and spoon volumes are exact. The ingredient densities are published averages and dry goods genuinely vary by 15–25% with how they were measured, so treat those as good figures rather than precise ones. If a recipe is sensitive, use a scale.