Cooking Measurement Converter

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Amount

What the recipe says, in the unit chosen below. Decimals are fine — 0.5 for a half.

Convert from

Cups, spoons and fluid ounces are the US ones. A metric cup is 250 mL, not 236.6.

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Every other unit is listed underneath the result anyway.

Ingredient

Needed only when you cross between volume and weight — that is the step a density decides. Cups to tablespoons ignores it.

Your inputs are calculated locally and are not stored.

2 cups of flour, all-purpose250 g

This is an approximation. It uses 125 g per US cup for flour, all-purpose, which is a typical value rather than a constant — flour especially varies by more than 20% with how it is scooped. That is exactly why serious baking recipes are written by weight, and why a $15 kitchen scale beats any converter, including this one.

Conversion type: Volume to weight — the ingredient decides the answer
Density used: 125 g per US cup (0.528 g/mL)
As a weight: 250 g
As a volume: 473.176 mL
What the figure assumes: Spooned into the cup and levelled off. Scooping the cup through the bag packs it and can add 20% or more.

2 cups of flour, all-purpose in every supported unit
Unit	Measures	Amount
US teaspoons	Volume	96 tsp
US tablespoons	Volume	32 tbsp
US fluid ounces	Volume	16 fl oz
US cups	Volume	2 cups
US pints	Volume	1 pt
US quarts	Volume	0.5 qt
Millilitres	Volume	473.176 mL
Litres	Volume	0.473176 L
Grams	Weight	250 g
Kilograms	Weight	0.25 kg
Ounces	Weight	8.81849 oz
Pounds	Weight	0.551156 lb

Read this first

These conversions are approximate, and flour is the worst offender

A cup of all-purpose flour can weigh anywhere from about 120 g to 150 g, and nothing about the cup tells you which. Spoon flour into the cup and level it off and you are near the low end. Dip the cup into the bag and scoop, and you compact the flour against the sides and come out near the high end. That is a spread of more than 20% on the ingredient that does most of the structural work in a cake, a loaf or a batch of cookies — the difference between tender and dry, between a loaf that rises and one that does not.

This is not a flaw in this converter. It is a flaw in measuring flour by volume at all, and it is precisely why serious baking recipes — and every professional kitchen — are written by weight. A digital scale costs about the price of two bags of flour, gets you the same result every time, and turns scaling a recipe into multiplication. If you have a scale, weigh the flour and ignore the cups entirely.

The other fourteen ingredients behave better but none of them are exact. Granulated sugar is among the most reliable, because the crystals do not compress much. Powdered sugar, cocoa and oats are among the worst, because they are light and packable. Liquids — water, milk, oil, honey — are the only genuinely dependable ones, since a liquid takes the shape of its container and cannot be tamped down. Treat every figure here as good to about 5%, and flour to about 20%.

Formula & methodology

Two families with exact factors, and one bridge that is not exact

Inside a family, conversion is a fixed factor and the answer is exact by definition. A US gallon is exactly 231 cubic inches, which is exactly 3.785411784 litres, and everything below it follows: the cup is a sixteenth of a gallon, the fluid ounce a hundred-and-twenty-eighth, the tablespoon half a fluid ounce, the teaspoon a third of a tablespoon. On the weight side, the avoirdupois pound has been exactly 453.59237 g since 1959, which makes the ounce exactly 28.349523125 g.

grams = millilitres × ρ • ρ = (g per US cup) ÷ 236.5882365

ρ: The ingredient’s density in grams per millilitre
g per US cup: The published figure — 125 for all-purpose flour
236.5882365: Millilitres in a US cup, exact by definition

Crossing families is the only step that needs an ingredient, and it is the only step that carries error. The tool routes every amount through both bases at once — millilitres and grams — which is why the table under the result can answer for all twelve units from a single input, and why switching the target unit never changes the underlying number.

Worked example

Two cups of all-purpose flour in grams

Two US cups is 2 × 236.5882365 = 473.18 mL. The density of all-purpose flour is 125 g per cup, which is 125 ÷ 236.5882365 = 0.5283 g per mL. Multiply: 473.18 × 0.5283 = 250 g. The shortcut is obvious once you see it — two cups at 125 g each — but the long way is what lets the same arithmetic answer for tablespoons, millilitres or ounces.

Now the same cups with something else in them. Two cups of rolled oats is the identical 473.18 mL, but at 90 g per cup the density is 0.3805 g/mL and the answer is 180 g. Two cups of honey is 680 g. Same volume, nearly four times the mass, which is the entire case for asking what the ingredient is.

And backwards, which is the direction people actually need when a European recipe lands in an American kitchen: 100 g of honey. At 340 g per cup the density is 1.437 g/mL, so 100 ÷ 1.437 = 69.6 mL — about 4.7 tablespoons, or a shade under a third of a cup. Note that this is the same 340 figure doing the work in reverse, so it carries the same uncertainty; honey happens to be one of the dependable ones.

Reference

What a US cup of each ingredient weighs

Heaviest first. Water sits in the middle at 236.6 g — a cup of water weighs almost exactly as many grams as it holds millilitres, which is the whole reason the metric system is pleasant to cook in.

Grams per US cup (236.6 mL), spooned and levelled unless noted
Ingredient	Grams per cup	Assumes
Honey	340	Densest thing on the list
Salt, table	292	Fine granulated
Milk, whole	244	Slightly heavier than water
Water	236.6	The reference case: 1 mL ≈ 1 g
Butter	227	Solid, two US sticks
Sugar, brown	220	Packed, as recipes specify
Oil, vegetable	218	Any neutral liquid oil
Sugar, granulated	200	Reliable by volume
Rice, long grain	185	Uncooked white
Salt, kosher	142	Diamond Crystal; Morton's is ~240 g
Flour, bread	127	Spooned and levelled
Flour, all-purpose	125	Spooned and levelled
Sugar, powdered	120	Unsifted
Oats, rolled	90	Old-fashioned, not instant
Cocoa powder	85	Unsweetened, unsifted

Which cup, which spoon

A cup is not a cup and a tablespoon is not a tablespoon

US customary cup — 236.588 mL. Exactly one sixteenth of a US gallon. This is the cup used everywhere on this page.
Metric cup — 250 mL exactly. Standard in Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, and about 5.7% larger than the US cup. Over four cups of liquid the difference is more than a quarter of a cup.
US tablespoon — 14.79 mL, exactly half a US fluid ounce and exactly three US teaspoons.
Australian tablespoon — 20 mL, a full third larger, because it was defined as four metric teaspoons rather than three. The UK settled on 15 mL. Since leavening agents and salt live in these spoons, and both have narrow tolerances, this is the one that quietly ruins things.
US fluid ounce — 29.574 mL, which is not the imperial fluid ounce of 28.413 mL. The imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces where the US pint is 16 US fluid ounces, so a British pint is about 20% larger.

Assumptions

What this converter assumes

All cups, spoons, fluid ounces, pints and quarts are the US customaryones. Metric cups, Australian tablespoons and imperial fluid ounces are deliberately absent rather than mixed into the same list, because an unlabelled “cup” that might be either is worse than no cup at all.
Ingredients are measured spooned and levelled, unsifted, and at room temperature. Brown sugar is the exception: it is packed, because that is how recipes specify it.
Butter is solid, from the fridge. Melting it changes the volume it occupies but not its mass, so a cup of melted butter and a cup of solid butter are not the same amount of butter.
Kosher salt means Diamond Crystal. Morton’s is far denser and is not interchangeable by volume.
Densities are typical published values, not measurements of your flour. Treat them as ±5%, and flour as ±20%. Within a family — cups to tablespoons, grams to ounces — there is no uncertainty at all; those factors are exact by definition.
No temperature correction is applied. Water is a touch less dense hot than cold, and no recipe in the world cares.

Common questions

Cooking measurement FAQ

How many grams is a cup of flour?

About 125 g for all-purpose flour, which is the figure King Arthur Baking publishes and the one most American recipe writers standardised on. But the honest answer is that it depends on how the flour got into the cup. Spoon it in and level it off and you get roughly 120 g; dip the cup into the bag and scoop, and you compact it to 145 g or more. That is a 20% spread on the single most important ingredient in most baking, and it is the reason a scale is the best twenty dollars a baker can spend.

Why does this converter ask which ingredient I am measuring?

Because cups measure space and grams measure mass, and nothing gets you from one to the other without knowing how heavy the stuff is. A cup of honey weighs 340 g. A cup of rolled oats weighs 90 g. That is a factor of nearly four out of the same measuring cup, so a converter that offers a single cups-to-grams number is answering a question nobody asked. Converting cups to tablespoons, or grams to ounces, needs no ingredient at all — those stay inside one family and the factors are exact.

Is a US cup the same as a metric cup?

No, and the gap is big enough to matter. A US customary cup is 236.588 mL, exactly one sixteenth of a US gallon. A metric cup — standard in Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe — is exactly 250 mL. That is about 5.7% more, so a recipe calling for four metric cups of liquid needs a little over four and a quarter US cups. This tool uses US cups throughout.

Is a tablespoon the same everywhere?

No. A US tablespoon is 14.79 mL, exactly half a US fluid ounce. An Australian tablespoon is 20 mL — a full third larger — because Australia defined it as four metric teaspoons rather than three. The UK settled on 15 mL. Baking powder, baking soda, salt and yeast are all measured in these spoons and all have narrow tolerances, so a recipe from a Sydney food writer will over-leaven if you read its tablespoons as American ones.

Which kosher salt does the salt figure mean?

Diamond Crystal, at about 142 g per cup. This is the one place a brand name genuinely changes the arithmetic: Morton's kosher salt is roughly 240 g per cup, nearly seventy percent denser, because the crystals are rolled flat rather than hollow-pyramid shaped. Swap one for the other by volume and a dish comes out seriously over- or under-salted. Table salt is denser still, around 292 g per cup.

Should I be using weight instead of cups?

For baking, yes, and it is not close. Weight removes the scooping variable, removes the sifted-or-not question, removes brand-to-brand density differences, and lets you scale a recipe by multiplying one column of numbers. It also means fewer measuring cups to wash. For cooking — a splash of oil, a handful of rice — volume is perfectly fine, because the tolerances are wide and nothing collapses if you are 10% out.

Primary sources

Sources and review notes

The unit factors on this page are defined values and cannot go stale. The fifteen densities can and do vary — between brands, between harvests, and between two people filling the same cup — so they are published here as typical values with the spread stated rather than as figures to trust to three digits.