Pints to Cups Converter
Convert US pints to cups — two cups to the pint, and why a British pint is not.
Updated
US cups
2.00cup
1 pt = 2.00 cup
In short
How many cups are in a pint?
A US liquid pint is exactly 2 cups, or 16 fluid ounces. That holds only for the liquid pint. A US dry pint, which is how berries and other produce are sold, is 16.36 percent larger at about 550.61 millilitres, and a British imperial pint is 20.09 percent larger again at 568.26 millilitres.
The imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces, not 16, which is why it is bigger despite its ounce being smaller.
US pints to US cups — quick reference
| US pints (pt) | US cups (cup) |
|---|---|
| 0.3 pt | 0.50 cup |
| 0.5 pt | 1.00 cup |
| 1 pt | 2.00 cup |
| 1.5 pt | 3.00 cup |
| 2 pt | 4.00 cup |
| 3 pt | 6.00 cup |
| 4 pt | 8.00 cup |
| 8 pt | 16.00 cup |
The formula, worked line by line
The conversion is a multiplication by two, and the two is a definition rather than a rounding. A US liquid pint is 16 fluid ounces and a US cup is 8, both derived from the same US liquid gallon of exactly 231 cubic inches. The ratio between them was declared, not measured.
“The US gallon is exactly 231 cubic inches, and the inch is exactly 2.54 centimetres.”
That makes this one of the few kitchen conversions with no error term at all. Every complication on this page comes from the word pint naming three different units, not from any difficulty in the arithmetic between them.
cups = US liquid pints x 2
1 US pint = 16 fl oz - 1 US cup = 8 fl oz
1 pt -> 1 x 2 = 2 cups
2 pt = 1 quart - 8 pt = 1 gallon
imperial pint = 20 imperial fl oz = 2.402 US cups- Pints entered
- 1
- Cups per pint
- 2, by definition
- Multiplication
- 1 x 2 = 2
- US cups
- 2 cups
No decimal appears at any precision, because both units are whole multiples of the fluid ounce. The only way to get a fractional answer here is to start with a fractional number of pints, or to be holding a pint that is not the US liquid one.
The whole US liquid ladder in one line
Every step from the fluid ounce upward is a doubling or a quadrupling: 8 fl oz to the cup, 2 cups to the pint, 2 pints to the quart, 4 quarts to the gallon. Nothing in the chain requires division by an awkward number, which is why American recipes scale by eye so easily.
- 1 fluid ounce
- 0.125 cups
- 1 cup
- 1 cup
- 1 pint
- 2 cups
- 1 quart
- 4 cups
- 1 gallon
- 16 cups
Doubling and halving covers the whole system. That is the practical advantage the customary units still have over metric in a kitchen without a calculator.
Where the metric system nearly lines up
A US pint is 473.18 millilitres, which is close to but not the same as a 500 millilitre bottle. The 500 millilitre bottle is 2.113 cups rather than 2. Going the other way, a bottle labelled 473 millilitres in a metric market is an American pint that has been converted and printed to the nearest millilitre.
How to use the pints to cups converter
A US liquid pint is 16 fluid ounces and a cup is 8, so a pint is exactly two cups. The conversion is a doubling and needs no rounding at all, because both units descend from the same fluid ounce and the ratio between them is a whole number by definition rather than by measurement.
That simplicity is why the pint survives in American recipes at all. It is the rung between the cup and the quart, useful for anything a recipe buys by the carton: cream, stock, buttermilk, ice cream. Two cups up, four cups to the quart, sixteen to the gallon.
2 cups
A US liquid pint
473.18 mL, 16 fl oz
2.33 cups
A US dry pint
550.61 mL, for produce
2.402 cups
A British imperial pint
568.26 mL, 20 imperial fl oz
Three answers to one question is unusual, and this is one of the few kitchen measures where it genuinely happens. The word pint on an American carton of cream and on an American punnet of blueberries refers to two different units, and neither is what a British recipe means by the same word.
For everything poured, the doubling holds and nothing else needs thinking about. A pint of stock is two cups. Half a pint is one cup, which is also 8 fluid ounces. Two pints make a quart and eight make a gallon, so the whole US liquid ladder is powers of two from the cup upward.
- 1 cup
- 8 fl oz
- 1 pint, two cups
- 16 fl oz, 473.18 mL
- 1 quart, two pints
- 32 fl oz, 946.35 mL
- 1 gallon, four quarts
- 128 fl oz, 3,785.41 mL
- 1 imperial pint
- 20 imperial fl oz, 568.26 mL
- 1 US dry pint
- 33.6 cubic inches, 550.61 mL
The first four are one system doubling cleanly. The last two are separate units that share the word pint and cannot be substituted into it.
When the recipe steps up to quarts
Two pints make a quart and four cups fill it. That page covers the quart, the litre it nearly matches, and the separate dry quart used for produce.
Open the quarts to cups converter →US liquid pints converted to cups, with the millilitre figure and the equivalent in fluid ounces. Every row is exact, because a pint is two cups by definition.
| US liquid pints | US cups | In millilitres |
|---|---|---|
| 0.25 pt | 0.5 cups | 118.29 mL |
| 0.5 pt | 1 cup | 236.59 mL |
| 0.75 pt | 1.5 cups | 354.88 mL |
| 1 pt | 2 cups | 473.18 mL |
| 1.5 pt | 3 cups | 709.76 mL |
| 2 pt | 4 cups | 946.35 mL |
| 3 pt | 6 cups | 1,419.53 mL |
| 4 pt | 8 cups | 1,892.71 mL |
| 6 pt | 12 cups | 2,839.06 mL |
| 8 pt | 16 cups | 3,785.41 mL |
| 10 pt | 20 cups | 4,731.76 mL |
| 12 pt | 24 cups | 5,678.12 mL |
| 16 pt | 32 cups | 7,570.82 mL |
The pint of berries is a different unit
The United States kept two parallel volume systems, one for liquids and one for dry goods, and both use the words pint and quart. NIST Handbook 44 gives the dry pint as 33.6003125 cubic inches and the liquid pint as exactly 28.875, which makes the dry pint 16.36 percent larger.
Federal regulation recognises the split explicitly. The rules on container labelling require dry commodities to be expressed in terms of the US bushel and its peck, dry-quart and dry-pint subdivisions, and liquid containers in terms of the US gallon and its subdivisions. They are not interchangeable measures that happen to share a name.
- US liquid pint
- 473.18 mL, exactly 2 cups
- US dry pint
- 550.61 mL, 16.36 percent larger
- Imperial pint
- 568.26 mL, 20.09 percent larger
- Dry against liquid, in cups
- 2.33 against 2.00
- Which one converts to 2 cups
- the liquid pint only
A recipe asking for a pint of berries and a shopper holding a dry-pint punnet are talking about the same thing. A recipe asking for a pint of cream means the liquid pint. Converting a punnet of berries into two cups understates it by about a third of a cup.
In practice this rarely bites, because berries get used by the punnet and cream by the carton. It bites when a recipe gives a produce quantity in cups and a shopper has to work out how many punnets that is, which is exactly the case where the 16.36 percent gap is doing real work.
The British pint is a fifth larger
An imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces where a US pint is 16 US ones. The imperial gallon is exactly 4.54609 litres against the US gallon of 3.785411784, and dividing each by eight gives 568.26 millilitres against 473.18. The imperial pint is 20.09 percent larger.
What makes this counterintuitive is that the imperial fluid ounce is the smaller of the two, at 28.41 millilitres against the US 29.57. The imperial pint is bigger despite having smaller ounces, because it contains twenty of them rather than sixteen. Most conversion tables state one fact and skip the other.
- Fluid ounce
- imperial 28.41 mL, US 29.57 mL
- Ounces per pint
- imperial 20, US 16
- Pint
- imperial 568.26 mL, US 473.18 mL
- Imperial pint in US cups
- 2.402 cups
- Gallon
- imperial 4.54609 L, US 3.785411784 L
The 20.09 percent gap is the same at every rung, because both systems divide their gallon by the same numbers. Only the gallons differ.
For cooking, the practical marker is the pint of cream or milk in a British recipe. Reading it as two American cups leaves you about four fluid ounces short, which is half a cup. Where a British recipe also gives a metric figure, that settles it immediately and no conversion is needed.
Every US pints value, worked out
36 common US pints figures each get their own page, with the answer at full precision, the arithmetic, what rounding costs, and the nearest real-world reference point on the scale.
Questions people ask
Sources
Where the constants and formulas on this page come from. Each line names the figure it backs.
The US liquid pint is 16 US fluid ounces of exactly 29.5735295625 millilitres each, giving 473.176473 mL.
NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8 — Factors for units listed alphabetically — NIST
The US dry pint is 33.6003125 cubic inches and the US liquid pint 28.875 cubic inches — separate units of capacity.
NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C — Units of Capacity or Volume — National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2026 edition
Dry container capacity must be expressed in US bushels and their peck, dry-quart and dry-pint subdivisions, separately from liquid containers.
16 CFR 500.16 — Measurement of container type commodities — US Federal Trade Commission, via the eCFR
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