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Cups of Butter to Grams

Convert cups of butter to grams — and the US stick system (1 stick = ½ cup = 113 g).

Updated

grams of butter

227g

1.00 cups of butter = 227 g

Values use the 240 ml US cup, spoon-and-level — your bag’s label may differ slightly.

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In short

How many grams is 1 cup of butter?

One cup of butter is 227 grams, which is two US sticks. The number falls out of the packaging rather than the density: an American stick is a quarter pound, so a cup is half a pound exactly. One stick is 113 g, a tablespoon is 14 g, and two cups make a full pound at 454 g.

European butter is usually sold in unmarked 250 g blocks, so a recipe written in sticks means nothing until you weigh it.

Cups to grams — quick reference

CupsButter (g)
¼57 g
76 g
½113 g
151 g
¾170 g
1227 g
340 g
2454 g

The formula, worked line by line

Cups of butter to grams is one multiplication by 226.8, the weight of a 240 ml cup. Because that figure is half a pound, every ordinary butter quantity lands on a round number of ounces, which is why the American stick chart looks so much neater than the charts for flour or oats.

The stick is the more useful working unit. A stick is half a cup, eight tablespoons, four ounces and 113 grams, so most recipe amounts can be built from sticks and tablespoons without touching a measuring cup at all.

grams = cups × 226.8
cups = grams ÷ 226.8
1 stick = ½ cup = 8 Tbsp = 4 oz = 113 g
grams per tablespoon = 226.8 ÷ 16 ≈ 14.2
Cups of Butter against gramsA twin scale: cups of Butter along the top against grams along the bottom, with 1 cup marked at 227 grams.cups ↔ g000.511312271.53402454cupsg
One cup of butter is 227 g — two sticks; one stick is ½ cup, 113 g, 8 Tbsp.
A pound cake, three ways of counting
Recipe calls for
1½ cups of butter
In grams
1.5 × 226.8 = 340.2, displayed as 340
In US sticks
exactly 3 sticks, 24 tablespoons
From European blocks
one 250 g block + 90 g of a second

A weighing job rather than a cutting job — there are no marks on a European wrapper to cut against.

Backwards, a French recipe asking for 200 grams of beurre doux is 200 ÷ 226.8 = 0.88 cups, or a little under two sticks: one stick plus about six and a quarter tablespoons. The awkwardness of that answer is a fair argument for weighing, and it is why converted American recipes so often round butter quantities to whole sticks and adjust something else.

How to use the cups of butter to grams

Type the cups and read the grams, or tap Swap to convert a gram weight back into cups. A cup of butter is 227 grams here, and the reason that number is so tidy is that it is not really a density at all — it is a packaging convention.

American butter is sold in quarter-pound sticks, four to a one-pound box, and the cup measurement was fitted to the stick rather than the other way round. So one stick is half a cup, two sticks make a cup, and a cup is half a pound: 226.8 grams, which the display rounds to 227.

King Arthur Baking lists half a cup of butter as 113 grams, the same figure seen from the other end. It also means the number converts perfectly into ounces and pounds and rather less tidily into millilitres, which is a fair clue about where it came from.

227 g

One cup

two US sticks, half a pound

113 g

One stick

½ cup, 8 Tbsp, 4 oz

14 g

One tablespoon

cut at the wrapper marks

That packaging is also why butter is one of the very few ingredients where a cup measurement is genuinely trustworthy. You are not compressing a soft solid into a cup and hoping you filled it the same way as the recipe developer; you are cutting a pre-formed block at marks printed on the wrapper.

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American stick wrappers carry a tablespoon grid down their length, so a recipe can say four tablespoons of butter and expect you to slice at the line without thinking about it. Cold butter cut at those marks is as accurate as weighing for almost any baking purpose, which is not something that can be said about a cup of flour.

The ingredient the cup fails at

A cup of flour is the opposite case, running from 120 grams spooned to 160 scooped with nothing in the cup to show which you did.

Convert cups of flour

The wrapper is, in effect, the measuring tool, and it is a better one than the cup because the amount was moulded at the dairy rather than filled by you.

Cultured butter and higher-fat European-style butter differ in flavour and water content more than in what a cup weighs. Water content is the one place where butters genuinely differ: higher-fat European-style butter carries a little less water than standard American butter, which changes how a pastry behaves without changing what a cup of it weighs by any amount you could detect at home.

Buy what the recipe assumes where that matters, and weigh it either way; what does change results is temperature and state, so use the gram figure as the amount rather than as a substitute for the technique. The values here use a 240 ml cup.

The whole American butter system in one place — cups against sticks, tablespoons, grams and ounces — plus the European block that has none of those markings on it, so a recipe written in any of the five units converts in one glance.

AmountUS sticksTablespoonsGramsOunces (weight)
1 tablespoon⅛ stick114 g0.5 oz
2 tablespoons¼ stick228 g1 oz
3 tablespoons⅜ stick343 g1.5 oz
¼ cup½ stick457 g2 oz
⅓ cup⅔ stick5⅓76 g2.7 oz
½ cup1 stick8113 g4 oz
⅔ cup1⅓ sticks10⅔151 g5.3 oz
¾ cup1½ sticks12170 g6 oz
1 cup2 sticks16227 g8 oz
1¼ cups2½ sticks20284 g10 oz
1½ cups3 sticks24340 g12 oz
2 cups4 sticks32454 g16 oz
European 250 g blockabout 2.2 sticksabout 17½250 g8.8 oz
Calculated from the engine density of 226.8 g per cup, which is half a pound and therefore two quarter-pound US sticks. King Arthur Baking gives half a cup of butter as 113 g. Grams and ounces rounded for the kitchen.

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What if your butter does not come in sticks?

Where the system breaks down is outside the United States. European, British, Australian and most other butter is sold in solid blocks, commonly 250 grams, with no stick divisions and no tablespoon grid, so an American recipe written in sticks is unusable until you convert it to weight.

A 250 gram block is a little over one cup, or about two and a fifth sticks — not a number you can eyeball. This is why the safest habit is to weigh butter in whichever state you bought it and change the state afterwards, and it is the clearest case in the whole cooking section for ignoring the cup and going straight to grams.

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Questions people ask

How many grams is 1 cup of butter?

227 grams, which is two US sticks or half a pound. The clean building block is the stick: half a cup, 113 grams, 8 tablespoons, 4 ounces. From there, half a cup is one stick at 113 grams, a quarter cup is half a stick at 57 grams, and two cups is a full pound at 454 grams. Butter is one of the more reliable ingredients to measure by volume precisely because you are cutting a pre-formed stick at printed marks rather than packing a soft solid into a cup.

How many grams is a stick of butter, or a tablespoon?

A US stick of butter is 113 grams — half a cup, 8 tablespoons or 4 ounces — and one tablespoon is about 14 grams, since 226.8 divided by sixteen is 14.2. Those two numbers cover nearly every American butter measurement you will meet. Six tablespoons is 6 × 14.2, about 85 grams. A stick and a half is 170 grams. Cutting cold butter at the tablespoon marks printed on the wrapper is accurate enough that you can skip the scale for most baking.

My butter does not come in sticks — how do I convert?

Weigh it. European, British and most other non-US butter is sold in solid blocks, commonly 250 grams, with no stick divisions and no tablespoon grid, so a recipe written in sticks or cups is meaningless until you convert to weight. One stick is 113 grams and one cup is 227 grams, which makes a 250 gram block a little over one cup, or roughly two and a fifth sticks. This is the clearest case in the whole cooking section for ignoring the cup and going straight to grams.

Do salted and unsalted butter weigh the same?

Yes, both are 227 grams a cup. The salt in salted butter is a small enough fraction of the mass that it cannot move a cup measurement, and the reason recipes call for unsalted is control over the total salt in the finished bake rather than any difference in density or yield. If you only have salted butter you can generally use it and trim the recipe’s added salt a little, especially in cookies and pastry where the butter quantity is large relative to everything else.

Should I measure melted butter by the cup?

Weigh it instead, and weigh it before melting where you can. A cup of butter is defined against a cold, solid quarter-pound stick, and once butter is softened for creaming it packs into a cup unevenly, while melted butter has lost the shape the whole cup convention was calibrated against. The mass does not change when butter melts, so 113 grams of butter is still 113 grams in the pan. Measure by weight in the solid state and melt afterwards, and the recipe stays exactly as written.

Sources

Where the constants and formulas on this page come from. Each line names the figure it backs.

  1. The published per-cup weight for butter that the stick convention is checked against.

    Ingredient Weight ChartKing Arthur Baking

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