Cups of Butter to Grams

Cups to grams — quick reference

The formula

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

Worked example: a pound cake calls for 1½ cups of butter. That is 1.5 × 226.8 = 340.2 grams, displayed as 340, and in stick terms it is exactly three sticks or 24 tablespoons. If you are working from a 250 gram European block instead, you need one block plus 90 grams from a second one, which is a weighing job rather than a cutting job — there are no marks on the 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.

One point of honesty about the density. Butter is not actually as heavy as water, so 240 millilitres of it does not weigh 226.8 grams as a matter of physics; the figure comes from the US convention that a cup of butter is half a pound, fixed by the quarter-pound stick. That makes it exact by definition rather than by measurement, and it works because nobody actually pours butter into a measuring cup — they cut a marked stick. It also means the number travels perfectly into ounces and pounds and rather less neatly into millilitres.

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.

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. 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 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.

Where the system breaks down is outside the United States and outside the fridge. 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. And once butter is softened for creaming or melted for a batter, the volume measure stops being reliable, because soft butter packs into a cup unpredictably and melted butter has lost the shape the cup was calibrated against. This is why recipes are usually careful to specify cold, softened or melted, and why the safest habit is to weigh butter in whichever state you bought it and change the state afterwards.

A few things that do not change the weight: salted versus unsalted butter measure the same, because the salt is a small fraction of the mass, and the reason recipes specify unsalted is control over the total seasoning rather than any measurement difference. Cultured butter and higher-fat European-style butter differ in flavour and water content more than in what a cup weighs. What does change results is temperature and state, so follow the recipe on cold, softened or melted, and use the gram figure as the amount rather than as a substitute for the technique. 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. The values here use a 240 ml cup.

Frequently asked questions