Cups of Rice to Grams

Cups to grams — quick reference

The formula

Cups of uncooked white rice to grams is one multiplication by 185, the weight of a 240 ml cup of dry grains. Because rice does not compress, that density holds however you fill the cup, which makes the arithmetic unusually dependable compared with the flour and sugar pages.

The reverse direction is the one most people actually need, because rice is sold by weight and cooked by the cup. Dividing a bag size by 185 tells you how many cup-sized batches are in it before you open it.

grams = cups × 185
cups = grams ÷ 185
grams per tablespoon = 185 ÷ 16 ≈ 11.6
1 kg bag ÷ 185 ≈ 5.4 cups dry

Worked example: a pilaf for six calls for 1½ cups of dry rice. That is 1.5 × 185 = 277.5 grams, displayed as 278. If your shopping is metric, a 500 gram bag is 500 ÷ 185 = 2.7 cups, so the bag makes not quite two batches of that pilaf — useful to know before you start rather than halfway through.

The conversion the formula deliberately will not do is dry to cooked. Packet directions typically pair one cup of dry rice with about two cups of water and give roughly three cups cooked, so the water absorbed is carried into the final weight rather than lost. That means a cup of cooked rice holds only about a third of a cup of dry rice, and applying the 185 grams per cup figure to cooked rice would overstate the amount of actual grain by around three times.

A note on the density itself. Published figures for uncooked white rice vary a little: this tool uses the 185 grams a cup that USDA nutrient data gives for raw long-grain white rice, while King Arthur Baking lists 198 grams. That spread reflects real differences between varieties and between measuring sessions rather than an error in either source. Long-grain, basmati and jasmine are close enough that a single figure serves them all for cooking purposes.

How to use the cups of rice to grams

Type the cups and read the grams, or tap Swap to convert a gram weight back into cups. This page works from 185 grams for a 240 ml cup of uncooked white rice, which is exactly the figure USDA nutrient data gives for raw long-grain white rice. Rice is one of the more honest ingredients to measure by volume: the grains are hard, dry and roughly uniform, so they do not compress under a scooping cup the way flour does and there is no packing technique to get wrong. Level the cup and you have measured it. The one thing you do have to get right is far more basic than technique, and it is the thing this page exists to nail down. Rinsing is the only fill-related variable worth a mention, and it changes the loose starch on the surface of the grains rather than the weight of what you measured.

That thing is whether the recipe means dry rice or cooked rice, because the two are not close. Rice absorbs a large amount of water as it cooks and the water does not go anywhere — it ends up inside the grains — so both the weight and the volume climb steeply. Typical packet directions for long-grain white rice pair one cup of dry rice with around two cups of water and yield about three cups cooked. Work through the arithmetic and a cup of cooked rice contains roughly a third of a cup of dry rice: nearly the same weight in the cup, but a third of the actual grain and three times the water. That is not an approximation standing in for a difficult calculation; it is simply where the water went, and it is why no single density figure can convert between the two states for you.

This is where meals go wrong in both directions. Cooking recipes almost always mean uncooked rice, because that is what you put in the pan. Nutrition labels, calorie counts and meal-prep portions almost always mean cooked rice, because that is what ends up on the plate. Read one as the other and a side dish for four becomes a side dish for one, or a calorie count comes out three times too high. If you weigh, weigh in the state the recipe intends: dry rice on the scale before the water goes in, or cooked rice on the scale after it comes off the heat, and never convert between the two using the density on this page. The tell is usually the verb sitting next to the measurement: a line that says add one cup of rice to the pan means dry, while a label saying one cup of rice contains so many calories means cooked and on the plate.

Across common white rices the dry figure travels well. Long-grain, basmati and jasmine all sit close together per dry cup, so 185 grams is a fair working number for the bag in most kitchens; note that published charts differ a little, and King Arthur Baking gives a slightly heavier 198 grams a cup for uncooked white rice, which is the kind of spread you should expect between varieties and sources. Brown rice weighs about the same dry but drinks more water and takes considerably longer to cook, so it changes the yield rather than the starting weight. Short-grain and sushi rices are not covered by this figure, and glutinous or sticky rice is usually soaked before cooking, which puts water into the grain long before it reaches the pan — weigh those dry and before soaking if you want a number you can repeat next time. The values here use a 240 ml cup.

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