Cups of Sugar to Grams

Cups to grams — quick reference

The formula

Cups of granulated sugar to grams is one multiplication by a single density, 200 grams for every 240 ml cup. Because sugar does not compress, that density holds regardless of how the cup was filled, which is not something you can say about most dry ingredients in a baking recipe.

The tablespoon and teaspoon figures fall out of the same number: a cup is sixteen tablespoons and forty-eight teaspoons, so dividing the cup weight gives you the small measures without a separate chart.

grams = cups × 200
cups = grams ÷ 200
grams per tablespoon = 200 ÷ 16 = 12.5
grams per teaspoon = 200 ÷ 48 ≈ 4.2

Worked example: a sponge recipe calls for 1½ cups of granulated sugar, and you also want to hold back 2 tablespoons for dusting the tin. The main quantity is 1.5 × 200 = 300 grams. The two tablespoons are 2 × 12.5 = 25 grams. So you weigh 275 grams into the batter and 25 grams into the dusting bowl, and the whole recipe stays in one unit from start to finish.

Run the other way, a European recipe asking for 250 grams of sugar is 250 ÷ 200 = 1.25 cups, which is one cup plus four level tablespoons. That is a clean conversion, and the fact that it lands so neatly is a consequence of sugar being one of the few ingredients where the cup and the gram agree with each other reliably.

One caveat worth keeping in view: the density is for granulated white sugar. Brown sugar is heavier at 213 grams a packed cup because the molasses film binds the crystals and the recipe expects you to compress them, and powdered sugar is much lighter at 113 grams an unsifted cup because it is milled fine and holds air. Substituting one sugar for another by the cup therefore changes the weight as well as the flavour and texture.

How to use the cups of sugar to grams

Type the cups and read the grams, or tap Swap to go from a gram weight in a metric recipe back to cups. The figure this page works from is 200 grams for a 240 ml cup of granulated white sugar, and the useful thing about it is how stable it is. Granulated sugar is the one common dry baking ingredient that volume measures honestly, because the crystals are hard, dry and roughly uniform in size. They do not deform when a metal cup is pushed into the bag and they do not trap much air when spooned, so a scooped cup and a carefully spooned cup arrive at essentially the same weight. Compare that with flour, where King Arthur Baking reports a spread from 120 grams a cup to as much as 160 grams depending purely on how the cup was filled. Sugar simply does not have that failure mode, which makes it the one dry ingredient on this site where the honest advice is that the cup is fine.

You can see the same point in how published charts treat the two ingredients. King Arthur lists brown sugar specifically as “packed” and gives flour a whole technique to go with its weight, but granulated sugar just gets a single number, 198 grams a cup, with no qualifier attached. That is the chart quietly telling you the fill method does not change the answer. The two-gram gap between that 198 and the 200 this tool uses is smaller than the variation between brands of sugar and far smaller than anything you could detect in a finished bake, so treat them as the same figure and do not chase the difference. It is worth noticing what that reliability actually buys you: granulated sugar is one of the very few places in a recipe where two cooks working from the same printed line will put the same amount in the bowl without either of them thinking about it.

So why weigh sugar at all? Three reasons, and the first two are about workflow rather than accuracy. If you are already weighing the flour and butter, weighing the sugar into the same tared bowl is faster than fetching a second cup and washing it. And scaling a recipe up or down is trivial arithmetic in grams, where in cups you end up dividing three-quarters of a cup by three. The third reason is the real one: ratio-critical work. In caramel, meringue, Italian buttercream, brittle and candy generally, the sugar-to-water or sugar-to-egg-white balance decides whether the mixture sets, crystallises or seizes, and there a five-gram error has consequences that a cake would simply absorb. Sugar in those preparations is not a flavour so much as a structural material, and the temperature it reaches and the crystals it forms depend on how much of it is in the pan relative to the water or egg white beside it.

This page is specifically granulated white sugar. Caster or superfine sugar is the same sugar milled to a smaller crystal and weighs close enough per cup to treat as identical; the finer grind dissolves faster, which is why it is preferred for meringues and delicate batters, not because it measures differently. The densities that genuinely diverge are brown sugar at 213 grams a packed cup and powdered sugar at 113 grams an unsifted cup, each of which has its own page here. Coarse or raw sugars such as demerara and turbinado sit somewhere else again: the crystals are much larger, they stack with more air between them, and they are usually scattered over the top of a bake for crunch rather than dissolved into it, so they are not a substitution for granulated sugar even where the weight happens to work out. The values on this page use a 240 ml cup, levelled off.

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