Cups to Grams Converter

Grams per cup — all 14 ingredients

The formula

Every conversion on this page is the same single multiplication. Each ingredient stores one number — how many grams fit in one 240 ml cup — and the tool multiplies your cup figure by it. Nothing else varies, which is why one expression covers all fourteen ingredients and every fraction of a cup between them.

Run backwards, the same number becomes a divisor, so a gram weight lifted from a metric recipe turns into cups without a second table. A tablespoon is one sixteenth of a cup, which gives you the spoon weight from the same density.

grams = cups × grams-per-cup
cups = grams ÷ grams-per-cup
grams per tablespoon = grams-per-cup ÷ 16
1 cup all-purpose flour: 1 × 120 = 120 g

Worked example, using the engine’s own densities. A cookie recipe calls for 2¼ cups of all-purpose flour, ¾ cup of granulated sugar and 1 cup of butter. Flour: 2.25 × 120 = 270 g. Sugar: 0.75 × 200 = 150 g. Butter: 1 × 226.8 = 226.8 g, shown as 227. That is 647 grams of flour, sugar and butter weighed into one bowl without a measuring cup ever leaving the drawer.

What moves is never the formula, it is the density. Take the same 2¼ cups of flour and scoop it from the bag at King Arthur’s compacted figure of 160 grams a cup and you get 360 grams instead of 270 — an extra 90 grams, three-quarters of a cup of flour that the recipe never asked for and that nothing in the bowl will reveal until the cake comes out dense.

Two honest limits. Butter’s 226.8 grams a cup comes from the US stick convention, where a cup is two quarter-pound sticks and therefore half a pound exactly, rather than from a measured density. And the tool converts an ingredient into its own weight, never one ingredient into another: 340 grams of honey is not a drop-in replacement for 340 grams of sugar, because honey carries water and is sweeter by weight.

How to use the cups to grams converter

Pick the ingredient first, because that choice is the whole conversion — the tool multiplies your cups by that ingredient’s grams-per-cup and does nothing else. Type the cups as a decimal or a fraction and the gram figure updates as you type; tap Swap when you are holding a gram weight from a European recipe and want to know how many cups it fills. The list covers fourteen everyday ingredients, from water and milk through three flours, three sugars, butter, oil, honey, cocoa, rolled oats and uncooked white rice, and each stores its own weight for a 240 ml cup. Because the arithmetic is linear, half a cup is exactly half the grams and three cups exactly triple, so a single lookup scales an entire recipe. The reference table below adds the level-tablespoon weight for each ingredient, the amount most often needed and least often printed.

The reason there is no universal grams-in-a-cup number is that a cup measures space, not mass, and ingredients fill that space very differently. Honey packs 340 grams into it; cocoa powder manages 85. Worse, some ingredients change weight depending on how the cup is filled. King Arthur Baking states that a cup of all-purpose flour holds around 120 grams when you fluff, sprinkle and scrape, but up to 160 grams when the flour is compacted — a third more flour from nothing but technique. Serious Eats puts the same spread at four to six ounces a cup, with the spooning method landing near four and a half ounces and dip-and-sweep well above it. Granulated sugar, by contrast, behaves: the crystals are hard and do not compress, so a cup lands near 200 grams however you scoop it. The error is ingredient-specific, which is exactly what makes it so easy to miss.

Even the cup itself is not one thing. The US customary cup is 236.5882365 ml, one sixteenth of a 231-cubic-inch US gallon. The FDA defines a different cup for nutrition labels, a flat 240 ml, alongside 15 ml for a tablespoon and 5 ml for a teaspoon, under 21 CFR 101.9. Australia, New Zealand and Canada use a metric cup of 250 ml, so four of them fill a litre exactly, and Australia standardised a 20 ml tablespoon under AS 1325 — four teaspoons, not three. The spread from the smallest of those cups to the largest is about 5.7 percent, invisible in a soup and very visible in a cake. This tool works from the 240 ml cup, so a British or Australian recipe written in cups is already a slightly different recipe before density enters the picture at all.

Whether any of this matters depends on what you are making. For liquids, volume is honest: a jug reads the same however you pour, and stock, milk or water in a soup, braise or pan sauce carries enough tolerance that a few grams either way vanishes. For most savoury cooking, cups are genuinely fine. Where volume stops being fine is anything with a ratio at its heart — bread, where hydration is water weight against flour weight; pastry, where the fat-to-flour proportion decides tenderness; and any batter leavened with baking powder or soda, which is dosed against the flour. Add thirty unintended grams of flour to a cake and you have quietly changed every ratio in it at once. That is why professional kitchens weigh, and why most recipes written outside the United States are given in grams to begin with.

Frequently asked questions