Cups to grams converter
Flour fills a US cup at 120 grams, a metric cup at 125, and a Japanese cup at 110. One word, three weights, because a cup is not one size. Tell the converter which cup you mean and it answers with the figure the authority that measured that cup published.
Butter: sticks, blocks and a ruler
Butter is sold as a printed stick in America and a smooth block everywhere else. A stick is 113 grams; a European block is 250, a Polish one 200. With no scale, divide the grams you need by 25 and cut that many centimetres off a 250 gram block, the method the butter master sets out.
The cup you mean changes the answer
Every leading converter bakes one cup size into its math and names the others only in passing. The five below are all called a cup somewhere, and they run from 200 to 284 millilitres, a 40 percent spread. The selector above applies whichever one you pick and shows it in the result, so a Japanese or British recipe stops being a guess.
- US customary (236.6 ml). Eight US fluid ounces, the cup American recipes assume.
- US legal (240 ml). The cup on US nutrition labels, a little larger than the recipe cup.
- Metric (250 ml). The 250 ml cup Australia and New Zealand share. Where the two countries weigh it differently, this carries the figure we publish.
- Australian metric (250 ml). The same 250 ml cup, weighed as the Australian charts weigh it. Plain flour is 150 g here against the 125 g a New Zealand book means.
- Japanese (200 ml). The 200 ml Japanese kitchen cup. Ingredients arrive lighter than a US cup predicts.
- UK imperial (284 ml). Ten imperial fluid ounces, the pre-metric British cup.
Where our numbers come from, and where we stop
For the US, metric and Japanese cups the converter uses the weight the matching authority measured, not the US cup scaled by volume. That distinction is the whole point: the Japanese tables weigh a cup of flour at 110 grams where a straight ratio predicts 101, because bulk density is not linear. Where no one measured a cup of an ingredient, the tool estimates it from the US density and labels the result an estimate rather than dress a guess as a fact. Foreign cups measured in grams, a Japanese go of rice or a Polish szklanka of sugar, live on the world measures pages and the twenty ingredient pages, each with its source. To convert a whole ingredient list at once, the recipe converter reads a pasted recipe by its country of origin, and you can embed this converter on your own site.
Common equivalents
- 1 cup = 16 tablespoons
- 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons
- 1 cup = 48 teaspoons
- 1 US cup = 236.6 ml
- 1 ounce = 28.35 g
Those ratios hold inside one country's set of measures. The exact size of each unit, and the two places where one American name covers two sizes, are on the units reference.
Questions about converting cups to grams
- How many grams is a cup of flour?
- About 120 grams for a US cup by King Arthur, 125 by the USDA, because they filled the cup differently. Pick the cup standard above and the tool answers with the figure the matching authority measured.
- Is a cup 240 ml or 250 ml?
- Both exist. The US recipe cup is 236.6 ml, the US nutrition-label cup is 240, and the metric cup Australia and New Zealand use is 250. That is why the converter asks which one you mean instead of guessing.
- Why does a Japanese cup give fewer grams?
- The Japanese cup holds 200 ml, and the Japanese standard tables weighed each ingredient in it rather than scaling the US cup down. The tool uses their measured figure, so a Japanese cup of flour reads 110 grams, not the 101 a straight volume ratio would predict.
- How many grams is a stick of butter?
- 113 grams, and the butter helper below turns sticks, tablespoons, cups and grams into each other, plus how many centimetres to cut off a 250 gram block if you have no scale.
- Does the tool handle heaped spoons?
- A recipe means a level spoon unless it says otherwise, so the converter answers level. A heaped spoon of flour runs 10 to 20 percent heavier, and the heaped versus level page collects what the charts publish for it.
Sources
King Arthur Baking and USDA FoodData Central for the US cup and spoon weights. The Kagawa Nutrition University standard tables, via Benricho, for the 200 ml Japanese cup. Edmonds, Chelsea, Sanitarium and Australian Women's Weekly for the 250 ml metric cup. NIST and FDA labeling rules for the cup volumes themselves. Every figure and its source is listed on the sources page, and the reasoning behind each choice is on the methodology page.