Olive oil in grams, and the two cups that disagree
Olive oil weighs 216 grams to the US cup, and the USDA is the only authority that filled a whole one. King Arthur weighs a quarter cup and stops, at 50 g, which is 200 if you multiply it out and 16 short of the cup somebody put on a scale. Go looking past the two of them and olive oil stops being named at all: the metric and Japanese tables fold it into a generic oil row, so those columns here stay empty rather than borrow one.
A cup of olive oil, and the quarter cup we will not multiply
The USDA measured a cup of olive oil at 216 g. King Arthur publishes a quarter cup at 50 g, and multiplying it by four gives 200, 16 grams short of what the USDA read on a whole cup. We do not build a cup out of a published quarter for the same reason we do not double a published half: the figure on the chart is what someone weighed, not the start of a sum. The methodology page sets out where that rule came from.
Olive oil conversions in full
Grams beside millilitres, spoons first. A whole cup of olive oil in grams is the common lookup; the spoon rows are the USDA's own published figures rather than fractions of the cup.
| Olive oil | Grams | Millilitres |
|---|---|---|
| 1 teaspoon | 4.5 g | 4.9 ml |
| 1 tablespoon | 13.5 g | 14.8 ml |
| 1/4 cup | 54 g | 59.1 ml |
| 1/3 cup | 72 g | 78.9 ml |
| 1/2 cup | 108 g | 118.3 ml |
| 3/4 cup | 162 g | 177.4 ml |
| 1 cup | 216 g | 236.6 ml |
| 2 cups | 432 g | 473.2 ml |
Density used: 0.91 g per ml, against water's 1.00.
Read the two columns side by side and the density shows itself: 236.6 millilitres of olive oil weigh 216 g, while the same jug of water weighs 237. Oil floats on water for the reason this table makes visible.
The cups nobody filled with olive oil
Most ingredients on this site carry a metric cup and a Japanese cup from charts that measured them. Olive oil carries neither, and the blank is deliberate. No Australian or New Zealand authority we reached publishes a cup of olive oil. The Japanese standard tables have no olive-oil row either: Benricho prints 180 g for a cup of oil in general, one line covering cooking oil, olive oil and sesame oil together. We could copy that 180 onto this page and call it olive oil. Doing so would put a name on a number its own source refused to give it, and the reader would never know. So the columns stay empty and say why.
A liquid has no fill method, so the cup works here
Conversion charts like to warn that a cup can swing by a fifth depending on how firmly you pack it. That warning belongs to flour and brown sugar. Roskachestvo, the Russian standards agency, puts it plainly for liquids: there is no heap, and the weight follows the volume. Oil settles level in whatever holds it, so a measuring jug and a scale agree, and the 216 g cup on this page is the one figure here that does not depend on your technique. If you own a jug, oil is the ingredient you can stop worrying about.
Questions about olive oil weight
- How many grams is a cup of olive oil?
- 216 g, from the USDA, the only authority that publishes a whole cup of olive oil. King Arthur weighs a quarter cup at 50 g, and four of those come to 200, so the two published figures disagree by 16 g on the same cup. We print the one that was measured whole.
- Why does a cup of olive oil weigh less than a cup of water?
- Oil is less dense. The same 236.6 millilitres holds 216 g of olive oil against 237 g of water, so a cup of oil runs about 21 g lighter. That gap is the density doing its work, not a measuring error.
- Does it matter how I pour oil into the cup?
- No, and that makes oil the easy one. Flour changes weight depending on whether you spoon it or scoop it. Oil finds its own level, so the cup holds what the cup holds, and a scale and a measuring jug agree.
Sources
USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy for the 216 gram cup, the 13.5 gram tablespoon and the 4.5 gram teaspoon. King Arthur Baking for the quarter cup. Roskachestvo for the rule that liquids carry no heap. The Kagawa Nutrition University tables, as reproduced by Benricho, for the generic oil row we declined to relabel. Full citations on the sources page.