Cups to Grams

A cup has no weight of its own

A cup measures volume; grams measure weight. How many grams a cup holds depends on what is in it: a US cup of all-purpose flour weighs 125 grams, of granulated sugar 200 grams, of honey 339 grams. To turn cups into grams, multiply by the weight of one cup of that ingredient.

The cup here is the US customary cup: half a US pint, 8 US fluid ounces, 236.6 ml. The weight of one cup of each ingredient except water is the one the US Department of Agriculture publishes in FoodData Central; water is counted from its volume.

Three steps

1. Find the weight of one cup of the ingredient — in the table below. For butter it is 227 grams.
2. Turn the recipe’s fraction into a number. 1/2 is 0.5, 1/3 about 0.333, 3/4 is 0.75, 2 1/2 is 2.5 — or simply type the fraction into the calculator as the recipe writes it.
3. Multiply. 1/2 cup of butter = 0.5 × 227 = 113.5 grams.

Grams in 1/4, 1/2 and 1 cup of each ingredient

If the ingredient does not matter yet, start from how many grams 1 cup is — every ingredient at once. The opposite question, how many cups a weight fills, is on the grams to cups page.

Where this actually comes up

• American recipes on a kitchen scale.2 1/2 cups of flour are 312.5 grams — weighing is faster and more exact than leveling three scoops.
• Butter by the stick. A US stick is half a cup, 113.5 grams; a recipe asking for 3/4 cup needs 170.3 grams.
• Sugar in a cake. 1 1/2 cups of granulated sugar is 300 grams; the same cups of packed brown sugar weigh 330 grams.
• Rice for a meal. A cup of uncooked white rice is 185 grams, and a cup of cooked rice 158 grams — useful when a nutrition label counts grams.
• Liquids by weight. A cup of whole milk weighs 244 grams, a cup of olive oil only 216 grams — oil is lighter than water.
• Sticky ingredients. A cup of honey is 339 grams and a cup of peanut butter 258 grams; weighing them avoids scraping a measuring cup.

Packed or loose, raw or cooked

Some ingredients fill a cup in two ways, and the weight changes with it. Packed brown sugar weighs 220 grams a cup, loosely spooned 145 grams; unsifted powdered sugar 120 grams, sifted 100 grams; uncooked white rice 185 grams, cooked 158 grams. Each state is its own choice in the list, and every result page names the other one. When an American recipe says “brown sugar”, it means packed.

Water: a milliliter is a gram

1 ml of water weighs about 1 g, so a US cup of water weighs its own volume, 236.6 grams. For water this calculator does not use a table at all; the same number in milliliters is on the cups to milliliters page. Every other liquid here — milk, oil, cream, honey — uses its USDA weight, because a cup of it is not a cup of water.

Where the cup and the gram come from

The American cup is a kitchen measure: cookbooks of the late 19th century, Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 among them, taught level measures with a standard cup, and the US cup settled at half a pint, 8 US fluid ounces. The gram was defined in France in 1795 as the weight of one cubic centimeter of water at the temperature of melting ice. Most of the world writes recipes in grams; converting cups to grams is how an American recipe meets a kitchen scale.

US cup or metric cup

This page uses the US customary cup of 236.6 ml. A recipe from Australia, New Zealand or Canada may mean the metric cup of 250 ml, 5.7 % larger, so its cup of flour weighs a little more. US nutrition labels use yet another “legal” cup of 240 ml. Every result page names the metric figure on one line under the answer.

Doing it in your head

Three anchors cover most baking: flour about 125 g a cup, sugar about 200 g, butter and water about 230 g. Fractions follow: half a cup of sugar is 100 g, a quarter cup of flour about 31 g, three quarters of a cup of butter about 170 g. For small amounts, a cup has 16 tablespoons, so a tablespoon of sugar is about 12.5 grams at the USDA cup weight.

Where the cup weights come from

Every weight on this page except water’s is a household-measure portion from USDA FoodData Central, the SR Legacy dataset (the final release of the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference). Each result page names the exact entry — for butter it is USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy entry 173430 “Butter, without salt”, portion “1 cup” = 227 grams. Other tables differ by a few percent — King Arthur Baking counts a cup of flour as 120 g, spooned in lightly — because scooped ingredients weigh what the scooping makes them weigh.