Grams to Cups

Grams turn into cups through the weight of a cup

A gram measures weight and a cup measures volume, so there is no single “grams in a cup”: it depends on what fills the cup. A US cup of all-purpose flour weighs 125 grams, of granulated sugar 200 grams, of butter 227 grams. To turn grams into cups, divide 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 — the reference behind American nutrition labels; water is counted from its volume.

Three steps

1. Find the weight of one cup of the ingredient — in the table below. For all-purpose flour it is 125 grams.
2. Divide the grams by it. 200 grams of flour ÷ 125 = 1.6 cups.
3. Round to a kitchen measure if you need one. Measuring cups come in eighths and thirds: 1.6 cups is just under 1 5/8 cups.

What 100 and 200 grams of each ingredient come to in cups

If the ingredient does not matter yet, start from how many cups 100 grams is — every ingredient at once. The opposite question, how many grams a recipe’s cups weigh, is on the cups to grams page.

Where this actually comes up

• European recipes in an American kitchen. A British or German recipe asks for 250 g of flour; with only measuring cups that is 2 cups.
• Baking by the package. A 500 g bag of sugar holds 2.5 cups — enough to tell whether one bag covers the recipe.
• Butter from a block. A 250 g block of European butter is 1.1 cups, slightly more than the one cup (two US sticks) many recipes call for.
• Rice and oats for a meal plan. 100 grams of uncooked rice is 0.54 cups, and the same weight of rolled oats fills 1.23 cups — oats are that much lighter.
• Nutrition labels. Serving sizes are printed in grams; knowing that 30 grams of flour is 0.24 cups turns a label back into a measure.
• Scaling a recipe. Halving 300 grams of powdered sugar gives 150 grams — about 1.25 cups unsifted.

Packed or loose, raw or cooked

The same ingredient can fill a cup in two ways, and the weight changes. 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. American recipes mean packed brown sugar unless they say otherwise.

Water: a gram is a milliliter

1 ml of water weighs about 1 g, so for water the calculator does not need a table: a US cup of water weighs its own volume, 236.6 grams. That makes 100 grams of water 0.42 cups, exactly the volume of 100 ml on the milliliters to cups converter. For any other liquid — milk, oil, honey — the weight of a cup differs from its volume, and this page uses the USDA figure.

Where the gram and the cup come from

The gram was defined in France in 1795 as the weight of one cubic centimeter of water at the temperature of melting ice — which is why a milliliter of water still weighs about a gram. The American cup grew out of kitchen practice: 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. Most of the world cooks by weight; American recipes kept the cup, and grams to cups is the bridge between the two.

US cup or metric cup

This page uses the US customary cup of 236.6 ml. Australia, New Zealand and Canada use a metric cup of 250 ml, 5.7 % larger, so the same weight fills slightly fewer metric cups. Nutrition labels in the US use yet another “legal” cup of 240 ml. Every result page names the metric figure on one line under the answer. The same cup in milliliters is on the cups to milliliters page.

Doing it in your head

Remember three anchors: a cup of flour is about 125 g, a cup of sugar about 200 g, a cup of butter or water about 230 g. So 250 grams of flour is two cups, 100 grams of sugar half a cup, and 115 grams of butter half a cup. For anything in between, a cup has 16 tablespoons: one tablespoon of flour is about 7.81 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 all-purpose flour it is USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy entry 168894 “Wheat flour, white, all-purpose, enriched, bleached”, portion “1 cup” = 125 grams. Other tables disagree 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. For baking, a kitchen scale is the exact answer; this converter is the reference for when a recipe and a kitchen speak different units.