Cups to Grams Converter

Why there is no single answer

A cup measures volume. A gram measures mass. Converting between them requires knowing density, which is a property of the specific substance — so "1 cup in grams" has no answer until you say what is in the cup.

The spread is not subtle. One US cup holds about 125 g of spooned all-purpose flour, 200 g of granulated sugar, 227 g of butter, and 340 g of honey. That is nearly a threefold range across four ordinary baking ingredients. Any site publishing a single cups-to-grams factor is simply wrong, and following it will ruin a recipe.

Flour is the worst offender

Flour is compressible, so its weight per cup depends entirely on how it got into the cup. Spooning flour lightly into a cup and levelling it gives roughly 125 g. Dipping the cup into the bag and scooping compacts it, and can give 150 g or more — twenty percent more flour than the recipe intended.

Twenty percent extra flour is the difference between a tender cake and a dense one, and it is the most common reason a baking recipe fails for one person and works for another with identical ingredients. The figure used here assumes the spoon-and-level method, which is what most published recipes intend.

Cups are not the same size everywhere either

A US customary cup is 236.588 ml. A US legal cup, used for nutrition labelling, is 240 ml. A metric cup, standard in Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, is 250 ml. An older Imperial cup is 284 ml.

So an Australian recipe calling for a cup wants about 6% more than an American one, and an old British recipe wants 20% more. Combined with the ingredient density problem, a cup measurement carried across two conventions can be off by a quarter or more. The figures above use the US customary cup, which is what American recipes mean.

The case for buying a scale

Every professional kitchen and essentially every European recipe works in grams, for the reasons above: mass is unambiguous, it does not depend on technique, and it scales cleanly. Halving 375 g is arithmetic; halving three-quarters of a cup is a puzzle involving tablespoons.

A digital scale costs very little and removes an entire class of failure from baking. If you are working from American recipes and want reliable results, converting them to weights once and writing the grams in the margin is time well spent — and this converter exists to make that conversion possible at all. For liquids, where volume is genuinely the right measure, the ml to fluid ounces converter is the appropriate tool.

Frequently asked questions