Grams to Cups Converter

How to use this converter

1. Pick the ingredient first. This is not a formality. A cup of rolled oats weighs 89 g and a cup of honey weighs 339 g, so choosing the wrong row is a bigger error than any other mistake you can make on this page.
2. Type the weight. The result updates as you type. There is no Calculate button because there is nothing to wait for.
3. Say how you fill the cup. Spoon the flour in and level it, or dip the cup into the bag and sweep. For flour those two habits are 22 g apart on the same cup, which is most of a fifth of a cup of flour you did not mean to add.
4. Check which cup the recipe means if it came from outside the United States. An Australian cup is 250 ml and an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml, not 15.
5. Read the breakdown, not the decimal. "0.83 cups" is not a thing you can measure. "13 tbsp + 1 tsp" is.

Why this converter is different

Search this and you will be told a cup of all-purpose flour weighs 120 g, 125 g, and 125.2 g, on the same page of results, by pages that do not acknowledge each other exists. None of them tells you why they disagree. The reason is not a rounding argument, and it is not small.

• It asks how you fill the cup. King Arthur publishes 120 g for a cup of all-purpose flour spooned in and levelled. America's Test Kitchen publishes 142 g for the same cup dipped into the bag and swept. Both are right, for the habit each describes, and the gap between them is 18 percent. Every other converter picks one silently, or splits the difference and hopes.
• Every ingredient carries its own source. The card tells you whether the number came from King Arthur's measured chart or from USDA FoodData Central, and it shows the arithmetic that got from the published figure to your answer. Other pages list their sources in a footer; none say which number came from where.
• Liquids are handled properly. King Arthur lists water, milk, cream and yogurt all at 227 g per cup, which is the old kitchen convention that a cup of liquid weighs eight ounces. USDA actually measured them: water is 237 g, whole milk 249 g. We use USDA for liquids and say so on the card.
• It hands back measuring cups, not decimals. The answer to 100 g of flour is not "0.83 cups". It is thirteen tablespoons and a teaspoon, which is a thing you can do with equipment you own.
• Five cup standards, with the right spoons attached. Switch to metric and the tablespoon becomes 20 ml, because that is what an Australian tablespoon is. Converters that change the cup and leave the spoon at 15 ml quietly break every recipe they touch.
• The math is tested on every build. Twenty-two sourced cases plus thirty thousand generated assertions: the published anchors reproduce exactly, every conversion round-trips, and no combination of 122 ingredients, five cup standards and two filling methods can produce a negative or infinite result. If any of it drifts, the site does not deploy.

How it works (the math)

One published number per ingredient, and two multipliers. That is the whole model, and it is deliberately not a density calculation.

gramsPerCup = published x methodFactor x (cupVolume / 236.5882365 ml)

cups  = grams / gramsPerCup
grams = cups x gramsPerCup

1. The published number is grams in one US customary cup, and it was weighed by somebody, not derived. For flours, sugars, fats, nuts, grains and cheeses it comes from King Arthur Baking's Ingredient Weight Chart, which is the closest thing American baking has to a standard reference. Where King Arthur publishes a smaller measure — a quarter cup of cornstarch, a tablespoon of kosher salt — the card shows you that original measure so the scaling is visible rather than implied.

2. The method factor is 1 for spoon-and-level, which is the convention every published weight here assumes, and 142/120 for dip-and-sweep. That pair is the actual disagreement between two named test kitchens on the same cup of all-purpose flour, not an estimate we invented. It is applied only to fine powders that pack down when you scoop them: flours, starches, cocoa, confectioners' sugar, milk powder. Granulated sugar, nuts, chocolate chips, liquids and fats do not compress, so the control switches itself off and tells you why rather than pretending to work.

3. The volume ratio reinterprets the same bulk density for a differently-sized cup. A metric cup is 250 ml against the US cup's 236.59, so it holds 5.7 percent more of whatever you put in it. Each standard carries its own tablespoon and teaspoon, which is where the Australian 20 ml tablespoon lives.

The liquid exception, and why it exists. King Arthur's chart lists water, buttermilk, cream, sour cream and yogurt all at exactly 227 g per cup, and vegetable oil at 198 g. Those are eight and seven avoirdupois ounces, which is the old kitchen shorthand that a cup of liquid weighs eight ounces. It is close enough for a recipe and wrong as a measurement. USDA FoodData Central weighed them: water is 237 g, whole milk 249 g, heavy cream 238 g, olive oil 216 g. For those ingredients this tool uses USDA and labels the row accordingly. King Arthur's syrups — honey, corn syrup, molasses — are density-consistent and are kept as published.

Limitation. Every number here is a published average for a typical bag of a typical ingredient. Flour picks up moisture in a humid kitchen and settles in a bag that has been sitting since spring, and neither is an input to anything. The honest use of this page is to get you close, and to convince you that for bread, pastry and anything you want to repeat, a twelve-dollar scale ends the argument permanently.

Three worked examples

100 grams of all-purpose flour

The most-searched conversion of the lot. Spooned and levelled it is 0.83 cups, which is thirteen tablespoons and a teaspoon. Dipped and swept, the same 100 g only fills 0.70 cups — because a dipped cup already holds 142 g, your 100 g does not reach as far up it. Read that the other way round and it is the sentence worth remembering: if a recipe wanted 120 g and you dipped, you just added 142 g and your dough is 18 percent drier than the person who wrote it intended.

250 grams of flour, from a British recipe

On the US cup that is 2.08 cups, or two cups plus a tablespoon and a teaspoon. Switch the cup standard to imperial, though, and one cup becomes 284 ml and therefore 144 g of flour, so the same 250 g is only 1.74 cups. A British book from before metric weights took over means the second one. This is the failure mode that makes people think they cannot bake: the arithmetic was fine and the cup was a different object. If you are making pastry from a book like that, a food processor gets the butter into the flour before your hands warm it, which is the other half of the same problem.

200 grams of rice, and the cup that came in the box

Dry long-grain rice is 198 g per cup, so 200 g is almost exactly one cup. But the plastic cup that came with your rice cooker is not a US cup at all, it is a Japanese gō, 180 ml, which holds about 150 g. Measure rice with it, then measure water to the line in the bowl, and the machine is right; mix the two systems and you get porridge. Our rice cooker guide covers which models label the bowl clearly, and the rice to water ratio page has the ratios by grain once you have weighed it. Either way you will want a colander for the rinse.

Frequently asked questions

How many grams are in a cup?

There is no single number, and any page that gives you one is guessing on your behalf. A US cup holds 120 g of all-purpose flour, 198 g of granulated sugar, 226 g of butter, 237 g of water, 89 g of rolled oats and 339 g of honey. The cup is a fixed volume, 236.59 ml, and what it weighs depends entirely on what you put in it. The only conversion that works without naming an ingredient is water, and only because water was the original reference.

How many cups is 100 grams?

For all-purpose flour, 0.83 cups, which is easier to measure as 13 tablespoons plus a teaspoon. For granulated sugar it is just over half a cup. For butter it is 0.44 cups, near enough to seven tablespoons. For rolled oats, 1.12 cups, because oats are the lightest thing in a normal pantry. Pick the ingredient in the converter above and you get your own number rather than the flour one.

Is a cup of flour 120 g or 125 g?

Both figures are in circulation and the difference is a measuring habit, not an error. King Arthur publishes 120 g for flour spooned into the cup and levelled off, which is the convention their recipes are written to. Many charts print 125 g as a round middle number. America's Test Kitchen publishes 142 g, because their recipes assume you dip the cup straight into the bag. Use the number that matches the book you are cooking from, and if the book does not say, spoon and level: it is the gentler error and it is what most modern recipes assume.

Why is a cup of water 237 g and not 227 g?

Because 227 g is eight ounces of weight and a cup is eight fluid ounces, which is a measure of volume. They are only the same word. A US cup is 236.59 ml and water is very close to one gram per millilitre, so a cup of it weighs about 237 g, which is what USDA measured. The eight-ounce shortcut is harmless in a soup and misleading in a bread dough, where hydration is the whole recipe.

Are US, metric and UK cups the same size?

No, and the gap is big enough to ruin a cake. A US customary cup is 236.59 ml, the US nutrition-label cup is 240 ml, an Australian or New Zealand metric cup is 250 ml, an old imperial British cup is 284 ml, and a Japanese cup is 200 ml. Imperial to Japanese is a 42 percent difference on the same word. The spoons diverge too: an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml where everyone else's is about 15, so an Australian recipe asking for two tablespoons of baking powder means half again as much as you would measure. The cup standard control above handles both together.

Related tools

• Egg Boiling Timer — the boil time for the egg you actually have, adjusted for size and elevation.
• Rice to Water Ratio — once the rice is weighed, this is the water that goes with it.
• Browse all free kitchen tools by Nora →

What actually fixes this

A converter is a workaround. It turns one person's published average into your kitchen and hopes the averages hold. Three things end the problem instead of managing it.

• A scale, which costs less than a bag of good flour. Weight is the same everywhere and does not care how you scoop. Tare the bowl, pour to the number, move on. This is the single highest-value object in a home baking kitchen and it is usually under fifteen dollars.
• Straight-sided dry cups. A levelling sweep only levels if there is a flat rim to sweep against. Rounded plastic rims are why two people measuring carefully from the same bag get different weights.
• A spouted glass cup for liquids, read at eye level on the counter. Holding it up tilts it, and you read the meniscus wrong by a tablespoon or more every time.
• A processor for the recipes where flour weight decides everything. Pie and pastry dough is mostly a race against warm butter. See our best food processors for the bowls that handle a small, dry batch without turning it to paste.

Sources & methodology

• King Arthur Baking — Ingredient Weight Chart — the measured cup weight for every flour, sugar, fat, grain, nut and dairy solid in this tool, under the spoon-and-level convention.
• USDA FoodData Central — the 1-cup portion weights for water, milk, cream, yogurt, sour cream, the oils, honey and maple syrup. Each of those rows records its FDC identifier in the tool's data file.
• America's Test Kitchen / Cook's Illustrated — the 142 g dip-and-sweep cup of all-purpose flour, the other half of the measuring-method pair.
• 21 CFR 101.9 — the 240 ml US legal cup used on nutrition labels.

Dry and solid ingredients use King Arthur's measured cup weights; water, dairy and oils use USDA FoodData Central, because King Arthur's liquid rows follow the kitchen convention that a cup weighs eight ounces and USDA weighed them instead. Dip-and-sweep multiplies by 142/120, the published pair for all-purpose flour, and applies only to fine powders. Cup standards are US customary 236.5882365 ml, US legal 240 ml, metric 250 ml, imperial 284.130625 ml and Japanese 200 ml, each with its own tablespoon and teaspoon. A fixture suite asserts both published anchors exactly, 6,100 round trips, 4,000 measuring-cup breakdowns, every unit ladder including the 20 ml metric tablespoon, and 21,960 input combinations for finiteness on every build. Reviewed by Nora Whitfield, CIA Culinary Arts, ServSafe Certified. About Nora · Last reviewed September 5, 2026.

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Free for recipe blogs, baking schools, cooking classes and anyone who publishes recipes in grams for readers who own cups. Required attribution is baked into the snippet: no fee, no account, no analytics attached to the embed.

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