Cups to Grams: The Complete Baking Chart

If you’ve ever doubled a recipe and ended up with a dense, heavy cake, the measuring cup is usually to blame. A cup tells you how much space an ingredient fills, not how much it weighs, and those two things drift apart the moment you switch from flour to sugar to butter. This guide gives you the exact grams for every common baking ingredient, including the fractional cup amounts recipes actually use, and it’ll show you when weighing wins.

Why a cup of flour and a cup of sugar are not equal

A cup is a unit of volume. A gram is a unit of weight. To go from one to the other you’ll need the ingredient’s density, which is simply how tightly it packs into that cup of space.

Flour is light and full of air, so a cup holds roughly 120 grams. Granulated sugar is dense and pours tight, so the same cup holds about 200 grams. Honey is heavier still at around 340 grams per cup. That single fact is why you can’t use one “cups to grams” number for everything, and it’s why professional recipes give weights instead of cups.

If you’d rather skip the math, the Cups to Grams Converter picks the ingredient and does it instantly, both ways. Going the other direction? See grams to cups, or the quick answer in how many grams are in a cup.

The master cups to grams chart

These are the weights of one US cup of each ingredient. Use this as your quick reference, then see the fractional table below for half cups, third cups, and quarter cups.

Ingredient	1 cup (grams)	1 cup (ounces)
All-purpose flour	120 g	4.2 oz
Bread flour	127 g	4.5 oz
Cake flour	114 g	4.0 oz
Whole wheat flour	130 g	4.6 oz
Granulated sugar	200 g	7.1 oz
Brown sugar (packed)	220 g	7.8 oz
Powdered sugar	120 g	4.2 oz
Caster sugar	225 g	7.9 oz
Butter	227 g	8.0 oz
Milk	240 g	8.5 oz
Water	237 g	8.4 oz
Vegetable oil	218 g	7.7 oz
Honey	340 g	12.0 oz
Maple syrup	322 g	11.4 oz
White rice (uncooked)	185 g	6.5 oz
Rolled oats	90 g	3.2 oz
Cocoa powder	85 g	3.0 oz
Cornstarch	120 g	4.2 oz
Chocolate chips	170 g	6.0 oz
Peanut butter	258 g	9.1 oz
Table salt	273 g	9.6 oz
Shredded coconut	80 g	2.8 oz
Almond flour	96 g	3.4 oz
Breadcrumbs (dry)	108 g	3.8 oz
Yogurt	245 g	8.6 oz

Fractional cups to grams (the amounts recipes really use)

Recipes rarely call for a clean one cup. They ask for a third of a cup of cocoa or three quarters of a cup of sugar, and that’s where most people get stuck. This table does the fractions for the three ingredients you weigh most often.

Cups	Flour	Granulated sugar	Butter
1/8 cup	15 g	25 g	28 g
1/4 cup	30 g	50 g	57 g
1/3 cup	40 g	67 g	76 g
1/2 cup	60 g	100 g	113 g
2/3 cup	80 g	133 g	151 g
3/4 cup	90 g	150 g	170 g
1 cup	120 g	200 g	227 g
1 1/2 cups	180 g	300 g	340 g
2 cups	240 g	400 g	454 g

For any ingredient not shown, take its one-cup weight from the master chart and multiply by the fraction. Two thirds of a cup of cocoa powder, for example, is 85 grams times 0.667, which is about 57 grams.

Flour types, side by side

Not all flour weighs the same, because the grind and protein content change how it packs. Swapping bread flour for cake flour cup for cup can throw a recipe off, so you’ll want to weigh when you can.

Flour type	1 cup	1/2 cup	1/4 cup
All-purpose	120 g	60 g	30 g
Bread flour	127 g	64 g	32 g
Cake flour	114 g	57 g	29 g
Whole wheat	130 g	65 g	33 g
Self-rising	125 g	63 g	31 g
Almond flour	96 g	48 g	24 g

Sugar types, side by side

Sugar’s where a lot of bakes go wrong, because brown sugar packs down and powdered sugar barely weighs anything.

Sugar type	1 cup	1/2 cup	1/4 cup
Granulated	200 g	100 g	50 g
Brown (packed)	220 g	110 g	55 g
Powdered (icing)	120 g	60 g	30 g
Caster	225 g	113 g	56 g
Raw / turbinado	200 g	100 g	50 g

How to convert cups to grams by hand

The formula is simple once you’ve got the density from the charts above:

grams = cups multiplied by grams per cup for that ingredient

So 2 cups of flour is 2 times 120, which is 240 grams. Three quarters of a cup of sugar is 0.75 times 200, which is 150 grams. If a recipe gives you grams and you want cups, flip it and divide the grams by the grams per cup. That’s exactly what the grams to cups side of the tool does for you.

Cups to grams for liquids

Liquids are the one case where a cup is close to its weight in grams, because water is the reference point. One cup of water is about 237 grams. Milk’s a little heavier at 240 grams, oil’s lighter at 218 grams, and honey is much heavier at 340 grams.

Liquid	1 cup (grams)	1 cup (ml)
Water	237 g	237 ml
Milk	240 g	237 ml
Vegetable oil	218 g	237 ml
Honey	340 g	237 ml
Maple syrup	322 g	237 ml

Notice the millilitres stay the same while the grams change. That’s the volume-versus-weight difference in one table: every liquid fills the same 237 ml cup, but each one weighs something different.

Tablespoons and teaspoons to grams

Small amounts trip people up too, since a recipe might give butter in tablespoons and your scale reads grams. There are 16 tablespoons in a US cup and 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon.

Ingredient	1 tablespoon	1 teaspoon
Butter	14 g	4.7 g
Flour	7.5 g	2.5 g
Granulated sugar	12.5 g	4.2 g
Honey	21 g	7 g
Cocoa powder	5.3 g	1.8 g
Table salt	17 g	5.7 g

US cups, metric cups, and the gap that trips people up

A US cup is about 237 millilitres. A metric cup, used across much of Europe and Australia, is 250 millilitres. A Japanese cup is smaller at 200 millilitres. That means the same recipe gives different grams depending on which cup it was written for.

The figures in this guide use the US cup, which is what American recipes mean. For a single cup the difference between a US and a metric cup is tiny, but on a large bake it’s worth checking which cup your recipe was written in. When a recipe comes from a British or Australian site, its cups are usually 250 ml, so its grams run slightly higher than the numbers here.

When you should weigh instead of measure

Weighing matters most when accuracy counts, and here’s the quick rule.

• Baking that can fail, like bread, macarons, or laminated pastry, is worth weighing every time, because a 20 percent swing in flour changes the result.
• Forgiving cooking, like soups or a pot of rice, is fine with cups.
• Scaling a recipe up or down is far safer in grams, since small cup errors multiply as the batch grows.

A basic kitchen scale removes the guesswork that scooping introduces, and it’s cheap insurance for a bake you care about. The way you fill a cup can change the weight of flour by a fifth, which is the single biggest source of baking failure at home.

Common cup-to-gram mistakes to avoid

• Scooping flour straight from the bag. That packs it down and adds 15 to 20 percent. Spoon it in and level it off, or just weigh it.
• Not packing brown sugar. Brown sugar is measured packed, so press it into the cup until it holds the shape.
• Assuming one number fits every ingredient. A cup of flour and a cup of honey are almost 3 times apart in weight.
• Ignoring the cup standard. A 250 ml metric cup gives more grams than a 237 ml US cup.

Once you know the ingredient and the cup standard, converting is quick, and you’ll never have to wonder whether your cake will rise the way it should.