Grams to Cups: The Reverse Baking Chart

You found the perfect cake recipe, but it’s written in grams and all you’ve got is a set of measuring cups. This happens constantly with recipes from Europe, the UK, and Australia, where baking is done by weight. This guide flips the usual conversion around and shows you how to turn grams back into cups for every common ingredient, with a full reverse chart.

If you’d rather not do the math, the grams to cups converter handles both directions in a tap. For the forward direction, see our cups to grams guide.

Why you can’t use one grams-to-cups number

A gram measures weight and a cup measures volume, so the conversion changes with every ingredient. 100 grams of flour fills far more space than 100 grams of sugar, because flour is light and airy while sugar is dense. That’s why there’s no single “grams to cups” answer, and it’s why you need to know what you’re measuring first.

Here’s the rule that drives every table below:

cups = grams divided by the grams in one cup of that ingredient

Flour is 120 grams per cup, so 240 grams of flour is 240 divided by 120, which is 2 cups. Sugar is 200 grams per cup, so 300 grams of sugar is 1.5 cups.

The master grams to cups chart

This shows what 100 grams of each ingredient works out to in cups. To scale it, just multiply. If 100 grams of flour is 0.83 cups, then 200 grams is 1.66 cups.

Ingredient	Grams per cup	100 g in cups
All-purpose flour	120 g	0.83 cups
Bread flour	127 g	0.79 cups
Cake flour	114 g	0.88 cups
Whole wheat flour	130 g	0.77 cups
Granulated sugar	200 g	0.50 cups
Brown sugar (packed)	220 g	0.45 cups
Powdered sugar	120 g	0.83 cups
Butter	227 g	0.44 cups
Milk	240 g	0.42 cups
Water	237 g	0.42 cups
Vegetable oil	218 g	0.46 cups
Honey	340 g	0.29 cups
White rice (uncooked)	185 g	0.54 cups
Rolled oats	90 g	1.11 cups
Cocoa powder	85 g	1.18 cups
Cornstarch	120 g	0.83 cups
Chocolate chips	170 g	0.59 cups
Almond flour	96 g	1.04 cups

How many cups is 100, 200, 250, and 500 grams?

These are the round metric weights that European recipes lean on, so they’re the ones you’ll look up most. Here’s each one across the three ingredients you weigh most.

Grams	Flour	Granulated sugar	Butter
50 g	0.42 cups	0.25 cups	0.22 cups
100 g	0.83 cups	0.50 cups	0.44 cups
125 g	1.04 cups	0.63 cups	0.55 cups
150 g	1.25 cups	0.75 cups	0.66 cups
200 g	1.67 cups	1.00 cups	0.88 cups
250 g	2.08 cups	1.25 cups	1.10 cups
300 g	2.50 cups	1.50 cups	1.32 cups
500 g	4.17 cups	2.50 cups	2.20 cups
1000 g	8.33 cups	5.00 cups	4.41 cups

Notice how the same weight gives you a very different number of cups. 250 grams of sugar is a neat 1.25 cups, but 250 grams of flour is over 2 cups. That gap is exactly why you can’t swap one number in for another.

Grams to cups for flour, by type

Flour is the ingredient people convert most, and the type matters. Cake flour is fluffier than bread flour, so the same weight gives you more cups.

Flour type	100 g	250 g	500 g
All-purpose	0.83 cups	2.08 cups	4.17 cups
Bread flour	0.79 cups	1.97 cups	3.94 cups
Cake flour	0.88 cups	2.19 cups	4.39 cups
Whole wheat	0.77 cups	1.92 cups	3.85 cups
Almond flour	1.04 cups	2.60 cups	5.21 cups

Grams to cups for sugar, by type

Sugar is dense, so it gives you fewer cups per gram than flour. Brown sugar is measured packed, which makes it heavier still.

Sugar type	100 g	200 g	500 g
Granulated	0.50 cups	1.00 cups	2.50 cups
Brown (packed)	0.45 cups	0.91 cups	2.27 cups
Powdered (icing)	0.83 cups	1.67 cups	4.17 cups
Caster	0.44 cups	0.89 cups	2.22 cups

Grams to cups for liquids

Liquids are the friendliest case, because their weight is close to their volume. Water is the anchor: one cup weighs about 237 grams, so grams and millilitres nearly line up.

Liquid	Grams per cup	250 g in cups
Water	237 g	1.05 cups
Milk	240 g	1.04 cups
Vegetable oil	218 g	1.15 cups
Honey	340 g	0.74 cups
Maple syrup	322 g	0.78 cups

When grams beat cups (and when they don’t)

If you’ve got a recipe in grams and a scale, it’s almost always better to weigh than to convert to cups. Here’s when each one wins.

• Keep the grams and weigh for anything that can fail, like bread or pastry, because the recipe author already did the accurate thing.
• Convert to cups when you have no scale, using the charts above or the tool.
• Round sensibly for forgiving recipes. If 250 grams of flour is 2.08 cups, 2 cups is close enough for a quick loaf.

A scale removes the guesswork, but a good reverse chart gets you most of the way there when a scale isn’t handy. Bookmark this one, and you’ll never stall on a metric recipe again.