Cups to Grams Baking Conversion Chart

Cups measure volume, but baking is a science that depends on weight. The same cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 120 g to 160 g depending on how you scoop it, how long the bag has been sitting, and even the humidity in your kitchen.

That means three cups of flour can be off by up to 120 g—enough to turn a soft, airy loaf into a dense brick, or make your cookies spread into flat discs instead of holding their shape.

Professional bakeries around the world use grams (and baker’s percentage) because it eliminates this guesswork entirely:

• Density varies by ingredient. A cup of honey (340 g) weighs almost three times as much as a cup of cocoa powder (85 g). Volume tells you nothing about actual quantity.
• Scooping adds 20–30 g per cup. Even careful bakers get inconsistent results with cups because the flour compresses differently every time you dip the cup into the bag.
• Baker’s percentage requires weight. The system that professional bakers use to scale and adjust recipes—expressing every ingredient as a percentage of flour weight—only works with grams or ounces, never cups.
• Scaling is effortless. Need to double a recipe? Multiply gram weights by 2. With cups, you’re dealing with fractions of fractions.

A $10 kitchen scale is the single most impactful upgrade you can make to your baking. Once you switch to weighing, you’ll never go back.

Following a European or metric recipe and need to know how many cups a gram measurement equals? Use this reverse conversion table. Values are approximate—for best results, use a kitchen scale instead of converting back to cups.

Values shown in US cups (240 ml). Round to the nearest practical fraction: 0.50 = ½ cup, 0.33 = ⅓ cup, 0.25 = ¼ cup, 0.75 = ¾ cup.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Flour?

One cup of all-purpose flour = 120g. Bread flour = 130g. Whole wheat flour = 130g. Cake flour = 115g. Flour is the ingredient where cup measurements cause the most problems—the difference between spooning and scooping can be 20–30g per cup. In a recipe with 3 cups of flour, that’s up to 90g of error, enough to change your dough hydration by 10% and dramatically affect the texture of your bread.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Sugar?

One cup of granulated sugar = 200g. Brown sugar (packed) = 220g. Powdered sugar = 120g. Sugar is more consistent than flour when measured in cups because the granules don’t compress as easily. However, brown sugar must be firmly packed into the cup—loosely measured, it can weigh 30–40g less.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Butter?

One cup of butter = 227g = 2 US sticks = 8 oz. Half a cup = 1 stick = 113g. This is the most reliable cup conversion because US butter is sold in pre-marked sticks. In Europe, butter is sold in blocks (typically 250g), so 1 cup is slightly less than one European block.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Rice?

One cup of uncooked white rice = 185g. Cooked rice roughly doubles in volume, so 1 cup uncooked yields about 2–2.5 cups cooked (370–460g). Brown rice and basmati rice weigh similarly. For sticky/sushi rice, use about 190g per cup as the grains pack slightly tighter.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Milk or Water?

One cup of water = 240g. One cup of whole milk = 245g (slightly heavier due to fat and protein content). Buttermilk = 245g. Heavy cream = 240g. Liquids are the easiest to measure in cups because they naturally level off, but a kitchen scale is still faster—no meniscus guessing.

How Many Grams in a Cup of Cocoa Powder?

One cup of unsweetened cocoa powder = 85g. Cocoa is extremely light and airy, which makes it one of the trickiest ingredients to measure by volume. Always sift cocoa before measuring in cups—clumps create air pockets that throw off the weight. Or better yet, just weigh it.

One of the biggest sources of confusion in baking is that “one cup” means different things in different countries. If you’re following a recipe from another country, the cup size matters:

The difference between a Japanese cup (200 ml) and an Imperial cup (284 ml) is over 40%—that’s a massive discrepancy that can ruin a recipe. An Australian recipe calling for “2 cups of flour” expects 260 g, while a US recipe with the same instruction expects 240 g.

This is yet another reason why gram-based recipes travel better across borders. 250 g of flour is 250 g of flour, everywhere in the world.