What to know when you turn cups into grams

Measuring is where most people stall when following a recipe written in other units. This guide covers only what you need at that moment.

Why a cup weighs a different amount for each ingredient

A cup measures volume and a gram measures weight. Density is what connects them.

A cup of all-purpose flour is 125g. A cup of granulated sugar is 200g. Same space, more weight.

A cup of honey is 339g and a cup of water is 237g. Some ingredients beat water, some do not.

So there is no single answer to 'how many grams is a cup'. Pick the ingredient and the answer appears.

The US customary cup is about 236.6mL. Korean and Japanese measuring cups are 200mL.

The metric cup is 250mL, which is what Australian recipes use.

US nutrition labels round the cup to 240mL.

Recipes written in English usually mean the US customary cup, and so do the grams on this page.

Scoop a US recipe's cup with a Korean cup and you are about 15% short.

British recipes rarely use cups at all. UK weights and measures law has no cup, so they weigh in grams.

The 200mL Korean cup is everywhere in practice, but we could not confirm it in an official document.

Brown sugar is 220g per cup packed and 145g per cup unpacked.

Same ingredient, same cup, 75g apart. Check whether the recipe says packed.

Powdered sugar is 100g sifted and 120g unsifted.

Where the source separates those states, this page lets you pick between them.

Making 2 servings from a 4-serving recipe means a scale of 0.5.

Enter that in the recipe scale box and every gram figure scales with it.

Eggs are hard to halve by count but easy to halve by weight.

Baking soda and baking powder are small enough that scaling gives you weights a kitchen scale cannot read. Use spoons.

Subtract 32 from the Fahrenheit number, multiply by 5, divide by 9.

350°F is about 177°C. Most recipes written in Celsius round that to 180°C.

Home ovens often run off their dial. An oven thermometer tells you the real number.

These are USDA reference weights. We did not weigh anything ourselves.

How you fill the cup changes a flour weight. Scooping and spooning are not the same.

Humid air makes flour heavier. These figures do not account for that.

Ingredients missing from the source are missing here. We do not fill the gap with a lookalike.

For baking, where ratios decide the result, a scale beats a cup.

Checked 2026-09-16