Cups to Grams Converter

Ingredient guides

Deep dives into the conversions people look up most, with measuring tips and full charts:

• Flour cups to grams — all-purpose, bread, cake, whole wheat and more
• Sugar cups to grams — granulated, caster, turbinado, demerara
• Butter cups to grams — sticks, tablespoons and cups
• Brown sugar cups to grams — what "packed" means
• Powdered sugar cups to grams — sifted vs. unsifted

Why a cup of flour and a cup of honey weigh so differently

A cup measures volume — the amount of space something takes up — while a gram measures mass. One cup is always the same 236.6 millilitres of space, but what fills that space can be light and airy or dense and heavy. A cup of all-purpose flour weighs about 120 grams, because flour particles trap a lot of air between them. A cup of honey, by contrast, is a dense liquid with almost no air in it, so the same cup weighs about 336 grams — nearly three times as much. Granulated sugar falls in between at about 198 grams: the crystals pack together more tightly than flour, but small air gaps remain. This is why there is no single answer to "how many grams are in a cup?" — the answer always depends on the ingredient.

How you fill the cup matters too, especially for flour. If you scoop the measuring cup straight into the flour bag, the flour is compressed and you end up with noticeably more than the recipe intends. The method behind most published weights, including the King Arthur chart used here, is spoon and level: stir the flour to loosen it, spoon it into the cup until it heaps above the rim, then sweep a straight edge across the top to level it off. Brown sugar is the exception — it is packed, pressed firmly into the cup so it holds the cup's shape when turned out.

Finally, not all cups are the same size. The US customary cup holds 236.588 mL, while the US legal cup used in nutrition labelling is 240 mL. The metric cup, common in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, is 250 mL, and the old UK imperial cup is about 284 mL. The weights in this tool are stated per US customary cup; when you choose a different cup above, the tool scales the weight by the ratio of the volumes — exact for liquids, and a close approximation for dry ingredients.

Every cups-to-grams page

The converter above handles all 69 ingredients; the pages below go deeper — one guide per staple ingredient, the full printable chart, the reverse converter, and pure volume conversions.

Frequently asked questions