A cup measures volume. A gram measures weight. That single sentence is the reason a recipe can go wrong even when you followed it exactly — a cup of flour and a cup of honey occupy the same space and weigh nothing like the same. This cups to grams conversion chart gives you the gram figure for each ingredient rather than one number for everything.
The conversion table is first. Below it are the things that actually cause the errors: why ingredient density matters more than careful levelling, the fact that the Australian cup is 250 ml while the American one is not, how to convert grams back to cups, and how to scale a four-portion recipe up to forty covers without the batch falling apart.
Cups to Grams Conversion Table for Common Baking Ingredients
All figures below are for the Australian metric cup of 250 ml. Find your ingredient, read across. Where a recipe calls for a fraction of a cup, the columns save you the arithmetic.
| Ingredient | 1 cup | 3/4 cup | 1/2 cup | 1/3 cup | 1/4 cup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Water | 250 g | 188 g | 125 g | 83 g | 63 g |
| Milk, full cream | 255 g | 191 g | 128 g | 85 g | 64 g |
| Plain flour (all-purpose) | 150 g | 113 g | 75 g | 50 g | 38 g |
| Self-raising flour | 150 g | 113 g | 75 g | 50 g | 38 g |
| Bread flour (baker's flour) | 150 g | 113 g | 75 g | 50 g | 38 g |
| Wholemeal flour | 160 g | 120 g | 80 g | 53 g | 40 g |
| Cornflour (cornstarch) | 130 g | 98 g | 65 g | 43 g | 33 g |
| Caster sugar | 220 g | 165 g | 110 g | 73 g | 55 g |
| White granulated sugar | 220 g | 165 g | 110 g | 73 g | 55 g |
| Brown sugar, firmly packed | 220 g | 165 g | 110 g | 73 g | 55 g |
| Icing sugar (powdered), sifted | 120 g | 90 g | 60 g | 40 g | 30 g |
| Butter | 230 g | 173 g | 115 g | 77 g | 58 g |
| Vegetable oil | 230 g | 173 g | 115 g | 77 g | 58 g |
| Honey or golden syrup | 350 g | 263 g | 175 g | 117 g | 88 g |
| Rolled oats | 90 g | 68 g | 45 g | 30 g | 23 g |
| Desiccated coconut | 90 g | 68 g | 45 g | 30 g | 23 g |
| Rice, uncooked long grain | 200 g | 150 g | 100 g | 67 g | 50 g |
| Dry breadcrumbs | 120 g | 90 g | 60 g | 40 g | 30 g |
| Cocoa powder | 100 g | 75 g | 50 g | 33 g | 25 g |
| Tasty cheese, grated | 100 g | 75 g | 50 g | 33 g | 25 g |
Be honest about which of those numbers are solid. Water, milk, sugar, butter, oil and honey are reliable, because liquids and crystals pack the same way every time. Flour, cocoa, oats, coconut, breadcrumbs and grated cheese are approximate and can move 10% either way depending on how the cup was filled — which is exactly the point the rest of this guide makes.
How Many Grams Are in a Cup? 1 Cup of Flour vs 1 Cup of Butter
There is no single answer to how many grams are in a cup, and any chart offering one is wrong. A cup is a unit of volume — a fixed amount of space. A gram is a unit of mass. The bridge between them is density, and density is a property of the ingredient, not of the cup.
Run the same 250 ml cup through four ingredients and you get four very different weights. One cup of flour is 150 g. One cup of butter weighs about 230 g. A cup of caster sugar is 220 g, and a cup of honey is 350 g — more than twice the flour figure from the identical measuring cup. Air is the variable: flour is a light powder full of trapped air, honey has essentially none.
That is also why 1 cup of flour is the least trustworthy measure in any recipe. Three cooks filling the same cup three ways produce three different weights:
- Spooned in and levelled off — the lightest result, around 125 to 130 g for a 250 ml cup. This is the method most American recipes assume.
- Dipped and swept — scooping the cup straight through the bag compresses the flour and gives around 150 g, which is the figure Australian charts quote and the one used in the table above.
- Scooped and tapped down — packing it can push a cup past 170 g.
That spread is roughly 20% on the single ingredient that sets the structure of a cake, batter or dough. It is the main reason a recipe that works for whoever wrote it fails for whoever follows it, and the reason a bakery weighs. Cocoa, icing sugar and coconut behave the same way; sugar, butter and liquids barely care.
Cup Size Matters: the Australian Cup Is 250 ml, the US Cup Is Not
Cup size is not standardised worldwide, so the same recipe word means different volumes in different countries. The Australian metric cup holds 250 ml. The US cup does not.
| Standard | 1 cup | Against the Australian cup | 1 tablespoon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia and New Zealand (metric cup) | 250 ml | baseline | 20 ml |
| United States (legal cup, used on labels) | 240 ml | 4% smaller | 15 ml |
| United States (customary cup, used in recipes) | 236.6 ml | 5% smaller | 14.8 ml |
| United Kingdom (metric cup) | 250 ml | same | 15 ml |
| Canada (metric cup) | 250 ml | same | 15 ml |
| Japan | 200 ml | 20% smaller | 15 ml |
Here is the part most guides get backwards. The cup difference is small: 4 to 5% on a US recipe is within the error of how you fill the cup anyway, and for most home baking you can ignore it. The tablespoon is the real trap. The Australian tablespoon is 20 ml while the American and British tablespoon is 15 ml, so an Australian cook following an imported recipe with Australian spoons adds a third more of every spoon-measured ingredient. On olive oil that is harmless. On baking powder, bicarb, salt or yeast it will wreck the batch.
Teaspoons are the same 5 ml everywhere, which is why serious recipes specify leavening and salt in teaspoons rather than tablespoons. If an imported recipe calls for tablespoons of anything powerful, convert it: 1 US tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, and 3 of your teaspoons is 15 ml, not one Australian tablespoon.
Measuring Cup, Tablespoon and Millilitre Conversion Chart
These are the volume equivalents behind every figure above, using the Australian 20 ml tablespoon. The exact column shows where the everyday rounding sits, because 1/3 of 250 ml is not really 80 ml.
| Measure | Millilitres (as quoted) | Exact millilitres | In Australian spoons |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 cup | 250 ml | 250 ml | 12 tbsp + 2 tsp |
| 3/4 cup | 190 ml | 187.5 ml | 9 tbsp + 2 tsp |
| 2/3 cup | 165 ml | 166.7 ml | 8 tbsp + 1 tsp |
| 1/2 cup | 125 ml | 125 ml | 6 tbsp + 1 tsp |
| 1/3 cup | 80 ml | 83.3 ml | 4 tbsp |
| 1/4 cup | 60 ml | 62.5 ml | 3 tbsp |
| 1/8 cup | 30 ml | 31.25 ml | 1 1/2 tbsp |
| 1 tablespoon | 20 ml | 20 ml | 4 tsp |
| 1 teaspoon | 5 ml | 5 ml | — |
Those roundings are the Australian convention and are harmless in cooking, but they compound when you multiply. Ten lots of a 1/3 cup measured as 80 ml is 800 ml, where ten exact thirds is 833 ml — a shortfall a wet batter will notice.
Converting Grams to Cups: 100 Grams and 200 Grams of Flour
Converting grams to cups runs the same table in reverse. Divide the gram figure by the grams-per-cup for that ingredient: cups = grams / grams per cup. With plain flour at 150 g per cup:
- 100 grams of flour is 100 / 150 = 0.67, so two-thirds of a cup.
- 200 grams of flour is 200 / 150 = 1.33, so one and one-third cups.
- 500 g of flour is 3.33 cups — three and a third, not four.
- 100 grams of caster sugar is 100 / 220 = 0.45, a little under half a cup.
- 250 g of butter is 250 / 230 = 1.09, a touch over one cup.
The same arithmetic answers the question people most often ask: only water gives you 250 g in a cup. Stock, thin juice and milk are close enough to treat the same way. Everything else is not, which is why converting grams to cups for a European or metric recipe is worth doing ingredient by ingredient.
Why Bakers Work by Weight: Weighing in Grams Beats Cup Conversions
No commercial bakery measures flour in cups. Once you are producing the same product every day, cup conversions introduce a variable you cannot control and cannot trace. Weighing in grams removes it, and brings three things a kitchen actually needs.
Consistency. A gram is a gram whoever is on shift. The apprentice weighing 1,500 g of flour and the head baker weighing 1,500 g of flour produce the same dough. Ten cups measured by two people will not.
Baker's percentage. Every bakery formula is written with flour at 100% and everything else expressed against it — 65% water, 2% salt, 1.5% yeast. That only works in weight, and once a recipe is written that way you can scale it to any batch size with one multiplication instead of recalculating a list of fractional cups.
Cost and waste control. Recipes written in grams give you a costed portion and a repeatable yield, so over-production and off-spec batches stop quietly eating margin. If waste is already on your list, our guide to reducing food waste in commercial kitchens covers the operational side.
Practically that means bench scales reading to 1 g for general work and a smaller set reading to 0.1 g for yeast and salt, where the quantities are tiny and the tolerance is not. A tare function matters more than capacity.
Scaling a Recipe from 4 Portions to 40 Covers
This is where cups stop being an inconvenience and start being a problem. Taking a domestic recipe to service means multiplying it by ten, and ten times a cup measurement is ten times its error. Convert to grams first, then scale.
| 4-portion recipe says | ×10 in cups | Weigh instead |
|---|---|---|
| 2 cups plain flour | 20 cups | 3.0 kg |
| 1 cup caster sugar | 10 cups | 2.2 kg |
| 250 g butter | — | 2.5 kg |
| 2 cups full-cream milk | 20 cups | 5.0 litres (about 5.1 kg) |
| 4 eggs (60 g size) | 40 eggs | about 2.0 kg of shelled egg |
| 1 tsp fine salt | 10 tsp | about 60 g |
| 2 tsp baking powder | 20 tsp | scale with care — see below |
A 60 g egg loses about a tenth of its weight as shell, so 40 of them give roughly 2 kg of usable egg. Buying liquid pasteurised egg by the kilogram removes the cracking and counting entirely, which is why most volume kitchens do.
Four things do not scale in a straight line, and they are what separates a batch that works from one that does not:
- Leavening. Baking powder, bicarb and yeast interact with batter depth and mixing time, so a straight multiplication in a much larger, deeper batch often over-rises then collapses. Scale it, then test the first batch and adjust.
- Salt and strong flavours. Salt, spice and vanilla usually need slightly less than the full multiple at large volumes. Taste before you commit the batch.
- Mixing time. A ten-times batch in a planetary mixer is not mixed for ten times as long. Over-mixing develops gluten and toughens cake and pastry, so scale the batch and keep the mixing to the visual cue, not the clock.
- Pan depth and bake time. Ten times the batter in a deeper tray bakes slower and unevenly. Spread across more trays at the same depth rather than filling one deep tin, and check the oven band in our bakery oven guide.
Matching Batch Size to Your Mixer and Bakery Equipment
Once a recipe is written in grams, sizing the equipment becomes arithmetic instead of guesswork. Add up the batch weight, convert the liquids to volume, and check it against the usable capacity of the bowl rather than its rated litres. The 40-cover batch in the table above comes to roughly 15 kg with about 5 litres of liquid in it — comfortably past what a small bench mixer is built to turn.
Two rules keep the sums honest. Stiff dough loads a mixer far harder than cake batter, so a bowl that handles 8 litres of batter may be rated for well under half that in bread dough — work from the manufacturer's dough figure, not the bowl size. And size for the batch you want in one go, because splitting a recipe across two runs reintroduces the variation weighing was meant to remove.
The rest of the bench matters too: scales with a tare, the right bowl scrapers, proving and storage containers sized to your batch, and trays that match your oven. Our café kitchen layout guide covers how that bench comes together, and the bakery and patisserie equipment range and the wider full equipment catalogue cover the gear itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many grams are in 1 cup?
It depends entirely on the ingredient, because a cup measures volume and a gram measures weight. In an Australian 250 ml cup, water is 250 g, plain flour is about 150 g, caster sugar is 220 g, butter is about 230 g and honey is 350 g. Use the ingredient row in the conversion table above rather than a single figure.
Is 1 cup the same as 250 g?
Only for water, and near enough for stock, thin juice and milk. An Australian cup holds 250 ml, and water weighs almost exactly 1 g per millilitre, so a cup of water is 250 g. A cup of flour is around 150 g and a cup of honey is about 350 g from the identical cup, so 250 g is not a general rule.
Is 500 grams of flour 4 cups?
No. At 150 g per Australian cup, 500 g of plain flour is 3.33 cups, or three and one-third. Four cups of flour is closer to 600 g. The arithmetic is grams divided by grams per cup, so 500 divided by 150 gives 3.33. For caster sugar at 220 g per cup, 500 g is about two and a quarter cups.
How many grams is 1 cup of butter?
About 230 g in an Australian 250 ml cup. American recipes quote 227 g for a cup of butter, but that is a 240 ml US cup holding two 113 g sticks, so the figures are not interchangeable. Butter is far easier to weigh than to pack into a cup, and most Australian blocks are sold in 250 g units you can cut by eye.
How do I convert a recipe from cups to grams for a large batch?
Convert every ingredient to grams individually using the table above, then multiply the gram figures by your batch factor. Do not multiply the cup figures and convert afterwards, because that multiplies the measuring error too. Scale leavening, salt and mixing time with care, and treat the first large batch as a test run.
