A recipe crosses a border carrying the word “cup”, not the volume. And a cup of flour is two different weights before it leaves your own kitchen.
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United States · 236.59 mL
A volume becomes a weight only once you say what is in it — a cup of honey and a cup of oats differ by nearly four times.
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Weighs120–145 g
Volume236.59 mL
1 Cup (US customary) of flour, all-purpose. The range is real, not caution: this ingredient varies by 20.8% depending on how the cup is filled.
Cup (US customary). The cup most US recipes mean, but US nutrition labels use a 240 mL cup instead, so the two differ by about 1.4% even within one country.
Why flour, all-purpose has that spread
The worst case in any kitchen. Spooned into the cup and levelled gives about 120 g; dipping the cup into the bag compacts it to about 145. A 20% swing in the structural ingredient — which is why bakers weigh flour and recipe writers disagree about what a cup even means.
Lightly filled120 g
Packed or scooped145 g
Difference25 g — 20.8%
“cup” in each region
The same word, 5 different volumes, spanning 42.1%. A recipe carries the word across a border; it does not carry the volume.
Show:
Cup (Japanese, 200 mL) · Japan
200 mL
Cup (US customary) · United States
236.59 mL · +18.3%
Cup (US legal, 240 mL) · US nutrition labels
240 mL · +20%
Cup (metric, 250 mL) · Australia, NZ, Canada
250 mL · +25%
Cup (imperial, 284 mL) · Older UK books
284.13 mL · +42.1%
What this converter covers
Cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, sticks and fluid ounces into grams and millilitres — with the region named on every measure, and dry ingredients given as a range because a single gram figure for a cup of flour would not be true.
All five cups — US customary, US legal, metric, imperial and Japanese
All three tablespoons, including the 20 mL Australian one
16 ingredients, each with a measured low-to-high gram range
Why each ingredient’s range is the width it is
The same nominal measure across every region, side by side
US, UK, EU, AU, IN Grams as a range Regional traps flagged 16 ingredients
Free, no signup — exact by definition, not an estimate.
Updated 7 September 2026
At a glance
Formula shown
Volume × (grams per US cup ÷ 236.588 mL) — computed as a low–high range per ingredient
Scenario support
1 US cup flour = 120–145 g · AU tbsp = 20 mL · imperial cup = 284 mL
Educational estimate
Planning support from the values you enter — not professional advice.
A cup is five different volumes
A recipe travels as text. It carries the word “cup” perfectly and the volume not at all, and the reader fills whichever cup is in their drawer.
The five cups in current or recent use, and how far each is from the US customary one
Cup
Volume
Where
vs US cup
Japanese
200 mL
Japan
15% smaller
US customary
236.59 mL
US recipes
—
US legal
240 mL
US nutrition labels
1.4% larger
Metric
250 mL
Australia, NZ, Canada
5.7% larger
Imperial
284.13 mL
Older UK books
20.1% larger
The United States manages to have two on its own: recipes mean the customary 236.59 mL cup, while nutrition labels are required to use a round 240 mL one. At 1.4% apart that difference rarely matters, and it is worth knowing about only because it explains why two American sources can quote different grams for the same cup without either being wrong.
The pair that does matter is imperial against US. Twenty percent is a fifth more of everything, and it is the reason a pre-metric British recipe read as American comes out wet, dense, or over-seasoned. Britain has used metric weights in published recipes for decades, so this mostly bites when working from an inherited book or a scanned page with no date on it.
The Australian tablespoon is four teaspoons
Almost everywhere, a tablespoon is three teaspoons. In Australia it is four. The metric conversion there settled on a round 20 mL rather than the 15 mL adopted elsewhere, and the ratio to the teaspoon changed with it.
That makes an Australian tablespoon 35% larger than a US one — the single largest discrepancy in everyday cooking, and much larger than the cup problem in proportional terms. It is also the more dangerous of the two, because tablespoons are where the potent ingredients live. A tablespoon of baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt, yeast or a strong spice is a quantity where a third more is not a slight difference; it is a soapy cake, a collapsed rise, or something nobody will eat.
The tell is the recipe’s origin rather than its language, since Australian and US recipes are both written in English and often look identical. If a recipe uses metric weights for solids and still says “tablespoon” for the small quantities, treat 20 mL as the likely reading and check whether it also gives a teaspoon count — in Australian writing, one tablespoon and four teaspoons are the same instruction.
Why a cup of flour has no single weight
This is the failure that matters most and it needs no border to happen. Take one measuring cup and one bag of all-purpose flour. Spoon the flour in loosely and level the top and you have about 120 g. Dip the same cup into the bag and scrape it level and you have about 145 g, because dipping compresses the flour against the walls of the cup.
That is a 20% swing in the structural ingredient, produced entirely by hand movement, with no way to tell afterwards which one happened. In bread it is the difference between a dough that comes together and one that will not hydrate. In cake it is the difference between tender and tough. And it compounds: a recipe with three cups of flour has a 75 g uncertainty before anything else is measured.
This is why serious baking recipes are written in grams and why reputable sources publish different gram-per-cup figures — 120, 125 and 130 are all in circulation, and each is correct for the filling method its author had in mind. It is also why this page gives you a range rather than picking one. A single number would be more convenient and less true.
The fix is not a better conversion. It is a scale. Weighing removes the variable entirely, takes less time than levelling a cup, and makes the recipe reproducible for anyone else who reads it. If you are converting a cup recipe to weights permanently, weigh your own cup of flour a few times, take the average, and write that number into the recipe — your kitchen’s figure is worth more than any published one.
Salt is a brand problem, not a measuring one
Salt is the one ingredient where the brand on the box changes the answer more than the country does. Table salt is fine dense cubes and packs tightly. Kosher salt is made of hollow flakes, so a spoonful of it is largely air.
A teaspoon of table salt is about 6 g. The same teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt is about 2.8 g — less than half. Morton kosher salt sits between them at roughly 4.8 g, because its flakes are rolled denser. So the three salts most likely to be in a kitchen span more than a factor of two by volume, and a recipe developed with one and cooked with another is not slightly off; it is inedible in one direction or bland in the other.
American recipe writers usually name the brand for exactly this reason, and it is not fussiness. If a recipe says “kosher salt” with no brand and you have table salt, use roughly half the volume and taste. By weight the problem vanishes entirely — a gram of salt is a gram of salt whatever shape the crystal is, which is the clearest illustration on this page of why weight beats volume.
When volume is fine and when it is not
Volume measuring is not wrong, and replacing every cup with a scale is not the point. It is unreliable for a specific and predictable set of ingredients, and perfectly good for the rest.
Volume is fine for liquids, where the cup is the measurement and there is nothing to pack — water, milk, stock, oil, wine. It is fine for granulated sugar, whose uniform free-flowing crystals settle the same way every time. It is fine for anything where a 10% error would not be noticed: chopped vegetables, most stews, a splash of vinegar.
Volume is unreliable for anything that packs, aerates or clumps — flour above all, but also icing sugar, cocoa, brown sugar (which is why recipes say “packed”, making your thumb part of the measurement), and grated or shredded ingredients where the shred size decides the density. It is unreliable for salt, for the brand reason above. And it is unreliable for anything in a fixed ratio with something else, which is what baking is: the flour, liquid and leavening have to stay in proportion, so an error in one is not absorbed anywhere.
A practical rule that costs nothing: weigh the flour and the salt, measure everything else however you like. That covers most of the risk in most recipes without turning cooking into laboratory work.
Related calculators
The measures behind the kitchen ones:
VolumeLitres, gallons, pints and cubic units — with US and imperial named apart, because a UK gallon is 20% larger than a US one.
WeightKilograms, pounds, ounces, stone and tonnes, listing the short, long and metric ton separately — three masses, one word.
Volume to WeightGallons to pounds, cubic yards to tons, litres to kilograms — by substance, with an honest range rather than one invented number.
TemperatureCelsius, Fahrenheit, kelvin and Rankine — and temperature CHANGES, which convert differently from readings.
LengthMillimetres to miles on the exact 1959 factors, with the mil kept clearly apart from the millimetre — they differ 25-fold.
Paper SizeA4, Letter and the rest in mm, inches and pixels at any DPI — plus what printing one on the other actually costs.
The volumes are settled by law and are exact: the US gallon is 231 cubic inches, the imperial gallon is 4.54609 litres, and every cup, spoon and fluid ounce on this page is derived from one of those two rather than typed in. The weights are not settled by anything, which is the honest part. Published gram-per-cup figures for flour differ between reputable sources by more than rounding, because they are measuring different filling techniques rather than disagreeing about arithmetic — so this page reports a range and says what moves it.
This is a kitchen tool, not a laboratory one, and the ranges are the honest part rather than a hedge. Three limits worth stating. First, the gram figures for dry ingredients depend on how the ingredient was handled before it reached the cup — sifted, settled in the bag, humid or dry — and no conversion can know that, which is why anything that depends on precision should be weighed rather than converted. Second, the ranges here are typical rather than exhaustive: a very coarse or very fine grind, an unusual brand, or an ingredient sitting at the extreme of its normal moisture content can fall outside them. Third, none of this is nutritional information; the weights are for measuring, not for calculating intake, and a nutrition label's own serving figures should be used for that. For baking in particular — where flour, sugar and leavening are in a fixed ratio to each other — a kitchen scale removes the entire class of problem this page exists to describe, and costs less than the ingredients wasted on one failed loaf.
Published the Cooking Converter: cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, sticks, fluid ounces, pints and quarts into grams and millilitres across 16 ingredients.
Names the region on every measure rather than resolving silently to one. A cup is five different volumes -- Japanese 200 mL, US customary 236.59, US legal 240, metric 250, imperial 284.13 -- spanning 42 percent, and the tool shows them side by side.
Flags the Australian tablespoon, which is 20 mL and therefore four teaspoons rather than three. At 35 percent above the US tablespoon it is the largest everyday discrepancy in cooking, and it falls on baking powder, salt, yeast and spices.
Returns dry ingredients as a low-to-high RANGE with the reason attached, because a cup of all-purpose flour is 120 g spooned and levelled or 145 g scooped from the bag. Water and butter come back with essentially no spread, so the range is information rather than a blanket hedge.
Covers the salt case, where the brand beats the country: a teaspoon is about 6 g of table salt, 4.8 g of Morton kosher and 2.8 g of Diamond Crystal, a span of more than two to one.
Every volume is derived from a defining constant -- the 231-cubic-inch US gallon and the 4.54609-litre imperial gallon -- rather than typed in. Verified by 52 automated cases covering the defining volumes, the regional spreads, range width by ingredient class, linear scaling, and refusal on unknown measures.
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