Cups measure volume, recipes need consistency, and flour is not sugar. This ingredient weight chart converts 1 US cup of 25 common ingredients into grams (and ounces), so your baking weighs the same every time. A kitchen scale is the single biggest upgrade a home baker can make. If a recipe uses a unit you do not recognise, convert units free with our instant converter.
Cups to grams: the full chart
All values below are for 1 level US cup (240 ml), lightly spooned and levelled unless noted. Values are rounded to the nearest gram or half ounce, precise enough for any home recipe.
| Ingredient | 1 cup in grams | 1 cup in ounces |
|---|---|---|
| Plain / all purpose flour | 120 g | 4.25 oz |
| Bread flour | 127 g | 4.5 oz |
| Whole wheat flour | 113 g | 4 oz |
| Cornflour / cornstarch | 128 g | 4.5 oz |
| Cocoa powder | 100 g | 3.5 oz |
| Rolled oats | 90 g | 3 oz |
| White sugar (granulated) | 200 g | 7 oz |
| Caster sugar | 200 g | 7 oz |
| Brown sugar (packed) | 220 g | 7.75 oz |
| Icing / powdered sugar | 120 g | 4.25 oz |
| Honey | 340 g | 12 oz |
| Butter | 227 g | 8 oz |
| Vegetable oil | 218 g | 7.7 oz |
| Milk | 240 g | 8.5 oz |
| Buttermilk | 245 g | 8.6 oz |
| Heavy / double cream | 238 g | 8.4 oz |
| Sour cream / yoghurt | 245 g | 8.6 oz |
| Water | 236 g | 8.3 oz |
| Long grain rice (uncooked) | 185 g | 6.5 oz |
| Chocolate chips | 170 g | 6 oz |
| Chopped nuts | 120 g | 4.25 oz |
| Desiccated coconut | 93 g | 3.3 oz |
| Raisins | 145 g | 5 oz |
| Peanut butter | 258 g | 9.1 oz |
| Tomato sauce | 245 g | 8.6 oz |
Why weight beats volume in baking
A cup of flour can weigh anywhere from 110 g to 150 g depending on how you scoop it. That is a 30% swing in the most important ingredient of your cake. Weighing removes the guesswork entirely: 120 g of flour is 120 g of flour every time, in every kitchen. Professional bakers work in grams for exactly this reason, and once you switch, your results become noticeably more consistent from batch to batch.
Quick reference: common spoon and cup measures
Use these standard equivalents when a recipe mixes spoons, cups and metric. Our free unit converter handles any other combination instantly.
| Measure | Metric | US |
|---|---|---|
| 1 teaspoon | 5 ml | 1 tsp |
| 1 tablespoon | 15 ml | 3 tsp |
| 1/4 cup | 60 ml | 4 tbsp |
| 1/3 cup | 80 ml | 5 tbsp + 1 tsp |
| 1/2 cup | 120 ml | 8 tbsp |
| 1 cup | 240 ml | 16 tbsp |
Weighing sticky ingredients and small amounts
Honey, treacle, peanut butter and molasses cling to cups and spoons, which is exactly why weighing them is better, put your mixing bowl on the scale, press tare, and pour or spoon straight in. For small amounts under 10 grams, such as salt, baking powder or yeast, a scale that reads to 1 gram is accurate enough for home baking; spoon measures are fine below that. And remember that brown sugar should be firmly packed into the cup before weighing if you ever do measure it by volume, while flour should always be spooned in lightly and levelled, never scooped.
Worked example: converting a whole recipe to grams
Take a simple chocolate cake recipe written in cups and convert every line using the chart above. The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of plain flour, 0.75 cup of granulated sugar, 0.5 cup of cocoa powder, 0.5 cup of butter, and 1 cup of milk. Work through them one at a time. Flour: 2.5 multiplied by 120 g per cup gives 300 g. Sugar: 0.75 multiplied by 200 g per cup gives 150 g. Cocoa: 0.5 multiplied by 100 g per cup gives 50 g. Butter: 0.5 multiplied by 227 g per cup gives 113.5 g, which you can weigh as 114 g without any recipe noticing. Milk: 1 cup is 240 g straight from the chart. Your converted shopping list of weights is therefore 300 g flour, 150 g sugar, 50 g cocoa, about 114 g butter, and 240 g milk.
Add those weights together and you also learn something useful about the batter itself: 300 plus 150 plus 50 plus 114 plus 240 comes to 854 g of main ingredients before eggs and small extras. That total is a practical check. If your mixing bowl on the scale reads wildly less than expected after the main ingredients go in, you have probably skipped a line, a far easier mistake to catch at the bowl than at the oven door. This is how weighing changes your baking beyond mere accuracy: the recipe becomes a sequence of numbers you can verify as you go, rather than a set of cup measures you have to trust blindly. If a quantity in your own recipe is awkward, such as a third of a cup of honey, the same multiplication works, a third of 340 g is about 113 g, and our unit converter will handle the fractions for anything not in the chart.
One more conversion makes the example realistic. Suppose you want to bake half the cake, in a smaller tin. Halving weighed ingredients is trivially easy: 150 g flour, 75 g sugar, 25 g cocoa, 57 g butter, and 120 g milk. Halving cup measures, by contrast, leaves you juggling quarter and eighth cups and guessing at half of three quarters of a cup of sugar. Bakers scale recipes up and down constantly, a double batch of biscuits for a party, a half batch of batter for two people, and weight is what makes that scaling a thirty second job instead of a source of errors.
Light, dense and in between: ingredient weights compared
The single most useful idea in the main chart is that a cup is a measure of space, not of weight, so ingredients of different densities fill that space with very different masses. The table below pulls three groups from the chart to make the spread obvious.
| Density group | Ingredient (1 cup) | Weight | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light and airy | Rolled oats | 90 g | Mostly air between flakes, so a cup weighs very little |
| Light and airy | Icing sugar | 120 g | Fine powder traps air; sifting changes the weight further |
| Middle weight | Plain flour | 120 g | The reference point most baking charts are built around |
| Middle weight | Chocolate chips | 170 g | Solid pieces pack more tightly than powders and flakes |
| Dense | Granulated sugar | 200 g | Small crystals settle with little trapped air |
| Dense | Peanut butter | 258 g | Thick and fat rich, with almost no air at all |
| Dense | Honey | 340 g | The heaviest common cup in the kitchen, nearly four times the oats |
That last comparison deserves a pause: a cup of honey weighs 340 g and a cup of rolled oats weighs 90 g, so swapping one cup for another in an improvised recipe changes the ingredient mass by 250 g. This is why “one cup of dry ingredients” is a meaningless instruction and why experienced bakers raise an eyebrow at recipes that treat all cups as equal. It is also why the chart above lists ingredients individually rather than giving a single conversion factor. Whenever you substitute an ingredient, coconut for nuts, syrup for sugar, check the weight of the new ingredient in the chart instead of assuming the cup you already measured carries across.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Scooping flour straight from the bag with the measuring cup. Scooping compacts the flour and can push a cup toward 150 g instead of 120 g. Spoon flour into the cup and level it, or weigh it and skip the problem entirely.
- Using the flour weight for every powder. Cocoa at 100 g per cup and cornflour at 128 g per cup are not flour at 120 g. Look each ingredient up in the chart rather than applying one number to the whole recipe.
- Forgetting to tare the scale between ingredients. Put the bowl on the scale, press tare so it reads zero, add the first ingredient, then tare again before the next. Skipping a tare means every later weight includes the bowl and the previous ingredients.
- Measuring brown sugar loosely. The chart weight of 220 g per cup assumes the sugar is firmly packed, as recipes intend. A loosely filled cup of brown sugar can fall well short and leave a bake under sweetened and dry.
- Treating a metric cup as a US cup. A metric cup is 250 ml against the US 240 ml. The difference is small, but across four cups of flour it grows noticeable, another argument for weighing.
- Weighing liquids in a dry ingredients mindset. Water and milk are close to 240 g per cup, but oils are lighter at about 218 g and honey far heavier. Liquids differ too, so use their own chart rows.
Setting up a weighing habit that sticks
The bakers who convert to weighing permanently share a few habits. The scale lives on the counter, not in a cupboard, because a tool that needs fetching loses to a cup every busy morning. Recipes get annotated once, the first time you bake from the chart, write the gram weights in pencil beside the cup measures, and every later bake is already converted. Ingredients go straight into the mixing bowl on the scale in recipe order, washing up shrinks to one bowl, and a small notebook or phone note keeps your own corrections: perhaps your oven or your brand of flour prefers 125 g where the chart says 120 g. Those personal notes are the real treasure, because they turn a generic chart into your kitchen’s own reference. When a new recipe arrives in ounces or in a unit you do not use, run it through the free unit converter once, write the grams on the page, and never convert it again.
Frequently asked questions
How many grams is 1 cup of flour?
1 US cup of plain (all purpose) flour weighs 120 grams when lightly spooned and levelled. Bread flour is slightly heavier at 127 g per cup, and whole wheat flour is 113 g per cup.
How many grams is 1 cup of sugar?
1 cup of white granulated or caster sugar weighs 200 grams. Packed brown sugar is denser at 220 g per cup, and icing (powdered) sugar is much lighter at 120 g per cup.
How many grams is 1 cup of butter?
1 cup of butter weighs 227 grams, which is 8 ounces or 2 standard US sticks. For metric recipes, most cooks round this to 225 g.
Is a US cup the same as a metric cup?
Not quite. A US cup is 240 ml, while a metric cup (used in Australia and some other countries) is 250 ml. The difference is small for most recipes, but for precision baking, weigh ingredients in grams instead.
Why does my baking fail when I measure flour in cups?
Scooping flour directly with the cup compacts it, so you can accidentally add up to 30% more flour than the recipe intends, producing dry, dense bakes. Spoon the flour into the cup and level it off, or better still, weigh 120 g per cup.
How many grams is a cup of honey?
1 cup of honey weighs 340 grams (12 ounces). Because honey is so dense, cup measures are especially unreliable for it, weighing is strongly recommended.