Cups to grams: 1/4 cup to 2 cups, by ingredient

Updated 9 October 2026

A cup measures space, not weight, so how many grams are in a cup depends on what’s in it. Here are the numbers for 14 everyday ingredients, from 1/8 cup to 2 cups, and where each one comes from.

Jump to: 1/4 cup · 1 1/4 cups · Flour · Sugar · Butter, oil and liquids · Rice, oats and cocoa · Metric cups · Tablespoons · Sticks of butter · Sources

1/4 cup to grams (a quarter cup)

A quarter cup is 4 tablespoons. Here is roughly what it weighs for each ingredient on this page. Tap an ingredient for its full chart.

1 1/4 cups to grams

1 1/4 cups is 1 cup plus 4 tablespoons, or 20 tablespoons in all.

Why cups to grams depends on the ingredient

A cup measures volume: a US cup holds 236.6 ml. A gram measures weight. To get from one to the other you need to know how heavy the ingredient is for the space it takes up, which is its density.

Water is the simple case. It weighs about 1 g per ml, so a cup of water is about 237 g. Flour holds a lot of air, so the same cup weighs about half that, 120 g. Honey is heavier than water, at about 339 g a cup. That’s why there is no single number for cups to grams, and why a converter that doesn’t ask which ingredient you mean can’t give a reliable answer.

How to measure a cup so these numbers hold

The charts assume the cup is filled the way King Arthur Baking’s test kitchen fills it. How you fill the cup changes the weight more than anything else.

• Flour: spoon and level. Stir the flour to loosen it, spoon it into a dry measuring cup until it overflows, then sweep the top level with a straight edge. Don’t dip the cup into the bag. King Arthur Baking says a spooned and leveled cup of all-purpose flour holds about 120 g, while a cup packed down can hold up to 160 g.
• Brown sugar: pack it. Press it into the cup firmly enough that it holds its shape when tipped out. The figures here are for packed brown sugar, which is how King Arthur Baking lists it.
• Powdered sugar: unsifted. The figures are for powdered sugar spooned into the cup without sifting. Sifted, a cup weighs less, about 100 g.
• Rice, oats and cocoa: spoon in and level, without pressing down.
• Butter: use the wrapper. US sticks are marked in tablespoons, and a whole stick is 1/2 cup.
• Water, milk, oil and honey: use a liquid measuring cup on a flat surface and read it at eye level.

A kitchen scale skips all of this. If you have one, weigh, and treat the cup amounts as a check.

Flour: cups to grams

For cake, self-rising, almond and other flours, and more on why flour weights vary, see cups of flour to grams.

All-purpose flour cups to grams

120 g per cup, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 125 g, so published figures run from 120 to 125 g.

Bread flour cups to grams

120 g per cup, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 137 g, so expect 120 to 137 g depending on the source.

Whole wheat flour cups to grams

113 g per cup, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 120 g for whole-grain wheat flour.

Sugar: cups to grams

For superfine, turbinado, demerara and coconut sugar, and loosely spooned brown sugar, see cups of sugar to grams.

Granulated sugar cups to grams

198 g per cup, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 200 g.

Brown sugar (packed) cups to grams

213 g per packed cup, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 220 g packed and 145 g loosely spooned.

Powdered sugar cups to grams

113 g per cup, unsifted, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 120 g unsifted and 100 g sifted.

Butter, oil and liquids: cups to grams

For butter in tablespoons, sticks and ounces, see cups and sticks of butter to grams.

Butter cups to grams

227 g per cup and 113 g per stick, from USDA FoodData Central, for salted and unsalted butter alike.

Water cups to grams

237 g per cup, from USDA FoodData Central. A US cup holds 236.6 ml and water weighs about 1 g per ml.

Milk cups to grams

244 g per cup of whole milk, from USDA FoodData Central. Milk is a little heavier than water.

Vegetable oil cups to grams

218 g per cup, from USDA FoodData Central. Oil is lighter than water, so a cup weighs less.

Honey cups to grams

339 g per cup, from USDA FoodData Central. King Arthur Baking’s 21 g per tablespoon works out to 336 g.

Rice, oats and cocoa: cups to grams

Uncooked white rice cups to grams

185 g per cup of uncooked long-grain white rice, from USDA FoodData Central. King Arthur Baking’s figure works out to 198 g.

Rolled oats cups to grams

89 g per cup of old-fashioned or quick oats, from King Arthur Baking. USDA FoodData Central lists 81 g.

Cocoa powder cups to grams

84 g per cup of unsweetened cocoa, from King Arthur Baking (42 g per half cup). USDA FoodData Central lists 86 g.

US cup vs metric cup

Every chart on this page uses the US customary cup, which NIST defines as 8 US fluid ounces, 236.6 ml. Many recipes from outside the US, including Australian and New Zealand ones, use a metric cup of 250 ml, which holds about 6% more. US nutrition labels use a third size, 240 ml, set by the FDA for labeling only.

If your recipe uses metric cups, multiply the grams on this page by 1.057, or use the table below. For a tablespoon or two the difference doesn’t matter. For three cups of flour it adds up to about 20 g.

Tablespoons and teaspoons in a cup

A US cup is 16 tablespoons, and a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, so a cup is 48 teaspoons. Useful when the 1/3 cup measure is in the dishwasher.

Sticks of butter in grams

US butter usually comes in 4-ounce sticks. One stick is 1/2 cup, 8 tablespoons or 113 g. More amounts, and grams back to tablespoons, are on cups and sticks of butter to grams.

Convert a whole recipe in Plate & Page

If you keep your recipes in Plate & Page, you don’t have to look amounts up one at a time. Plate & Page’s scaling and conversion guide explains that with Convert Between Volume and Weight turned on, which it is by default, and Metric chosen in Settings, “ingredients with a known density are shown by weight”, using “a bundled reference table of about 450 ingredients”. Ingredients it has no density for are converted only within the same kind of unit, such as cups to millilitres, and never guessed.

Scaling and unit conversion are part of the free edition. The app uses its own reference table, so its figures can differ slightly from the charts on this page. The same guide shows how to scale a recipe from a quarter to eight times its size.

Where these numbers come from

Each ingredient uses one grams-per-cup figure, and every fraction is worked out from it by the same script, so the charts agree with each other. Flour, sugar, oats and cocoa come from King Arthur Baking’s chart, because its test kitchen measures by spooning and leveling, the method described above. Butter, water, milk, oil, honey and rice come from USDA FoodData Central. King Arthur rounds liquids to whole ounces, listing a cup of water as 227 g, while a 236.6 ml cup of water weighs about 237 g.

Amounts under 20 g are rounded to the nearest 0.5 g and larger amounts to the nearest gram. All values are approximate: the brand, the humidity and how you fill the cup all move the number a little.

Sources, checked 9 October 2026: King Arthur Baking’s Ingredient Weight Chart and How to measure flour; USDA FoodData Central (SR Legacy portion weights; food IDs are listed on the cups to grams page); the NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8 for the US cup (236.5882 ml). FDA 21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii) for the 240 ml labeling cup. Values are approximate. Spotted a number that looks wrong? Email support@plateandpage.app.