Cooking Measurement Converter

The handy ones to remember: 3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon, 16 tablespoons = 1 cup, and 1 US cup = 236.6 ml. So a cup is 8 fluid ounces, a US pint is 2 cups, and a quart is 4 cups. This tool does the exact math and shows the value in every unit at once, rather than requiring a chain of separate conversions.

Watch out: a US cup is 236.6 ml, but a metric cup (used in Australia, much of Europe and elsewhere) is a rounder 250 ml, and an old UK/imperial cup was 284 ml. This converter uses US customary measures throughout. For a metric-cup recipe, the difference is about 5% — small enough to shrug off in most everyday cooking, but large enough to matter in baking, where ratios of flour to liquid to leavening are more sensitive to being off by a consistent 5% across every ingredient.

This converts volume to volume only — none of its units represent weight. That is a deliberate choice, because the word "ounce" is dangerously ambiguous in English-language recipes: a fluid ounce (fl oz) measures volume, while a plain ounce (oz) measures weight, and recipes routinely use "oz" for both without flagging which one they mean. "8 oz of flour" is weight — about 227 g. "8 fl oz of milk" is volume — about 237 ml, this converter's own cup measure. The two are completely different kinds of quantity that happen to share an abbreviation, and this converter sidesteps the ambiguity entirely by not offering weight ounces at all — for those, the grams-to-ounces converter is the right tool, and it explains the trap in more depth.

Because a US cup is defined as exactly 8 fluid ounces, it is tempting to assume 1 cup also weighs 8 ounces. That equivalence holds only for water, and only because water happens to weigh very close to 1 gram per milliliter. Nearly everything else in a kitchen has a different density: a cup of all-purpose flour weighs roughly 120 to 125 g (about 4.2 to 4.4 oz), not 227 g, because flour is full of air pockets between the particles; a cup of granulated sugar weighs closer to 200 g; a cup of honey, being dense and syrupy, weighs well over 300 g. Volume measurement simply cannot substitute for weight when the ingredients being compared have different densities.

Even setting the fluid-vs-weight ounce confusion aside, measuring a dry ingredient by volume carries its own built-in imprecision: how a cup of flour is filled changes its weight noticeably. Scooping the measuring cup directly into the flour bag packs it down and can weigh 20–25% more than spooning flour lightly into the cup and leveling it off with a knife — the same "1 cup" on paper, two meaningfully different amounts of flour in practice. This is exactly why professional bakers and precise recipes increasingly specify grams on a kitchen scale rather than cups for anything where the ratio matters, while everyday cooking — soups, stir-fries, most savory dishes — tolerates volume measuring's built-in wobble just fine.