How Many Grams Are in a Cup? The Complete Chart

Why a cup weighs something different every time

A cup is a container of a fixed size: 236.6 millilitres in the US system. What that container weighs when you fill it depends on how much matter the ingredient packs into the space. Flour is mostly air and loosely stacked particles, so a cup of it is light. Sugar crystals are denser, honey is denser still, and a cup of jam is heavier than a cup of water. This is why any chart, app or rule of thumb that gives one grams figure for "a cup" is wrong for almost everything you cook.

Technique matters almost as much as the ingredient. Flour spooned gently into a cup and levelled with a knife weighs about 120 grams. The same cup plunged into the flour bag and scooped up can hold 140 grams or more, because scooping compresses the flour. Brown sugar is deliberately packed down, which is why its chart value says "packed". Ingredients ground finer pack tighter too: caster sugar outweighs granulated, and powdered sugar — mostly air and fluff — weighs barely half as much as either. Every value in the chart below assumes the standard method bakers use: dry ingredients spooned and levelled, brown sugar packed, liquids poured to the brim.

The complete grams in a cup chart

Weights are for one US cup (236.6 ml), rounded to the nearest gram, from the same database behind our converters. The tablespoon column is the cup weight divided by 16.

How to use this chart

Find your ingredient and read across. For amounts other than a cup, multiply: two cups of flour is 2 × 120 = 240 grams, and a third of a cup of sugar is 198 ÷ 3 = 66 grams. For awkward fractions like ¾ cup, the maths is easier with our Cups to Grams converter, which handles every fraction, works in reverse (grams back to cups), and covers more than 130 ingredients, including different flours, salts and fats.

Match the form of the ingredient, not just its name. The chart's brown sugar is packed because that is how recipes expect it; its flour is spooned and levelled because that is the standard the source data uses. If a recipe says "1 cup sifted flour", the flour is sifted before measuring and will weigh less than the chart value — the safest fix is to weigh out the chart weight of unsifted flour and sift it after weighing. And if you own a scale, remember the chart's real job: it tells you what weight to aim for. Once you are weighing, the cups stop mattering entirely.

How many grams in a cup of flour, sugar, butter and honey?

These four are the lookups people need most. Flour (all-purpose, spooned and levelled): 120 grams per cup. Granulated sugar: 198 grams per cup — and remember that brown sugar, packed, is 213 grams while powdered sugar is only 113 grams. Butter: 227 grams per cup, which is two standard sticks. Honey: 340 grams per cup, the heavyweight of the chart. If your ingredient is not one of these four, the table above or the converter will have it.

When a chart is not enough

Published weights are averages, and real ingredients vary. Flour absorbs moisture in a humid kitchen and weighs a little more per cup; one brand of cocoa is milled finer than another; chopped nuts depend on how small you chopped them. Treat the chart as accurate to within a few grams — more than close enough for cakes, biscuits, pancakes and everyday cooking — but for precision work like macarons or laminated pastry, weigh everything and trust your scale over any table, including this one. Our methodology page shows where these values come from, so you can judge them for yourself.

Frequently asked questions