Cooking measurement converter
Enter an amount, get it in cups, spoons and milliliters.
How many tablespoons are in a cup?
16. A cup is 8 fluid ounces, a fluid ounce is 2 tablespoons, and a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons — so a cup is also 48 teaspoons.
How much is a stick of butter?
In the US a stick is ½ cup: 8 tablespoons, or 4 ounces by weight (113 grams). A standard 1-pound box holds 4 sticks.
How many milliliters are in a cup?
A US cup is 236.6 mL. Recipes from Australia, Canada and elsewhere often use a metric cup of 250 mL — pick "Metric cups" to convert those.
How do I measure ⅔ cup with spoons?
⅔ cup is 10 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons. Half a cup is 8 tablespoons, and ¼ cup is 4.
Are fluid ounces the same as ounces?
No — fluid ounces measure volume, ounces measure weight. A cup of water weighs about 8.3 ounces, but a cup of all-purpose flour only about 4¼ (120 g by King Arthur Baking's chart). For flour and sugar, weigh or use the cups to grams converter.
Is a US cup 236.6 mL or 240 mL?
Both appear. A US customary cup is exactly one sixteenth of a gallon, 236.6 mL, and that is what this converter uses. For nutrition labeling only, the FDA defines a cup as 240 mL, a tablespoon as 15 mL and a teaspoon as 5 mL (21 CFR 101.9). The rounder values are within 2% of the customary ones, which rarely matters in a home kitchen.
How many cups are in a quart and in a gallon?
4 cups in a quart and 16 cups in a gallon, because a quart is a quarter of a gallon and a cup a quarter of a quart. In the same way a pint is 2 cups and there are 32 tablespoons in a pint.
How the conversion works
Every unit is converted through teaspoons. A tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, a fluid ounce 6, a cup 48, a pint 96, a quart 192 and a gallon 768, and the US gallon is defined as exactly 231 cubic inches, which is 3.785411784 liters. That makes a US teaspoon 4.929 mL, a tablespoon 14.79 mL, a fluid ounce 29.57 mL and a cup 236.59 mL. A metric cup of 250 mL is 1.057 of a US cup.
Worked example: ⅔ cup and a stick of butter
⅔ cup is 10.67 tablespoons, which is 10 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons (⅔ of 16 is 10⅔, and ⅔ of a tablespoon is 2 teaspoons). A stick of butter is 8 tablespoons, or ½ cup. Converting a recipe from a 250 mL metric cup to US cups, 2 metric cups is 2.11 US cups, about 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons.
Common mistakes
The classic error is confusing fluid ounces, a volume, with ounces, a weight. They agree only for water-like liquids, and a cup of flour is far lighter than a cup of water. Another is using a dry measuring cup for liquids, which cannot be filled accurately to the line; use a liquid measuring cup with a spout. The British imperial pint (20 fluid ounces) is larger than the US pint (16 fluid ounces), so a recipe from the UK that asks for a pint of milk means about 568 mL, not 473 mL. Heaping spoonfuls and packed cups also change the amount, so level the spoons.
Sources: NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8 (the US gallon as 231 cubic inches, exact conversion to liters); 21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii) (household measures for nutrition labeling). Related: cups to grams converter, butter converter, recipe scaler and oven temperature converter.