Ingredient conversion chart: cups to grams and ounces
A cup of flour is not a unit of weight — it is a unit of packing. Scoop, spoon, and sift the same flour three ways and the same “cup” can differ by twenty percent or more, which is why two bakers can follow the same recipe and bake two different breads. Weight fixes that: 120 grams of flour is 120 grams however it sits in the cup. The table below gives widely used standard weights for common ingredients, so you can move between volume-written and scale-written recipes in either direction.
| Ingredient | 1 cup (grams) | 1 cup (ounces) |
|---|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 120 g | 4.25 oz |
| Whole wheat flour | 113 g | 4 oz |
| Granulated sugar | 200 g | 7.1 oz |
| Brown sugar (packed) | 213 g | 7.5 oz |
| Powdered sugar | 113 g | 4 oz |
| Butter | 227 g | 8 oz |
| Vegetable oil | 218 g | 7.7 oz |
| Milk (whole) | 244 g | 8.6 oz |
| Water | 237 g | 8.4 oz |
| Honey | 340 g | 12 oz |
| Cocoa powder (unsweetened) | 85 g | 3 oz |
| Rolled oats | 90 g | 3.2 oz |
| Chocolate chips | 170 g | 6 oz |
| Almond flour | 96 g | 3.4 oz |
| Plain yogurt | 245 g | 8.6 oz |
Sources: King Arthur ingredient weight chart (flours & sugars), USDA (liquids & dairy). Figures checked October 2026.
How to use it without surprises
- Check the recipe’s own convention. Some cookbook authors and brands publish their own weight tables, and flour weights especially vary between them (a “cup” of flour runs from roughly 120 to 130 grams across popular references). When a recipe names its source or brand, that table wins over any generic one, including this one.
- Packed means packed. Brown sugar is listed weighed as pressed into the cup; flour is not. The packing note matters more than the third decimal.
- Spoon and level, if you must scoop. When a volume measurement is all you have, spooning flour into the cup and leveling it gives you the measurement the table assumes. A swept scoop from the bag can add twenty percent.
- Liquid cups and dry cups. The table’s gram weights are for standard US volume cups (237 ml). Liquid measuring cups and dry cups measure the same volume; the difference is reading at eye level for liquids.
Why these numbers, and where they come from
Weights for baking staples follow published baking references (King Arthur’s ingredient weight chart is the common standard for flours and sugars); liquid and dairy values follow USDA data. Figures were checked against those sources in October 2026. They are conventions with real variation between references — not laboratory constants — so small differences (5 grams here or there) are noise, and a recipe that depends on the difference is one to follow on its own terms.
From table to scaled recipe
This page converts amounts between units; when you need to change how much a recipe makes, that is a different operation — see the scaling guide for how to double, halve, or resize a recipe, and what changes beyond the arithmetic.