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📏 Productivity & Units

Free Cooking Volume Converter for Cups, Tablespoons, Spoons and Millilitres

“One cup” is five different volumes depending on where the recipe was written. Pick the right one, and find out why an Australian tablespoon will ruin your scones.

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Where was the recipe written?

In millilitres

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The same amount, measured every way

One cup, by region

Written for servings, I am cooking for

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How the calculation works

A recipe says “3 tablespoons of baking powder” US / UK / Canada tablespoon 3 × 14.79 ml = 44.4 ml 3 teaspoons to the tablespoon Australian tablespoon 3 × 20 ml = 60 ml four teaspoons to the tablespoon 35% more raising agent. Enough to make a cake rise fast, collapse, and taste of soap. Australia is the only country that redefined the tablespoon. Nothing on the page tells you which one the author meant.

How to Use This Tool

Volume is a bad way to measure ingredients and the whole world uses it anyway. The trouble is not that cups are imprecise — it is that “one cup” is not one volume. There are at least five in active use, they differ by up to 20%, and no recipe ever states which one it means. This converter makes you pick, which is the only honest way to do it.

The five cups

A US customary cup is 236.59 ml, derived from half a US pint. The US legal cup, used on nutrition labels, is rounded to 240 ml. The metric cup used in Australia, New Zealand and modern Canadian recipes is 250 ml. The old imperial cup found in pre-1970s British cookbooks is 284.13 ml. A Japanese cup (合-based rice measure) is 200 ml.

So a British wartime recipe asking for two cups of stock and an American blogger asking for two cups of stock differ by 95 ml — about six tablespoons. For a soup that is nothing. For a bread dough it is the difference between a workable dough and a batter.

One cup, to scale. All five are in use in recipes published today. Japan200 ml US customary236.6 ml US legal240 ml Metric (AU/NZ)250 ml Imperial (old UK)284.1 ml Widest gap: 84 ml, or 42% more in an imperial cup than a Japanese one.
The five cups still found in published recipes. Nothing on the page tells you which is meant.

The tablespoon trap, which is worse

Cups mostly hold forgiving things. Tablespoons hold the unforgiving ones: yeast, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, salt, chilli. And Australia redefined the tablespoon to 20 ml, four teaspoons instead of three, when it went metric. Everywhere else it is roughly 15 ml.

A recipe calling for three tablespoons of baking powder means 44 ml to an American author and 60 ml to an Australian one. That is 35% more leavening, which produces a cake that rises violently, collapses, and carries the metallic soapiness of unreacted bicarbonate. If a recipe comes from an Australian site and something keeps failing, this is the first thing to check.

Using the converter

Choose the region first — every other number on the page depends on it. Enter your amount, pick the units, and the panel shows the result in millilitres alongside the nearest practical measure, because “173 ml” is not something you can pour. The recipe scaler at the bottom multiplies your amount for a different number of servings and rounds it to something you can actually measure.

When volume simply will not do

For flour, sugar and anything else compressible, weigh it. A cup of flour ranges from about 120 g scooped loosely to 150 g packed — a 25% swing that no converter can fix, because the problem is the ingredient, not the arithmetic. Liquids are fine by volume. Solids are a coin toss, and every serious baking book has quietly moved to grams for exactly this reason.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How many ml is one cup?
It depends entirely on where the recipe was written. A US customary cup is 236.59 ml, a US legal cup is 240 ml, a metric cup used in Australia and New Zealand is 250 ml, an old imperial British cup is 284.13 ml, and a Japanese cup is 200 ml. If a recipe does not say, the safest guess is 240 ml for American sources and 250 ml for Australian, British and Canadian ones published after about 1975.
Is an Australian tablespoon really different?
Yes, and it is the most consequential difference in the whole system. Australia standardised its tablespoon at 20 ml, which is four teaspoons. Everywhere else it is about 15 ml, or three teaspoons. Using an Australian tablespoon for an American recipe adds 33% more of whatever you are measuring, which matters enormously for baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, yeast and salt.
Are US and UK fluid ounces the same?
No. A US fluid ounce is 29.57 ml and an imperial fluid ounce is 28.41 ml, so the imperial one is about 4% smaller. Confusingly, the imperial pint contains 20 fluid ounces while the US pint contains 16, so an imperial pint is 568 ml against 473 ml for the US one — a 20% difference that is much larger than the ounce gap suggests.
Should I measure flour by cups or by weight?
By weight, if the recipe gives you the option. A cup of all-purpose flour weighs anywhere from roughly 120 g when spooned in lightly to about 150 g when scooped and packed. That 25% variation dwarfs every conversion difference on this page and is the most common reason a bread or cake recipe behaves differently in two kitchens.
Is a teaspoon the same everywhere?
Very nearly. A US teaspoon is 4.93 ml and the metric teaspoon used in the UK, Australia and most of Europe is exactly 5 ml, a difference of about 1.5%. That is small enough to ignore in cooking. The tablespoon is where the systems genuinely diverge, because Australia uses four teaspoons to the tablespoon rather than three.
What is a 'stick' of butter?
An American convention: one stick is half a US cup, which is 8 tablespoons, 113 grams or about 118 ml. Butter is one of the few solids where the volume-to-weight conversion is reliable, because butter is sold in a standard density and does not pack differently depending on how you scoop it.
Why do some recipes use grams and millilitres together?
Because it is the only combination that removes ambiguity. Millilitres for liquids and grams for solids gives one unambiguous number per ingredient with no regional variants and no packing error. Professional and translated recipes almost always use it, and it is worth converting a favourite recipe once and writing the grams in the margin.

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