Cups to Milliliters
Convert US cups to milliliters in your browser, and find out why a cup of flour is not a reliable measurement.
ml = cup × 236.5882365
NIST SP 811 (2008), Appendix B.8 — cup (US) to cubic meter (m³) = 2.365 882 E−04
The US cup is 236.5882365 milliliters — a sixteenth of a US gallon. That figure is exact, but it is also the least interesting thing about the conversion, because the cup measures volume and most of what gets measured in cups is sold by weight.
How it is calculated
ml = cup × 236.5882365
Recipes outside America usually round the cup to 240 millilitres, and Australian recipes use a 250 millilitre cup outright. For liquids the difference is small. For anything that can be packed into the cup it is swamped by how firmly you packed it.
Source: NIST SP 811 (2008), Appendix B.8 — cup (US) to cubic meter (m³) = 2.365 882 E−04
Common values
| US cups | milliliters |
|---|---|
| 0.25 | 59.14705 |
| 0.33 | 78.074106 |
| 0.5 | 118.2941 |
| 0.75 | 177.44115 |
| 1 | 236.5882 |
| 1.5 | 354.8823 |
| 2 | 473.1764 |
| 3 | 709.7646 |
| 4 | 946.3528 |
| 6 | 1,419.5292 |
| 8 | 1,892.7056 |
Questions people ask
- Why is a cup of flour unreliable?
- Because how you fill it changes what goes in. Scooping straight from the bag compacts the flour and can give 20 % more than spooning it in and levelling off. That is the difference between a cake and a brick, and it is why serious baking recipes give grams.
- Is a cup the same everywhere?
- No. The US cup is 236.6 millilitres, the metric cup used in Australia and New Zealand is 250, and older British recipes may mean an imperial cup of 284. Check where the recipe comes from before trusting it.
- How many cups in a liter?
- About 4.23 US cups. Going the other way, four cups is 946.35 millilitres, which is close enough to a litre that recipes often treat them as the same — fine for soup, not for pastry.
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