Guide
Cup Sizes by Country
A cup is not one fixed volume. Depending on where a recipe was written it can mean anything from 200 ml to 250 ml — a difference of up to 25% on a single ingredient.
The five cups you will actually meet
| Cup | Volume | vs US cup | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|---|
| US customary cup | 236.6 ml | 100% | United States recipes, most American food blogs |
| US legal cup | 240 ml | 101% | US nutrition labels and packaging |
| Metric cup | 250 ml | 106% | Australia, New Zealand, Canada, modern UK books |
| Japanese cup (gō-based) | 200 ml | 85% | Japanese rice cookers and recipes |
| Latin American taza | 250 ml | 106% | Much of Latin America |
Which cup do our converters use?
Every conversion on this site uses the US customary cup of 236.6 ml, because that is what the overwhelming majority of grams-to-cups recipes assume. If your recipe is Australian or uses a 250 ml metric cup, multiply our cup figures by 0.95 to get metric cups.
How to tell which cup a recipe means
- Fahrenheit oven temperatures and stick butter mean US cups.
- Celsius temperatures with cups and tablespoons of 20 ml mean metric cups.
- Weights in grams alongside cups mean you can ignore the cups entirely.
Best fix: use weights
Grams are identical everywhere, which is why weighing removes the problem completely. Use the cups to grams converter once, write the weights on the recipe, and never think about cup standards again.