Bakers Percentage, Explained

Baking Resources Editorial · Reviewed by Joan Ramos · Updated October 2026 · 19 min read

In bakers percentage, every ingredient in a dough is written as a percentage of the flour weight, and the flour is always 100 percent. Water at 65 percent means 65 percent of the flour weight. Salt at 2 percent means 2 percent of the flour weight, not 2 percent of the finished dough.

That one convention is why bakers can look at two recipes written by two strangers and know instantly which one is wetter, which one is saltier, and which one will rise faster. It is also why they can resize either recipe to whatever amount of flour happens to be in the bag.

Cups can't do that. Percentages can.

Skip the arithmetic entirely: our free recipe scaler takes your ingredient weights and resizes the whole formula to any flour weight or batch size you want.

Why flour gets to be 100 percent

Flour is the only ingredient in bread that every other ingredient is reacting to. Water hydrates flour. Salt slows the yeast and tightens the gluten that flour forms. Yeast eats the starch and sugar the flour brings. Fat coats the flour's proteins. Everything in the bowl is doing something to the flour.

So the flour becomes the ruler. Set it at 100 and measure everything else against it.

This has a nice side effect. Because flour is fixed at 100, the number attached to each ingredient never changes when the batch size changes. A 2 percent salt dough is 2 percent salt whether you're making one roll or two hundred loaves. The grams change. The percentage doesn't.

That's the whole idea. Everything below is just what you do with it.

One rule to memorize: if a recipe uses more than one flour, all the flours added together are the 100 percent. A dough with 400 g bread flour and 100 g whole wheat has 500 g of total flour, so a 2 percent salt figure means 10 g of salt.

How to convert a recipe to bakers percentage

The formula has one line:

Ingredient percentage = (ingredient weight ÷ total flour weight) × 100

Here's an ordinary sandwich loaf recipe of the kind you'd find on a recipe card, written in cups and spoons. We'll convert every line.

Step 1: turn the volumes into weights

Using the standard weights this site uses everywhere:

Total dough weight: 375 + 236 + 25 + 28 + 9 + 7 = 680 g.

Step 2: divide everything by the flour weight

Flour is 375 g, so 375 becomes our divider.

You now know things about this recipe that the cup measurements were hiding.

It's a 63 percent hydration dough, which puts it squarely in soft-sandwich-loaf territory. It's mildly enriched, since 7.5 percent butter and 6.7 percent sugar is a light touch. And the salt is running a little hot at 2.4 percent, above the 1.8 to 2.2 percent range most bread sits in. Pull the salt back to 1 1/4 tsp (7.5 g) and you land at exactly 2.0 percent.

That last catch is the real payoff. Nothing on the recipe card told you the salt was high. The percentage did, in one number, in about four seconds.

How to scale a recipe once it's in percentages

Now the useful part. Say you're down to 500 g of flour in the bag and you want to use all of it.

Set flour = 500 g. Then multiply each percentage by 5, because 500 ÷ 100 = 5. Every percentage point is worth 5 g.

Check the math: 500 × 1.81 = 905 g, and our column adds to 906 g. The one gram is rounding, and one gram in a 906 g dough is nothing.

Compare that to the cup version of the same job. Scaling 3 cups of flour to "however much is left in the bag" means guessing, and then guessing again for the water, and by the third guess the dough is wrong in a way you won't discover until it comes out of the oven.

Round however you like on the small stuff. Yeast at 9.5 g can be 9 g or 10 g and nothing bad happens. Salt is the one worth keeping honest, because a gram of salt in a small dough is a taste you'll notice.

The hydration table

Hydration is the single most useful number bakers percentage gives you. It is just the water percentage, and it predicts almost everything about how the dough will feel in your hands and what the crumb will look like.

A few things this table explains that recipes usually don't.

If a dough feels impossible, check its hydration first. A beginner who's only ever made 62 percent sandwich dough and then tries an 80 percent ciabatta hasn't done anything wrong. That dough is supposed to be that wet.

Higher hydration means a more open crumb and a crisper crust, because more water means more steam, and steam is what blows the holes open and gelatinizes the crust.

Higher hydration also means less structure, which is why very wet doughs need folds, cold retards, or a Dutch oven to keep them from flattening out.

Flour type shifts the whole scale. Whole wheat and rye absorb far more water than white flour, so a 75 percent whole wheat dough can feel like a 65 percent white dough. Bread flour drinks more than all-purpose too. If you swap flours and keep the water the same, the dough will change feel even though the number on the page didn't move.

Why the percentages add up to more than 100

This is the part that stops people cold the first time, and it's the reason a lot of bakers decide bakers percentage is broken and go back to cups.

The total in our example was 181.3 percent. That looks like nonsense. Nothing can be 181 percent of itself.

But it isn't a share of the dough. It's a ratio to the flour. The total is telling you that the finished dough weighs 1.813 times what the flour weighs, and that's a perfectly sensible thing to know.

Here's the mental swap that fixes it permanently: read the percent sign as "parts per hundred of flour." So 62.9 percent water is "62.9 parts water for every 100 parts flour." Read that way, a total of 181 is obviously fine. You have 181 parts of dough for every 100 parts of flour you started with.

The alternative system, where every ingredient is a share of the total dough and everything sums to 100, is called true percentage, and almost nobody uses it in a bakery. It's harder to work with for exactly one reason: when you change one ingredient, every other number has to change too, because the denominator moved. In bakers percentage the denominator is nailed to the flour, so you can raise the water 5 points and nothing else on the sheet is affected.

That total is genuinely useful, by the way. Divide any target dough weight by it and you get the flour weight you need. We'll use that trick below.

Salt and yeast: the numbers that hold at every batch size

Two ingredients have narrow, well-established percentage ranges, and knowing them lets you sanity-check any recipe in seconds.

Salt: 1.8 to 2.2 percent

Salt does three jobs in dough. It seasons, it tightens the gluten network, and it slows fermentation so the flavor has time to develop.

• Below about 1.5 percent the bread tastes flat and the dough ferments faster than you want.
• 1.8 to 2.2 percent is the working band for nearly all bread. Two percent is the default that most bakeries run.
• Above about 2.5 percent the bread starts to taste salty and the yeast is noticeably held back.

A saltless dough is a real thing (Tuscan bread is traditionally made without salt), but it's a deliberate style, not an accident.

Watch out for salt type when you convert. Table salt is about 6 g per teaspoon. Coarse kosher salt can be as low as 3 g per teaspoon for the same volume, so "1 tsp salt" can mean half as much salt depending on the box. This is exactly why percentages are written against weight and not volume.

Yeast: 0.2 to 2 percent, depending on how fast you want it

Yeast percentage is really a time setting, not a flavor setting.

Our example loaf sat at 1.9 percent, which is on the brisk side and normal for a same-day enriched sandwich loaf. Sugar and butter both slow yeast down, so enriched doughs legitimately need more of it.

Active dry yeast is usually dosed about 25 percent higher than instant for the same speed, and fresh yeast about three times higher. Our yeast converter handles that swap, and active dry vs instant yeast covers why they behave differently.

The reason these ranges hold at any batch size is the whole point of the system. Two percent salt is two percent salt in a 300 g test batch and in a 30 kg production mix. You never re-derive it. You never wonder whether a recipe that "worked at full size" will work halved.

The real use case: sizing a batch to what you actually have

Recipes assume you want the amount they made. You usually don't. Here are the two situations where bakers percentage stops being theory and starts saving your afternoon.

Case 1: you have a specific amount of flour

There's 640 g of bread flour left and you want to use all of it rather than open a new bag.

Set flour = 640 g. The multiplier is 640 ÷ 100 = 6.4 grams per percentage point.

• Water at 68% → 68 × 6.4 = 435 g
• Salt at 2% → 2 × 6.4 = 13 g
• Instant yeast at 0.8% → 0.8 × 6.4 = 5 g

Done. Total dough weight is 640 + 435 + 13 + 5 = 1,093 g. Three lines of arithmetic and the whole formula moved.

Case 2: you have a specific pan

This runs the math backwards, and it's the trick most home bakers never learn.

A 9x5 inch loaf pan takes roughly 900 g of dough for a well-domed loaf. An 8.5x4.5 inch pan takes closer to 750 g.

You want 900 g of finished dough at our sandwich formula, whose total was 181 percent. So:

Flour weight = target dough weight ÷ total percentage

900 ÷ 1.81 = 497 g of flour. Round it to 500 g and rebuild the formula from there, exactly as we did above.

Now do it for two 8.5x4.5 pans: 750 × 2 = 1,500 g of dough. 1,500 ÷ 1.81 = 829 g of flour. Call it 830 g, multiply every percentage by 8.3, and you have a formula that fills both pans properly instead of one overflowing and one looking sad.

If you're moving a recipe between pan sizes and want the capacity numbers rather than the rules of thumb, our pan converter does the volume math, and the recipe scaler will take it from there.

This is the moment bakers percentage earns its keep. Not in a bakery. In your kitchen, on a Saturday, when the recipe makes one loaf and you own two pans.

Bakers percentage only works if you own a scale

This has to be said plainly, because it's the one hard requirement.

You cannot do this with cups. Not because it's difficult, but because the input numbers aren't stable enough for the output to mean anything.

A cup of all-purpose flour is 125 g if you spoon it in and level it, 145 g if you dip the cup into the bag, and 115 g if you sift first. Same cup, same flour, a 26 percent spread. Run our sandwich loaf with scooped flour instead of spooned:

• Flour: 3 × 145 = 435 g instead of 375 g
• Water is unchanged at 236 g
• Hydration: 236 ÷ 435 = 54.3 percent, not 62.9 percent

You aimed at a soft 63 percent sandwich dough and got a stiff 54 percent bagel dough, and the recipe card gave you no way to notice. That's a tight, dry, heavy loaf, and it's one of the most common reasons bread fails. How to measure flour walks through all three methods and why the numbers differ so much.

A digital kitchen scale that reads to 1 g costs about the same as two bags of good flour and removes the entire problem. Weigh into the bowl, tare between ingredients, and you've also cut your dishes down to one.

A couple of practical scale notes:

• Get one that reads to 1 g, not 5 g. Yeast and salt in a small dough live in single-gram territory.
• Use the tare button between every ingredient. One bowl, one running total, no measuring cups at all.
• For quantities under about 5 g, a 1 g scale is at the edge of its accuracy. Measuring spoons are fine there as long as you know the conversion, and our ingredient weights chart lists them.

Once you're weighing, percentages are basically free. You're already writing down grams. Dividing by the flour weight takes ten seconds and turns a recipe into a formula you can reuse forever.

Bakers percentages for common breads

These are typical working ranges for well-known styles, not one fixed recipe. Use them to sanity-check a formula, or as a starting point for your own. Yeast figures are for instant yeast.

Notice how the enriched breads at the bottom list very little water. Their eggs, milk and butter carry plenty of water of their own, which is the subject of the next section. For more on how the flours behave, see types of bread and bread flour vs all-purpose.

Counting the water hiding in milk, eggs and butter

The hydration percentage only tells the truth if you count every source of water. These are the approximate water contents bakers use to work out total hydration.

Worked check: a challah with 500 g flour, 150 g water, 150 g egg and 50 g oil looks like a 30% dough on paper. Add the egg water (150 × 0.75 = about 112 g) and the true hydration is (150 + 112) ÷ 500 = about 52%. That is why it feels like a soft, workable dough rather than a dry brick.

Oil and sugar contain essentially no water, so they do not count toward hydration, but both make a dough feel softer than its hydration number suggests.

Preferments in bakers percentage

A preferment is a portion of the flour, water and yeast mixed ahead of time. Bakers describe it two ways: its own hydration, and how much of the total flour it contains (the prefermented flour percentage).

Whatever the preferment, split it into its flour and water and add both to the dough totals before you calculate anything. Our stiff starter ratio guide works through that split for a 50% levain, and converting a yeast recipe to sourdough shows the same math in reverse.

Worked example: four pizza dough balls from percentages

Here is the backwards method from start to finish, using a formula you can trust.

The formula: flour 100%, water 62%, salt 2.8%, instant yeast 0.2%. Total = 165%.

The target: four 250 g dough balls, so 1,000 g of dough.

Step 1. Find the flour. 1,000 ÷ 1.65 = 606 g of flour.

Step 2. Multiply out. Every percentage point is worth 6.06 g.

• Water: 62 × 6.06 = 376 g
• Salt: 2.8 × 6.06 = 17 g
• Instant yeast: 0.2 × 6.06 = 1.2 g, a little under 1/2 teaspoon

Step 3. Check. 606 + 376 + 17 + 1.2 = 1,000.2 g. Four balls at 250 g each.

Step 4. Allow for loss. Some dough always sticks to the bowl and bench. Many bakers add 2 to 3% to the target, so they would build 1,030 g and divide it into four 257 g pieces. The pizza dough rise time guide covers how long a 0.2% yeast dough needs.

A quick reference for reading any formula

Once a recipe is in percentages, these numbers tell you what kind of bread you're looking at before you make anything.

Common bakers percentage mistakes

For the measuring side of these mistakes, see kitchen scale vs measuring cups, and for the salt type problem specifically, kosher salt vs table salt.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between bakers percentage and true percentage?

Bakers percentage divides every ingredient by the flour weight, so flour is always 100 percent and the total comes out over 100. True percentage divides every ingredient by the total dough weight, so everything sums to exactly 100. Bakeries use bakers percentage because the flour stays a fixed reference point, which means changing one ingredient doesn't force you to recalculate all the others.

How do I calculate hydration percentage?

Divide the total water weight by the total flour weight and multiply by 100. For 350 g of water and 500 g of flour, that's 350 ÷ 500 = 0.70, so 70 percent hydration. Count every liquid that behaves like water, including milk, and count all flours together in the denominator.

Does milk count as water in the hydration percentage?

Mostly, but not entirely. Whole milk is roughly 87 percent water, so 100 g of milk contributes about 87 g of hydration plus fat, sugar and protein. Most home bakers just count milk as water and accept the small error, which is fine. If you're chasing precision, multiply the milk weight by 0.87 before adding it to your water total.

What percentage of salt should be in bread dough?

Between 1.8 and 2.2 percent of the flour weight, with 2 percent as the safe default. For 500 g of flour that's 9 to 11 g of salt. Below 1.5 percent the bread tastes flat and ferments too fast; above about 2.5 percent it tastes salty and the yeast slows down noticeably.

How much yeast per 500g of flour?

For a same-day loaf, 1 percent instant yeast is 5 g, which is about 1 1/2 teaspoons. A full US packet is 7 g, or 2 1/4 teaspoons, which lands at 1.4 percent for 500 g of flour and gives you a faster rise. For an overnight dough, drop to 0.3 percent, or about 1.5 g.

Do I include the starter or preferment in the flour weight?

Yes, and this trips up almost everyone. A 200 g starter at 100 percent hydration is 100 g of flour and 100 g of water, and both halves belong in your totals. Add that 100 g to your flour figure and that 100 g to your water figure before you calculate anything, or your hydration number will read far too low.

Can I use bakers percentage for cakes and cookies?

You can, and pastry kitchens do, but it's less useful. Cakes and cookies have several structural ingredients competing (eggs, sugar and fat all do heavy lifting), so flour alone doesn't predict behavior the way it does in bread. Scaling by a simple multiplier works fine for those, which is what our recipe scaler does.

Why does my dough feel wrong even though the percentages are right?

Almost always the flour. Whole wheat, rye, and high-protein bread flour all absorb more water than all-purpose, so an identical 70 percent formula feels dry with whole wheat and slack with all-purpose. Humidity and how long the flour has sat open both move it a few points too. Treat the percentage as a starting point, then adjust water by 2 to 3 percent based on what the dough actually feels like.

What is a good hydration for beginner bread?

Start around 60 to 65%. Dough in that range is soft and smooth but not sticky, so it is easy to knead and shape by hand. Once that feels comfortable, move up a few points at a time toward the 70 to 75% range used for rustic and sourdough loaves.

Do eggs count toward hydration?

Their water does. A shelled whole egg is roughly 75% water, so 100 g of egg adds about 75 g to the hydration total. Most bakers either count egg at 75% water or list it as its own percentage and keep that in mind when judging how wet the dough will feel.

Does sugar or oil count as part of hydration?

No. Neither contains meaningful water, so they are not added to the water total. Both still soften the dough and make it feel wetter than its hydration number suggests, which is why enriched doughs are often written at lower hydration.

How do I convert a bakers percentage formula into cups?

First calculate the grams for your flour weight, then convert each ingredient using a weight chart. For all-purpose flour this site uses 125 g per cup. Cups will always be less accurate than grams, so weigh the flour at least, even if you measure smaller ingredients by spoon.

What is prefermented flour percentage?

It is the share of the total flour that goes into a preferment such as a poolish, biga or levain. If a dough has 1,000 g total flour and 200 g of it is in the poolish, the prefermented flour is 20%. It controls how much flavor and acidity the preferment adds.

Related guides: How to measure flour | Bread flour vs all-purpose | Types of flour | Recipe scaler | Pan converter | Ingredient weights chart

Want to work it out for your own dough or syrup? Try our free bread hydration calculator.