Cups to mL
A US cup is 236.588 mL. An Australian cup is 250 mL. Same word, 6% apart, and no recipe warns you. Pick the standard your recipe means, then convert either way.
US customary cup: 236.588 mL, which is 8 US fluid ounces exactly. This is what "1 cup" means in an American recipe.
Fractions welcome: type 3/4, 1 1/2, ⅔ or 0.75. Enter a volume in milliliters.
Read me The 6% nobody warns you about
A metric cup holds 250 mL. A US customary cup holds 236.588 mL. Divide one by the other and the metric cup is 5.7% larger, call it 6%.
Six percent sounds like nothing. Follow an Australian cake recipe with American cups and you are short 13.4 mL per cup. Across three cups of flour, two of sugar and one of milk that is about 80 mL of missing ingredients, spread unevenly, because you almost certainly used the correct amount of the things measured in spoons. The ratios shift, and the cake is drier and denser than the one in the photograph.
It runs the other way too. Bake an American recipe with Australian cups and everything is 6% bigger, which usually shows up as batter that will not fit the pan and a bake that sinks in the middle.
How to tell which cup a recipe means. If it is American, or from a US site, it is 236.588 mL. If it uses grams alongside cups, or the words "caster sugar", "plain flour" or "bicarbonate of soda", or it is from Australia, New Zealand, Canada or the UK, it is almost certainly the 250 mL metric cup. If it is a British recipe printed before about 1970, it may be the 284.13 mL imperial cup. If you genuinely cannot tell and the recipe is American in style, assume 236.588 mL.
The permanent fix is to stop using cups. A gram is a gram in every country. Our grams to cups converter and the ingredient weight chart will get you off cups for good.
Cups to mL: common amounts, all four standards
The table people screenshot. Every row is the same fraction of a cup, converted under each of the four standards, so you can see the gap for yourself.
| Cups | US customary 236.588 mL |
US legal 240 mL |
Metric 250 mL |
Imperial 284.13 mL |
|---|
The highlighted column is the standard you have selected above. Change it and this table follows.
mL to cups: the amounts that show up in recipes
Working the other way, from a metric recipe into American measuring cups. These are US customary cups, written the way you would actually measure them.
| mL | In US cups | Decimal cups |
|---|
Notice 250 mL. One metric cup is not one US cup, it is one US cup plus nearly three teaspoons.
Tablespoons and teaspoons are not safe either
Everyone knows cups vary. Almost nobody knows the tablespoon does too, and the Australian one is the outlier that ruins things, because a tablespoon of baking powder is not a rounding error.
| Standard | 1 tbsp | 1 tsp | tbsp per cup |
|---|---|---|---|
| US customary | 14.79 mL | 4.93 mL | 16 |
| US legal / nutrition label | 15 mL | 5 mL | 16 |
| Metric (UK, NZ, Canada, Europe) | 15 mL | 5 mL | 16.7 |
| Australian | 20 mL | 5 mL | 12.5 |
| Imperial (old British) | 17.76 mL | 5.92 mL | 16 |
Australia One tablespoon is four teaspoons, not three
Australia is the only country that standardized its tablespoon at 20 mL. Everywhere else it is 15 mL or the US 14.79 mL. The teaspoon stayed at 5 mL, so an Australian tablespoon is four teaspoons while everyone else's is three.
Practically: if an Australian recipe says 2 tablespoons of butter, that is 40 mL, and 2 American tablespoons is 29.6 mL. You would be a third short. Going the other way, using an Australian spoon on an American recipe overdoses leaveners and salt by 35%, which is the version you can actually taste.
Australian recipes also fill 12.5 tablespoons to the cup rather than 16, which is why an Australian cup measure will not divide neatly into tablespoons the way an American one does.
Method Where these numbers come from
Every figure here is a definition, not a measurement, so there is nothing to disagree about once you have named the standard.
US customary cup = 8 US fluid ounces = 236.5882365 mL, which follows from the US fluid ounce being defined as exactly 29.5735295625 mL. We show it as 236.588 mL.
US legal cup = exactly 240 mL, the rounded figure the US Food and Drug Administration uses for nutrition labeling.
Metric cup = exactly 250 mL, the standard cup in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and metric Europe.
Imperial cup = 10 imperial fluid ounces = 284.130625 mL, from the imperial gallon of 4.54609 liters. We show it as 284.13 mL.
The conversion itself is one multiplication: milliliters = cups × the mL value of your chosen cup, and back the other way cups = milliliters ÷ that same value. Tablespoons and teaspoons are a sixteenth and a forty-eighth of a US customary cup, except in Australia where the tablespoon is defined outright as 20 mL.
These are volumes. A cup of flour and a cup of honey both hold 236.588 mL and weigh nothing like the same, which is a different question answered by our grams to cups converter.
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Questions bakers actually ask
How many mL is 1 cup?
236.588 mL if it is a US customary cup, which is what an American recipe means. 240 mL if it is the US legal cup used on nutrition labels. 250 mL if it is a metric cup, standard in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and metric Europe. 284.13 mL if it is an old imperial British cup.
The 236.588 figure is not arbitrary. A US cup is 8 US fluid ounces and a US fluid ounce is defined as exactly 29.5735295625 mL, so the cup falls out of that definition. Most sites round it to 237 or 240 without telling you which one they picked.
Is a cup 240 mL or 250 mL?
Both, in different places, which is exactly the problem. 240 mL is the US legal cup, a rounded figure the FDA defined for nutrition labeling. You will see it in newer American cookbooks that wanted a tidier number. 250 mL is the metric cup and is a genuinely different, larger cup used outside the United States.
Neither is the cup sitting in your American kitchen drawer, which is 236.588 mL. The gap between 240 and 236.588 is small enough to ignore in most baking. The gap to 250 is not.
Is an Australian cup the same as a US cup?
No. An Australian cup is 250 mL and a US cup is 236.588 mL, so the Australian cup is about 6% larger. Over a recipe using six cups of ingredients that is roughly 80 mL of difference.
The Australian tablespoon is the bigger trap. It is 20 mL, not the 15 mL used everywhere else, so it is four teaspoons rather than three. Using an Australian tablespoon of baking powder in an American recipe puts in 35% too much leavener, which you will taste.
How many mL in half a cup, a third and a quarter?
In US customary cups: ½ cup = 118.3 mL, ⅓ cup = 78.9 mL, ¼ cup = 59.1 mL, ⅔ cup = 157.7 mL, ¾ cup = 177.4 mL.
In metric cups the same fractions are 125 mL, 83.3 mL, 62.5 mL, 166.7 mL and 187.5 mL. The metric numbers are rounder because the metric cup was designed that way, which is the whole point of it.
Can I use a measuring jug instead of cups?
For liquids, yes, and it is more accurate. A liquid measuring jug is read at eye level against a flat surface, which removes the meniscus guesswork and the overfilling that dry cups invite. Pour to the mL mark this converter gives you and you are done.
For dry ingredients, no. Flour and sugar do not settle into a jug the way they settle into a dry cup, so the volume you read is not the volume the recipe writer measured. Weigh dry ingredients if you can, and if you cannot, use nested dry measuring cups filled and leveled.
Why does my converter give 237 mL and yours gives 236.588?
Because they rounded and did not say so. 236.588 rounds to 237, and for a single cup of milk the 0.4 mL difference is invisible. It stops being invisible when a converter rounds at every step of a scaled recipe, or when it silently rounds to 240 instead, which is a different standard rather than a rounding.
We hold the full value internally and round only for display, so scaling a recipe by 3 or by 0.5 does not accumulate error.
Does the type of ingredient change the mL?
No. Milliliters measure volume, and a cup is a fixed volume, so one cup of flour and one cup of honey are both 236.588 mL. That is the one conversion on this site that does not care what you are measuring.
Weight is the opposite. That same cup is 125 g of flour and 340 g of honey. If you need grams rather than milliliters, use the grams to cups converter, which asks for the ingredient first.
Cup, tablespoon and teaspoon volumes here are defined standards, not measurements. US customary from the US fluid ounce definition, US legal from FDA nutrition labeling, metric and Australian from their national standards, imperial from the imperial gallon. Last reviewed August 2026.