Cups to Milliliters Converter

What this does

So you have got a recipe in cups but a measuring jug marked in millilitres, or the other way round. This converter turns cups into millilitres or litres in a second. The one twist is that not all cups are the same size, so the tool lets you pick which cup you mean before it does the sum.

How to use it

1. Enter the number of cups.
2. Pick your cup type, US Legal (240 ml) or Imperial (284 ml).
3. Choose millilitres or litres, then press Calculate.

Use litres when the numbers get big, otherwise millilitres are easier to measure.

How the conversion works

It is just the number of cups multiplied by the size of one cup in millilitres:

millilitres = cups × cup size in ml

With the US Legal cup at 240 ml, 2 cups is 2 × 240, which is 480 ml. With the Imperial cup at 284 ml, a single cup is 284 ml. Litres are simply the millilitres divided by 1000.

Which cup do you mean?

It sounds odd to ask, but a cup is not one fixed size around the world. The tool offers two. The US Legal cup is 240 millilitres, the official cup used on United States nutrition labels. The Imperial cup is 284 millilitres, the older British cup found in vintage UK recipes.

Two more cups exist out in the wild. The US customary cup used in most American recipes is about 237 millilitres, just under the legal cup, and the modern metric cup used across the UK, Australia, and Canada is 250 millilitres. They are all close, but the gaps add up over several cups, so match the cup to wherever your recipe came from.

Questions people ask

References

1. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Guidance for Industry: Guidelines for Determining Metric Equivalents of Household Measures. https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/guidance-industry-guidelines-determining-metric-equivalents-household-measures