Tablespoons to Cups Converter

What this does

So a recipe has you adding spoon after spoon of something, and you would rather just measure it as cups. This converter turns tablespoons into cups. Enter the number of tablespoons, pick your spoon and cup types, and it gives you the cups. It accepts teaspoons too, in case that is what you are counting.

How to use it

1. Enter the amount.
2. Pick the spoon type, US or Imperial tablespoons, or teaspoons.
3. Pick the cup type, US Legal or Imperial, then press Calculate.

No ingredient needed, since tablespoons and cups both measure volume.

How the conversion works

The tool turns your spoons into millilitres, then divides by the size of a cup:

cups = (tablespoons × ml per tablespoon) ÷ cup size in ml

A US tablespoon is about 14.8 millilitres, so 8 tablespoons comes to roughly half a cup, and 16 tablespoons to about a full cup.

Good to know

The classic kitchen fact is that 16 tablespoons make a cup. That holds against the US customary cup of about 237 millilitres. Measured against the 240 millilitre US Legal cup this tool uses, 16 tablespoons come to about 0.99 of a cup, a whisker under one. The difference is tiny, but it is why the answer is not a perfectly round number.

Imperial tablespoons are larger than US ones, so choosing Imperial changes the count. Most modern recipes mean US spoons.

Questions people ask

References

1. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Buying Guide. Guide to Volume Equivalents for Liquids. https://foodbuyingguide.fns.usda.gov/Content/TablesFBG/Table12_FBG_A_Guide_to_Volume_Equivalents_for_Liquids.pdf
2. 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