Liquid measurement made simple — from US cups to the metric world.
| cups | ml |
|---|---|
| 0.25 | 59.1 |
| 0.333 | 78.8 |
| 0.5 | 118.3 |
| 0.667 | 157.8 |
| 0.75 | 177.4 |
| 1 | 236.6 |
| 1.5 | 354.9 |
| 2 | 473.2 |
| 3 | 709.8 |
| 4 | 946.4 |
This converter solves one of the most common cross-border recipe frustrations: American recipes measure liquids in cups, while almost everywhere else uses milliliters. The good news is that unlike cups-to-grams for solids, cups-to-milliliters is a fixed conversion for all liquids (1 US cup = 236.588 ml), because both are volume units.
That said, there is a subtlety many people miss: the "cup" is not universal. The US legal cup (used for nutrition labeling) is 240 ml. The US customary cup (used in most recipes) is 236.588 ml. The metric cup (used in Australia, Canada, South Africa) is 250 ml. This tool uses the US customary value — the one you will encounter in the vast majority of American recipes.
For most cooking, the difference between these standards is negligible. But for lab-grade formulations or large-batch production scaling, that 3–13 ml difference per cup compounds significantly over many cups.
This conversion uses a fixed international factor — the result is mathematically exact for any input value you enter. The factor itself is defined by international standards bodies (NIST/SI) and is not subject to any rounding for everyday kitchen use.
Use this when a US or Canadian recipe lists liquid amounts in cups and you want to measure using a metric jug — or when scaling a recipe up for large batches where cup counting becomes impractical.
The US "cup" was not standardized until the late 19th century. Before then, recipes often said things like "a teacup of flour" — and teacup sizes varied wildly by household, region, and the size of the particular teacup available.