How Many Grams Is 1 Cup of Butter?
The short answer: 1 cup of butter equals 227 grams (about 8 ounces), which is also exactly 2 US sticks or 16 tablespoons. That number holds whether the butter is salted or unsalted, European-style or American — as long as you mean 1 cup of solid butter by volume, not 1 cup of melted butter (which weighs 218 g because liquid fat traps less air).
Sticks are how American recipes almost always call for butter, but cups, tablespoons, and grams all show up in recipes you might want to follow. Knowing the conversions cold is what stops you from holding a stick next to a ½-cup mark and guessing.
| Butter Unit | Volume | Weight (g) | Weight (oz) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 whole stick | ½ cup | 113.5 g | 4 oz |
| 2 sticks | 1 cup | 227 g | 8 oz |
| ½ cup | 8 tbsp | 113.5 g | 4 oz |
| ¼ cup | 4 tbsp | 56.75 g | 2 oz |
| ⅓ cup | ~5.3 tbsp | 75.6 g | 2.67 oz |
| 1 tbsp | — | 14.2 g | 0.5 oz |
| 1 tsp | — | 4.7 g | 0.17 oz |
Bookmark the chart, or skip the lookup entirely — our Kitchen Measurement Converter knows butter density by default, so you can type “1 cup → grams” and get 227 without touching a calculator.
Why the 227-Gram Number Doesn’t Change
Most ingredients have densities that move around — flour absorbs humidity, sugar clumps, oil warms up. Butter doesn’t. A gram of butter is the same gram whether it came out of the fridge, sat on the counter for an hour, or came in a foil-wrapped block from the warehouse. Its density (about 0.911 g/mL) is locked in by chemistry, not handling.
That is why recipe developers love cooking with butter in weight. A scale will always give you 227 g for 1 cup, regardless of what the cup looks like, how cold it is, or how tightly it was packed. The only edge case is melted butter: when you melt it, the air pockets between the fat crystals collapse, and the same 1-cup volume now weighs 218 g. Always measure butter solid unless the recipe explicitly says “1 cup melted butter.”
Salted vs Unsalted — Does It Affect the Weight?
No, and this matters to clear up: the salt in salted butter adds roughly 1.5% to the weight, which is so small your scale cannot distinguish 227 g salted from 227 g unsalted. Recipes that insist on unsalted butter are telling you they want you to control the salt separately — not that the weight will change. If a recipe says 227 g salted butter, swapping in 227 g of unsalted and adding a pinch of salt gives the same effect.
Where the change shows up is flavor, which is why almost every baking recipe calls for unsalted. Salted butter is salted per batch (varies by brand), so the recipe developer cannot predict how salty your cookie will turn out. The weight is fine to swap; the sodium is not.
How to Measure a Stick of Butter Without a Scale
If you are baking from an older cookbook, the recipe will say “1 stick” and expect you to know what that means. Every US stick of butter ships with the tablespoon markings printed on the wrapper, and every 1-tablespoon segment is 14.2 g:
- 1 stick = 8 tbsp = ½ cup = 113.5 g
- ½ stick = 4 tbsp = ¼ cup = 56.75 g
- ¼ stick = 2 tbsp = 1/8 cup = 28.4 g
Cut on the lines on the wrapper, and you have an exact tablespoon-level portion without a scale. This is faster and more accurate than scooping butter into a dry cup, which is messy and tends to trap air pockets.
If the butter has been used and the wrapper is gone, eyeballing a stick of butter is forgiving. A stick is roughly the size of your thumb and half the length of a dollar bill — accurate within ±5%, which is good enough for any recipe that uses whole or half sticks.
Scaling Butter in a Larger Recipe
Butter is one of the few ingredients you can scale linearly without changing the result. Tripling a recipe that uses ½ cup (113.5 g) of butter means 1½ cups (340.5 g) — no math tricks. The reason it stays linear is that fat does not interact much with itself or with the dry ingredients; you are not changing leavening ratios, hydration, or pan coverage when you triple it.
Where scaling does get tricky is across pan and serving size at the same time. Doubling a cookie recipe usually doubles the butter, but you also need more flour area, which is why our Recipe Servings Calculator rescales everything together — fat, flour, liquid, leavening — in a single pass. It saves you the “did I remember to scale the salt” headache.
Then check the pan. A 9×5 loaf pan holds roughly 2 sticks of butter’s worth of batter. If you double a loaf recipe, you need either a 10×5 or two 9×5 pans; run it through the Baking Pan Converter before pouring.
Common Butter Conversion Mistakes
- Measuring butter in a liquid measuring cup. A cup of melted butter in a liquid cup is fine; a cup of cold, sticky butter crammed into a liquid cup wastes a cup of yours. Use the markings on the wrapper.
- Assuming salted = unsalted by weight. They weigh the same to ±1 g. Do not adjust the weight; do adjust the salt.
- Forgetting the melted-butter caveat. Melted butter is 218 g per cup, not 227 g. Most recipes mean solid unless they say otherwise.
- Substituting margarine 1:1 by volume. Margarine has slightly more water and air; it spreads the same, but it bakes drier. Stick to butter for the structural recipes (puff pastry, croissants, laminated dough).
Try Our Free Tools
Stop scribbling on stick wrappers. The Kitchen Measurement Converter does butter conversions alongside flour, sugar, and 40+ other ingredients. Pair it with the Recipe Servings Calculator to rescale the rest of the recipe, and the Baking Pan Converter to keep the pan size honest. Free, no signup, works on your phone.