How Many Grams Is 1 Cup of Flour?
The short answer: 1 cup of all-purpose flour is 120 grams — assuming you spoon the flour into the cup and level it off with a straight edge. That 120 g figure is the one used by most U.S. test kitchens and by nearly every baking book written in weights.
But flour is not a single ingredient. A cup of cake flour weighs less than a cup of bread flour, and a cup of almond flour is lighter still. If you bake more than once a month, the number you actually need depends on which bag you pulled out of the pantry.
| Flour type | 1 cup (g) | ¾ cup (g) | ½ cup (g) | ⅓ cup (g) | ¼ cup (g) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 120 | 90 | 60 | 40 | 30 |
| Bread flour | 130 | 98 | 65 | 43 | 33 |
| Cake flour | 114 | 86 | 57 | 38 | 29 |
| Pastry flour | 106 | 80 | 53 | 35 | 27 |
| Whole wheat flour | 120 | 90 | 60 | 40 | 30 |
| White whole wheat | 120 | 90 | 60 | 40 | 30 |
| ”00” / doppio zero | 125 | 94 | 63 | 42 | 31 |
| Semolina flour | 167 | 125 | 84 | 56 | 42 |
| Rye flour | 102 | 77 | 51 | 34 | 26 |
| Spelt flour | 120 | 90 | 60 | 40 | 30 |
| Almond flour | 96 | 72 | 48 | 32 | 24 |
| Coconut flour | 112 | 84 | 56 | 37 | 28 |
Keep this chart handy, or skip the lookup entirely — our Kitchen Measurement Converter converts flour (and everything else) between cups, grams, and ounces instantly, and it already knows these densities.
Why Your Cup of Flour Might Weigh 150 g
The most common way to measure flour — digging the measuring cup straight into the bag — is also the most inaccurate. Scooping compacts the flour, and a “cup” measured that way can weigh 140–155 g instead of 120 g. That is up to 30% more flour than the recipe developer intended, which is enough to turn a tender cake into a dry brick.
Three fixes, in order of reliability:
- Weigh it. 120 g is 120 g, no matter how the flour settled in the bag.
- Spoon and level. Spoon flour loosely into the dry measuring cup until it mounds, then sweep the excess off with the back of a knife. Do not tap or shake the cup.
- Sift only if the recipe says so. “1 cup sifted flour” (about 100 g) and “1 cup flour, sifted” (120 g, then sifted) are different amounts, and older recipes assume you know the difference.
Humidity matters too. Flour absorbs moisture from the air, so a cup weighed in a humid summer kitchen can run 5–8 g heavier than the same cup in a dry winter one. Another reason grams plus a scale beat cups plus hope.
Why Grams Win Once You Start Scaling
Cups break down fastest when you multiply a recipe. Tripling “1 cup + 2 tablespoons” means converting to tablespoons (18), tripling (54), then converting back — and somewhere in there someone loses a tablespoon.
In grams it is just arithmetic:
- Original: 1 cup all-purpose flour = 120 g
- Double it: 240 g
- One and a half times: 180 g
- Scale from 8 servings to 20: multiply by 2.5 → 300 g
No fractions, no “is ⅓ of ¾ cup the same as ¼ cup” debates. If you regularly resize recipes, our Recipe Servings Calculator takes the original servings and target servings and rewrites every ingredient — flour included — in a form you can actually measure.
From Flour Weight to Pan Size
More flour means more batter, and more batter needs more pan. A single 8-inch round cake pan holds roughly 500–550 g of batter; if your scaled recipe now makes 900 g, you need either a second pan or a larger one. Guessing here is how cakes dome, crack, and bake raw in the middle.
Once you have converted cups to grams and scaled the batch, check the volume against your tins with our Baking Pan Converter. It compares pan areas and depths so you know whether to split the batter or move up a size — and it will tell you when a 9×13 is the smarter choice than two rounds.
A Worked Example
A sandwich loaf calls for 3 cups of bread flour. You want to bake a slightly larger loaf, 1.25× the original.
- Convert: 3 cups bread flour × 130 g = 390 g.
- Scale: 390 g × 1.25 = 487.5 g — round to 488 g.
- Read it back as cups if you must: 488 ÷ 130 = 3.75 cups (3¾ cups).
- Check the pan: a 3-cup-flour dough usually suits a 9×5-inch pan; at 1.25× you want a 10×5-inch pan or the dough will crest and collapse.
Notice that step 3 is optional. If you own a scale — and every serious baker should — you stop at 488 g and never touch the measuring cup again.
Common Flour Conversion Mistakes
- Using a liquid measuring cup. The spouted glass cup is for water and milk. Flour needs a nested dry cup you can level.
- Assuming all flours are 120 g. Bread flour at 130 g and semolina at 167 g are big differences in a dough.
- Converting a whole recipe cup by cup. Convert once to grams, scale, then read back. Round-tripping every ingredient multiplies your rounding errors.
- Forgetting the “packed” rule. Only brown sugar is packed. Flour is always spooned and leveled.
For a printable version covering flour, sugar, liquids, and fats on one page, bookmark our Conversion Chart — it is the same data the converters use, laid out for the fridge door.
Try Our Free Tools
Stop doing cup math on the back of a grocery receipt. The Kitchen Measurement Converter converts cups to grams for flour and 40+ other ingredients, the Recipe Servings Calculator rescales the whole recipe in one pass, and the Baking Pan Converter keeps your pan choice honest. Free, instant, no signup.