1 Cup of Milk in Grams: The Short Answer
One US cup of milk weighs about 245 grams. Whole milk at 3.25% fat has a density of roughly 1.03 g/mL, and a US cup is 236.6 mL (240 mL in nutrition labelling), which multiplies out to 243–247 g depending on fat content.
That single number is enough for most recipes, but milk is a case where the published figures disagree more than they should — and the disagreement is big enough to change a bake. Here is the honest breakdown.
| Milk type | 1 US cup (grams) |
|---|---|
| Whole milk (3.25%) | 244–249 |
| Reduced-fat 2% | 244–246 |
| Low-fat 1% | 244–245 |
| Skim / fat-free | 245 |
| Buttermilk | 245 |
| Half-and-half | 242 |
| Heavy cream (36%) | 238 |
| Evaporated milk | 252 |
| Sweetened condensed milk | 306 |
| Dry milk powder (unreconstituted) | 128 |
Use 245 g as your default and you will never be meaningfully wrong. Note how flat the top of that table is: removing fat from milk barely changes its weight, because fat is lighter than water but only makes up 3% of the glass. Cream is the exception at the bottom, and milk powder is a completely different substance — it is a dry solid, not a liquid.
Why Some Charts Say 1 Cup of Milk Is 227 g
Several well-known baking charts list milk at 227 g per cup. That is not a measurement error; it is a legacy convention. 227 g is 8 ounces, and the number descends from treating a cup of milk as “8 fluid ounces of water” for the sake of round arithmetic.
The physical reality is that 8 fl oz (236.6 mL) of milk weighs 244 g, not 227 g. The gap is 17 g, about 7%. In a custard or a pudding, 7% less liquid means a noticeably firmer set. In a cake, it means a slightly drier crumb.
What to do about it: look at where the recipe came from.
- A recipe from a chart that lists 227 g → use 227 g, because the rest of that recipe was developed with the same convention.
- A recipe written in millilitres (240 mL milk) → use 245 g. You are converting a real volume, not honouring a convention.
- A recipe that gives both → trust the gram figure; it is the more deliberate number.
- No guidance at all → use 240 g as a compromise that sits between the two camps.
What you should not do is mix conventions inside one recipe. Half the ingredients weighed at the USDA density and half at the legacy density is how you end up with a batter that is neither.
Fractions of a Cup, in Grams
Most recipes call for a half or a third of a cup rather than a whole one, so here are the weights you actually need, using 245 g per cup.
| Volume | Whole milk (g) | Heavy cream (g) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 cup | 245 | 238 |
| ¾ cup | 184 | 179 |
| ⅔ cup | 163 | 159 |
| ½ cup | 123 | 119 |
| ⅓ cup | 82 | 79 |
| ¼ cup | 61 | 60 |
| 2 tbsp | 31 | 30 |
| 1 tbsp | 15 | 15 |
Note the practical consequence: one tablespoon of milk and one tablespoon of water both weigh about 15 g. For measuring small amounts, milk behaves like water and you can treat 1 mL as 1 g without thinking about it. The distinction only matters at cup scale, and even there it is only worth about 5 g.
Milk in Metric Recipes: Volume and Weight Diverge
European and Australian recipes almost always give milk in millilitres, and this is where home cooks get caught. There is no problem with fresh milk — 250 mL is 258 g, close enough to interchange. The problem is with concentrated milks:
- Evaporated milk is fresh milk with about 60% of its water removed. A 354 mL can weighs 354 g × 1.06 ≈ 380 g, so volume and weight do not match, and a recipe that says “1 cup evaporated milk” means 252 g, not 245 g.
- Sweetened condensed milk is roughly 45% sugar by weight. One cup is 306 g — 25% heavier than a cup of milk. Substituting one for the other by volume gives you a wildly different recipe.
- Dry milk powder is the trap. One cup of powder is 128 g and reconstitutes into about 3.5 cups of milk. Never substitute it by volume for liquid milk.
When a recipe mixes concentrated and fresh dairy, weigh everything. The Kitchen Measurement Converter covers milk alongside flour, butter, sugar, and eleven other ingredients, and it handles the volume-to-weight direction for each one separately.
Why Weighing Milk Beats Measuring It
Milk is one of the easier liquids to measure by volume — no settling, no compaction, a flat meniscus. So why bother with grams at all?
Three reasons:
- You can scale it. Doubling ¾ cup of milk gives you 1½ cups, which is fine; doubling ⅔ cup gives you 1⅓ cups, which is a fraction you have to think about. Doubling 163 g is 326 g and you are done.
- It survives unit conversion. A recipe in grams can be rescaled by percentage, which is how commercial formulas are written. A recipe in cups cannot.
- It pairs with the rest of your mise en place. Once the flour, sugar, and butter are on a scale, adding milk to the same bowl-and-tare routine costs you nothing.
If you are already weighing your flour, weigh the milk too — but note that the two are not equally important. A 20 g error in flour is a disaster; a 20 g error in milk is a slightly different crumb. Spend your precision where it counts.
When you change the batch size, the Recipe Servings Calculator multiplies the milk and everything else in one pass. If you are also changing the tin, the Baking Pan Converter checks whether the batter depth still works, because more liquid in the same pan and more batter in the same pan are two different problems.
Quick Reference
- 1 cup whole milk = 245 g = 240 mL = 8.1 fl oz
- 1 L milk = 1,030 g = 1.03 kg
- 1 gallon milk = 3,785 mL = 3,900 g
- 1 tbsp milk = 15 g
- 1 cup heavy cream = 238 g
- 1 cup sweetened condensed milk = 306 g
- 1 cup dry milk powder = 128 g
Try Our Free Tools
Skip the arithmetic. The Kitchen Measurement Converter converts cups, grams, millilitres, and ounces for milk and fifteen other ingredients with their real densities built in, so you do not have to remember which chart you are following. The Recipe Servings Calculator rescales every ingredient in a recipe when you change the serving count, and the Conversion Chart is a printable page for the cupboard door. Free, no signup, instant.