How Many mL in 1 Cup?
It depends whose cup you mean. 1 US cup = 236.59 mL ≈ 240 mL, which is what every American recipe and most online calculators round to. 1 metric cup = 250 mL exactly, and that’s the standard in Australia, New Zealand, Canada (legally), and the EU. 1 imperial cup (UK, pre-1970s recipes) = 284.13 mL, and you will still see it in older British cookbooks and some American sites that copy them.
The discrepancy is small (240 vs 250 mL is only 4%), but in a baking recipe with multiple liquid ingredients it compounds fast. A recipe calling for “1 cup of milk and 1 cup of water” using metric cups will end up with about 500 mL of liquid; using US cups it would be 480 mL — close enough that you would not notice in a stew, but noticeable in a delicate cake.
Cup to mL — Charted for Every Standard
If you need a quick lookup across the three cup standards, plus the related volume units, this is the chart to save:
| Volume Unit | US Cup (mL) | Metric Cup (mL) | Imperial Cup (mL) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 cup | 237 | 250 | 284 |
| ¾ cup | 177 | 188 | 213 |
| ½ cup | 118 | 125 | 142 |
| ⅓ cup | 79 | 83 | 95 |
| ¼ cup | 59 | 63 | 71 |
| 1 tablespoon | 14.79 | 15 | 17.76 |
| 1 teaspoon | 4.93 | 5 | 5.92 |
| 1 fluid ounce | 29.57 | 30 | 28.41 |
The cleanest cheat: memorize three numbers — 240 mL (US cup), 250 mL (metric cup), and 30 mL (1 fl oz) — and you can reconstruct the rest. Everything else in the chart is just division or multiplication.
For instant calculations, our Kitchen Measurement Converter supports cups, mL, fluid ounces, tablespoons, and teaspoons with a single input — pick your starting unit and the converter handles the rest.
Which Cup Is Your Recipe Using?
There are three tells. If the recipe is American and modern, it is US cup. If it is from a Commonwealth country (Australia, NZ, Canada, South Africa) or an EU country, it is metric 250 mL cup. British recipes from the 1970s or earlier, or anything cribbed from an older British cookbook, may still quote imperial cups — at which point the answer depends on whether the author knew they were using them.
When in doubt, look at the other measurements in the recipe:
- Butter given in sticks (4 oz or 8 oz blocks): US recipe → US cup.
- Butter given in grams (250 g blocks): metric/Commonwealth → metric cup.
- Oven in °F: US.
- Oven in °C and grams of flour: metric.
- “8 fl oz” of milk or water: UK, even modern — British recipes still use fluid ounces for liquid measures even though they use grams for everything else.
US Legal Cup vs. US Customary Cup
This one confuses everyone the first time they hear it. The US has two cup sizes: the US customary cup (236.59 mL, what you measure at home with Pyrex) and the US legal cup (240 mL, used on nutrition labels in the US — the FDA rounds to 240 mL for labeling purposes). Every recipe you have ever cooked from calls for the customary 236.59 mL cup, not the 240 mL label cup. The difference is 1.4% — too small to notice in real cooking but useful trivia for certification exams.
How to Convert Liquid and Dry Ingredients Separately
Conversions for liquids (water, milk, oil, broth, melted butter, extracts) are 1:1 by volume — 1 US cup is 1 US cup regardless of which liquid. The mL number is identical because all liquids at room temperature have density close enough to 1 g/mL that the volume relationships hold.
Conversions for dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa, oats) depend on the ingredient’s bulk density. The 236.59 mL volume is the same, but the gram weight varies from about 96 g for almond flour to about 240 g for table salt. This is the case where cup-to-mL is straightforward, but cup-to-grams requires the chart (or our Kitchen Measurement Converter which factors the density in).
For more on this, see Convert Cups to Grams Calculator (Free, Instant, No Signup), which covers the gram side of the same conversion.
Practical Conversions You Will Use Most
Three conversions cover 90% of what you will ever do with cups and mL:
- 1 US cup → 240 mL: every American recipe ingredient list.
- 1 metric cup → 250 mL: every Commonwealth/EU recipe ingredient list.
- 30 mL → 1 fl oz: for sauces, dressings, and recipes that mix metric and imperial.
Memorize those three, and you can wing the rest by simple arithmetic.
mL vs. Cubic Centimeter
In cooking, 1 mL = 1 cubic centimeter (cc), by definition. Medical syringes marked “cc” and kitchen syringes marked “mL” measure the same volume. This is why a 5 mL teaspoon = 5 cc teaspoon, and a 30 mL shot glass = 30 cc. (Medication dosages sometimes distinguish the two, but for cooking and baking they are interchangeable.)
Try Our Free Tools
Skip the table-look-up and the mental math. The Kitchen Measurement Converter handles cups, mL, fluid ounces, tablespoons, and teaspoons across US and metric standards in a single input. Pair it with the Recipe Servings Calculator to rescale batches in any unit system, and the Conversion Chart as a printable fridge reference. Free, instant, no signup.