Because a cup is a volume, grams per cup depends on the ingredient. Look up common baking ingredients here.
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American recipes measure by volume (cups, tablespoons) while most of the world measures by weight (grams). Because a cup is a volume, the grams in a cup depend on the ingredient — a cup of flour is about 120 g, but a cup of sugar is about 200 g.
This chart gives grams per cup and per tablespoon for common baking ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, and more), so you can bake metric recipes with US cups, or convert grandma's cup measures into precise grams.
Converting grams to cups is not a unit conversion at all — it is a density calculation, because grams measure mass and cups measure volume. There is therefore no single conversion factor: a cup of flour is about 125 g while a cup of granulated sugar is 200 g and a cup of water is 237 g. Worse, flour's density depends on how it was measured, with scooping directly from the bag compacting it enough to add 20–25% more flour than spooning and levelling. This is the single biggest reason a recipe behaves differently in different kitchens, and the reason serious baking is done by weight.
Cups = grams ÷ (grams per cup for that ingredient)Grams = cups × grams per cup1 US cup = 236.588 mL — a volume, converted only via densitywhere:
Assumptions: Densities are approximate and method-dependent. Scooped flour can reach 150 g per cup, so a four-cup recipe may vary by 100 g — roughly two-thirds of an extra cup — depending purely on technique.
Convert a weight-based recipe to cups, then quantify the measurement-technique error.
Result500 g flour ≈ 4 cups (spooned) — but 3.33 cups if scooped
A 20% flour error is the difference between a tender crumb and a dense one, and no conversion table can correct for it because the error is in the measuring, not the maths. This is why every professional recipe is written in grams.