The short answer: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons. That single number is the whole conversion — multiply any amount in cups by 16 and you have the amount in tablespoons. It is an exact conversion between two units of volume in the US customary system, so there is no estimating, no density to look up and no ingredient that changes it. A cup of water, a cup of milk and a cup of stock are all 16 tablespoons.
Most people meet this conversion when a recipe is written in one system and their tools are marked in the other. American recipes use cups; metric recipes use tablespoons; and a cook who follows recipes from both ends up converting constantly. The good news is that volume-to-volume conversions are the simplest kind: the factor is exact, it never depends on the ingredient, and it works the same way for water, milk, oil, stock and every other liquid you cook with.
Conversion table
| Cups | Tablespoons |
|---|---|
| ¼ cup | 4 tablespoons |
| ⅓ cup | 5.3333 tablespoons |
| ½ cup | 8 tablespoons |
| ⅔ cup | 10.6667 tablespoons |
| ¾ cup | 12 tablespoons |
| 1 cup | 16 tablespoons |
| 1.5 cups | 24 tablespoons |
| 2 cups | 32 tablespoons |
| 3 cups | 48 tablespoons |
| 4 cups | 64 tablespoons |
Read the table in either direction. Going from cups to tablespoons, multiply by 16; going back, divide by 16 or multiply by 0.0625. The middle rows are the ones recipes use most — ⅔ cup is 10.6667 tablespoons, and 1 cup is 16 tablespoons. If your amount is not in the table, multiply it by 16 and you have the answer. For a quick check: 1 cup is 16 tablespoons, 2 cups are 32 tablespoons, and 10 cups are 160 tablespoons.
Worked examples
A victoria sponge that needs ½ cup. The recipe calls for ½ cup and your jug is marked in tablespoons. That is 8 tablespoons — pour to that line and you have the right amount. If you double the recipe for a crowd, you need 1 tablespoons, which is 16 tablespoons. The conversion itself never changes with the ingredient: whether the victoria sponge uses milk, water or melted butter, ½ cup is always 8 tablespoons. What changes is only the weight, never the volume.
A small batch, halved. A vinaigrette dressing recipe makes too much, so you halve it. The original uses ¾ cup; halved, that is 0.375 cup, which is 6 tablespoons. Small amounts are where conversion errors hurt most, because a 10% error in a small amount of liquid is a bigger share of the recipe. When the halved amount is awkward, measure it in tablespoons — the finer unit gives you a cleaner number.
Baking, where precision matters. A cake batter that needs ¾ cup of milk has no room for guessing: that is 12 tablespoons. In baking, liquid is a structural ingredient, and a 10% error changes the crumb. If your recipe gives the liquid in tablespoons and your cups are in cups, convert before you start, not while the oven is heating. And if the recipe also gives a weight in grams, use the weight — it is the most accurate measure of all.
How the conversion works
The US cup is defined as 236.5882 ml, and the tablespoon is defined as 14.7868 ml. Divide the first by the second and you get 16 — that is the whole derivation, and it is why the conversion is exact rather than approximate. No kitchen experiment was needed to establish it; the units were defined this way, so the ratio follows from the definitions. That is also why the same factor appears in every reliable conversion chart: there is only one right answer, and every source that uses US customary units agrees on it.
The one thing to check is which cup your recipe means. This page uses the US customary cup throughout. A metric cup is 250 ml, an imperial cup is 284 ml, and older recipes sometimes use a 'cup' that means whatever cup the writer had in the cupboard. If a recipe from outside the US gives an amount that looks wrong after converting — a cake with far too much liquid, a soup that is far too thin — the cup is the first suspect. Convert the recipe to grams once, write the grams on the recipe card, and the question never comes up again.
Rounding deserves a note too. The exact factor is 16 to four decimal places, and the full value runs further (236.59 ml divided by 14.79 ml). For everyday cooking, rounding to two or three significant figures is fine: a 1% rounding error is invisible in a soup and barely noticeable in a cake. But round only at the end. If you round the factor and then multiply by a large amount, the rounding error grows with the amount — so keep the full factor through the calculation and round the answer, not the factor.
Volume is not weight
A conversion between two volume units is the same for every ingredient, but a conversion between volume and weight is not — and confusing the two is the most common conversion mistake in cooking. A cup of all-purpose flour weighs about 120 g spooned and levelled (King Arthur Baking), a cup of granulated sugar about 198 g, a cup of butter about 227 g, a cup of milk about 244 g (USDA), and a cup of honey about 336 g. All of those weights are approximate, because they depend on how the ingredient is measured: flour is spooned and levelled, brown sugar is packed at about 213 g a cup, and honey is poured.
Flour weight is the most disputed conversion in baking. King Arthur Baking lists 120 g per cup spooned and levelled, while other sources quote 125 g, 130 g and up to 142 g for a scooped cup. We use the King Arthur spooned-and-levelled value as primary, and the gap is a warning: if you scoop flour instead of spooning and levelling it, you can add 20 g or more per cup, which is enough to make a cake dry. Granulated sugar carries a smaller dispute — King Arthur lists 198 g per cup and the USDA rounds it to 200 g, a difference of rounding rather than a real disagreement. When a recipe matters, verify with a kitchen scale: weigh the ingredient instead of measuring it by volume, and every dispute on this page disappears.
Measuring accurately
The conversion is exact, so any error in your cooking comes from the measuring, not the maths. Use a liquid measuring jug for liquids and dry cups for dry ingredients — a jug's wide top and spout make it hard to level a dry ingredient, and a dry cup's flat rim makes it hard to read a liquid meniscus. Read a jug at eye level, on a flat surface, with the liquid settled; reading it from above makes the meniscus look higher than it is. For spoon measures, level with the back of a knife: a heaped spoon can hold half as much again as a level one, which is a 50% error in a teaspoon of baking powder. Measure over the sink or the ingredient's own container, never over the mixing bowl, so a spill does not go into the batter. And if you own a kitchen scale, use it for anything that matters — weighing is more accurate than any volume measure, and it removes the conversion entirely. Keep your measuring cups together as a set, because cups from different sets are not always the same size, and a mixed set is a quiet source of error in every recipe you cook.
Frequently asked questions
How many tablespoons are in 1 cup?
Exactly 16 tablespoons. Multiply any number of cups by 16 to get tablespoons — for example, ¾ cup is 12 tablespoons. The conversion is exact because both units are defined volumes in the US customary system.
What is ⅔ cup in tablespoons?
10.6667 tablespoons. Multiply 0.6667 by 16: 0.6667 × 16 = 10.6667. This is a common recipe amount — a third of a cup of cream, a few spoonfuls of oil — so it is worth knowing it is a straight multiplication with no special case.
Is a US cup the same as a metric or imperial cup?
Not always, and this is the biggest trap in unit conversion. This page uses the US cup (236.5882 ml). A metric cup is 250 ml, an imperial cup is 284 ml, a US pint is 473 ml while an imperial pint is 568 ml, and an Australian tablespoon is 20 ml against the US 14.79 ml. If your recipe comes from outside the US, check which system it uses before converting — the factor on this page is correct for US measures only.
Can I use a kitchen scale instead of converting?
For liquids, often yes. A kitchen scale removes volume conversion entirely if the recipe gives grams, and for water-based liquids 1 ml weighs about 1 g, so millilitres and grams are nearly interchangeable. But the shortcut fails for fats and syrups: a cup of olive oil weighs about 216 g, not 237 g, and a cup of honey about 336 g. Use the scale when the recipe gives weights, and use this conversion when the recipe gives volumes.
Does temperature change the conversion?
No, not in any way that matters in a kitchen. Liquids expand slightly when heated, so a cup of boiling stock is a fraction of a percent larger in volume than a cup of cold stock, but the difference is far smaller than ordinary measuring error. Measure liquids at room temperature where you can, and never worry about temperature when converting between volume units.