Kitchen

How many tablespoons in a cup?

Every common kitchen volume, converted exactly - US, UK, and metric - not a rounded rule of thumb.

The conversions people actually look up

QuestionAnswer
Tablespoons in a cup16
Teaspoons in a tablespoon3
Fluid ounces in a cup8
Cups in a pint2
Cups in a quart4
Cups in a gallon16
Fluid ounces in a gallon128
Teaspoons in a cup48

All exact, US customary measurements - not rounded. These are the numbers behind essentially every US recipe conversion, verified against this site's own conversion engine rather than a rule of thumb.

Why "a cup" isn't the same everywhere

The same word means a genuinely different amount depending on where the recipe is from - a US cup is 236.6mL, but a UK/imperial cup is 284.1mL, about 20% more. A US tablespoon (14.79mL) is close to but not identical to a UK or metric tablespoon (15mL), and an Australian tablespoon is a notable outlier at 20mL - a third larger than the US version. For a recipe with more than a couple of tablespoons of something, that difference is enough to change the result. If a recipe doesn't specify, and reads like it's from outside the US, it's worth checking - and this converter handles US, UK, and metric versions separately rather than treating "cup" and "tablespoon" as universal.

This pairs with the ingredient weight to volume converter for turning any of these volumes into grams for a specific ingredient - since a cup of flour and a cup of sugar don't weigh the same.

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