Millilitres to Cups: Liquid Measurement Guide

Liquid conversions are honestly the easiest category on this whole site, because unlike flour or sugar, water-based liquids don't have a density problem to worry about — a millilitre of water weighs almost exactly a gram, and volume-to-volume conversions here are just clean unit math. Still, worth having the numbers in one place.

The Core Table

Why "240ml" and Not a Rounder Number

A US legal cup is defined as exactly 240ml for nutrition labeling and recipe purposes, even though the "technical" US customary cup works out to about 236.6ml. Recipe writers essentially all use the rounded 240ml figure because the couple of millilitres of difference is meaningless in a kitchen — nobody is measuring that precisely by eye anyway.

The Metric Cup Is Different Again

To make things slightly more annoying: Australia, New Zealand, and some metric recipe writers use a "metric cup" of 250ml, not 240ml. It's close but not identical — over multiple cups of liquid in a recipe, that 10ml-per-cup gap adds up. If a recipe's origin is ambiguous and results seem consistently a little off, this is worth double-checking.

Fluid Ounces — Not the Same As Weight Ounces

This one catches people constantly: a fluid ounce measures volume, and a regular ounce measures weight, and they are not interchangeable even though they share a name. For water, they're close enough (1 fl oz ≈ 1 oz by weight) that people get away with conflating them, but for anything denser or lighter than water — honey, oil, whipped cream — treating fluid ounces and weight ounces as the same thing will throw your conversion off.

Litres, for Bigger Batches

Useful if you're scaling a soup, stock, or batch cocktail recipe up to a size where cups stop being a practical way to measure at all.

A Worked Example

A European recipe calls for 500ml of milk and you only have a US cup measure. 500ml ÷ 240ml per cup = 2.08 cups — close enough to just use 2 cups and add a splash more (roughly 2 tablespoons) to make up the difference for most recipes.

FAQ

Do I need to worry about the US cup vs metric cup difference for everyday cooking?
Not much for a single cup of liquid in a soup or sauce — the gap is small. For baking, where ratios matter more, it's worth being precise, especially across multiple cups.

Is a "cup" of flour and a "cup" of milk the same size?
Yes — the cup itself is a fixed volume (240ml) regardless of what you put in it. What changes between ingredients is the weight that volume holds, not the volume itself.

What's the easiest way to convert an odd amount like 350ml?
Use the conversion tool directly rather than doing the division by hand — it'll give you the cup and tablespoon equivalent instantly.