How butter conversions work
Butter is dense and consistent enough that, unlike flour or brown sugar, its measurements barely vary between cooks or countries: a stick weighs what a stick weighs. Everything on this page comes from one anchor figure: a US stick of butter is a quarter pound, 113.4 grams exactly (the wrapper rounds that to 113 g). From there, a cup is always 2 sticks, a tablespoon is always 1/8 of a stick, and an ounce is always 1/4 of a stick. Enter an amount in any of those units, even a fraction like 1/2 stick or 1 1/4 cups, pick what you want it converted to, and this calculator does the rest with the steps shown.
The conversion table
| Cups | Sticks | Tablespoons | Ounces | Grams |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/8 cup | 1/4 stick | 2 tbsp | 1 oz | 28 g |
| 1/4 cup | 1/2 stick | 4 tbsp | 2 oz | 57 g |
| 1/2 cup | 1 stick | 8 tbsp | 4 oz | 113 g |
| 3/4 cup | 1 1/2 sticks | 12 tbsp | 6 oz | 170 g |
| 1 cup | 2 sticks | 16 tbsp | 8 oz | 227 g |
| 2 cups | 4 sticks | 32 tbsp | 16 oz | 454 g |
The gram column is rounded to a whole number for sticks and cups, since that is how wrappers and recipes usually state it. Tablespoon-scale amounts keep a decimal (1 tablespoon is 14.175 g, shown as 14.2 g), because at that size a tenth of a gram is worth keeping.
Worked examples
Half a stick to tablespoons: 0.5 stick × 8 tbsp per stick = 4 tbsp.
6 tablespoons to grams: 6 × 14.175 g per tbsp = 85.05 g.
2 cups to grams: 2 × 226.8 g per cup = 453.6 g, rounded to 454 g (a full pound).
Reading a US butter wrapper
Most US butter wrappers print tablespoon lines right on the paper, one for each of the stick's 8 tablespoons, and often a half-cup mark at the middle. So when a recipe says "6 tablespoons," you do not need a measuring spoon at all: unwrap the stick, find the sixth printed line, and cut straight across. This calculator is most useful for the amounts that are not printed on the wrapper, like converting a recipe written in grams, or figuring out how many sticks a bulk cup measurement needs.
Why European butter never comes in sticks
European butter is typically sold in a 250 gram block with no wrapper markings at all, not a set of pre-portioned sticks. There is no line to cut at, which is exactly why UK, Australian, and most European recipes specify butter by weight in grams rather than by sticks, cups, or tablespoons: weight is the only measurement a plain block actually offers. If you are converting a European recipe to US units, or a US recipe for a European kitchen, this converter's gram figures are the ones to use.
Converting the rest of a recipe
Butter is one ingredient among many. If the same recipe hands you flour, sugar, or another ingredient in cups, the cups to grams converter covers those by weight, ingredient by ingredient. For volume-to-volume swaps, teaspoons and tablespoons and fluid ounces, the cooking measurement converter handles that without needing an ingredient at all. And if you are resizing the whole recipe to a different serving count, the recipe scaler does that math and rounds every ingredient to a measurement you can actually read off a cup or spoon.