Last updated: 2026-06-22

Butter — Sticks, Grams, Cups, Tablespoons

American recipes almost always measure butter in sticks, while metric recipes and most of the world's butter packaging use grams. That mismatch is one of the most common stumbling blocks when cooking across cultures: a recipe asks for "one stick" or "half a cup," but the block of butter in your fridge is labelled 250 g. This converter bridges the two systems so you can follow any recipe without guesswork.

The conversion rests on a fixed standard. A US stick of butter weighs 113.4 g, and four sticks are sold together as a one-pound (454 g) pack. Because each stick is precisely half a cup, the cup and tablespoon measures fall neatly out of the same weight.

Conversion factors

Expressed as formulas, where $B$ is the butter weight in grams:

Worked example

Suppose a recipe in grams calls for 200 g of butter and you want to know how many sticks that is.

That is just under two sticks — about one and three-quarter sticks, or roughly 14 tablespoons. In the other direction, an American recipe asking for three-quarters of a cup of butter works out to $0.75 \times 226.8 \approx 170$ g, which is one and a half sticks.

A note on cups

The figures here use the US customary cup of 236.6 mL. Butter is measured by weight rather than volume in this converter, so the result does not depend on how tightly the butter is packed — a frequent source of error when scooping soft butter into a measuring cup. If your recipe comes from the UK or Australia, note that an imperial or metric cup differs slightly in volume, though butter packs everywhere are sold by weight.

For scaling a whole recipe up or down, the Recipe Scaler adjusts every ingredient at once, and bakers working in ratios may prefer the Baker's Percentage Calculator.