🥄 Cooking measures
Tablespoons to Cups Converter
Enter tablespoons and press Convert to get cups. There are 16 US tablespoons in a US cup, so 8 tbsp is half a cup.
About the Tablespoons to Cups Converter
A US cup is 16 tablespoons, so the conversion is a divide by 16 — the single most useful number in the kitchen. Half a cup is 8 tbsp, a third is 5⅓ tbsp and a quarter is 4 tbsp.
Australian tablespoons are the exception: they are 20 mL against 14.79 mL in the US, so four Australian tablespoons make a 80 mL cup measure rather than the 59 mL four US tablespoons would give.
How the calculation works
- 1 US cup = 16 US tablespoons
- 1 US tablespoon = 3 US teaspoons = 14.787 mL
- Cups = tablespoons ÷ 16
Reference values
| Tablespoons | Cups | Millilitres |
|---|---|---|
| 1 tbsp | 1/16 cup | 14.8 mL |
| 2 tbsp | 1/8 cup | 29.6 mL |
| 4 tbsp | 1/4 cup | 59.1 mL |
| 5⅓ tbsp | 1/3 cup | 78.9 mL |
| 8 tbsp | 1/2 cup | 118.3 mL |
| 12 tbsp | 3/4 cup | 177.4 mL |
| 16 tbsp | 1 cup | 236.6 mL |
Worked examples
- 1 Tablespoon (US) = 0.0625 Cup (US).
- 2 Tablespoon (US) = 0.125 Cup (US).
- 5 Tablespoon (US) = 0.3125 Cup (US).
- 10 Tablespoon (US) = 0.625 Cup (US).
- 50 Tablespoon (US) = 3.125 Cup (US).
- 100 Tablespoon (US) = 6.25 Cup (US).
Checking the answer
Multiply the Tablespoon (US) figure by 0.0625 to get Cup (US), and divide by the same number to come back. Twenty-five Tablespoon (US) should land at 1.562 Cup (US); an answer near 400 means the division went the wrong way. A quick sanity check is that Cup (US) 0.625 must always be smaller than the matching Tablespoon (US) figure when the factor is above 1.
Common mistakes
- Using a coffee mug as a cup measure.
- Packing brown sugar when the recipe expects it loose.
- Mixing US, metric and UK cup sizes in one recipe.
Using this conversion
The Tablespoon (US) to Cup (US) relationship is fixed, so one factor covers every value you will enter: a household quantity and an industrial one behave identically. What changes with size is only how much the rounding matters, which is why the table above stops at a round number rather than at whatever figure you happen to need today.
When precision matters
For a rough Tablespoon (US) to Cup (US) estimate one decimal place is plenty. For a contract, a shipping document or a lab result, keep the full figure from the converter and round only on the final line, so no intermediate step throws the Cup (US) total out.
A last check on the numbers: 37 Tablespoon (US) works out to 2.312 Cup (US), and reversing that with the same factor brings you back to 37 Tablespoon (US). Because Tablespoon (US) to Cup (US) is a single multiplication, any tool that gives a different figure for the same input is rounding somewhere in the middle rather than only at the end.