About the Volume Converter
This volume converter covers both the metric units used almost everywhere and the US customary cooking measures that recipe sites are written in: teaspoons, tablespoons, fluid ounces, cups, pints, quarts and gallons, alongside millilitres, litres and cubic metres. All the customary units here are the US versions, which matters because the imperial equivalents used in the UK and Commonwealth carry the same names but different sizes. Convert a single figure and the table beneath shows the same quantity in all ten units, which saves repeated round trips when scaling a recipe.
How to use the Volume Converter
- 1
Enter the quantity you want to convert in the Value field.
- 2
Select its current unit under From — remember the cooking measures are US sizes.
- 3
Select your target unit under To.
- 4
Use the result for a single conversion, or read the full table when scaling a whole recipe at once.
What people use it for
Cooking from a US recipe in metric
A cup of liquid is 236.6 ml, a tablespoon is 14.8 ml and a teaspoon is 4.93 ml. Most metric kitchens round these to 240, 15 and 5, which is fine for cooking but not for baking.
Fuel and fluid capacities
A 15 US gallon tank holds 56.78 litres, and a car quoted at 5 litres of engine oil takes 1.32 US gallons.
Aquariums, tanks and containers
A cubic metre is exactly 1,000 litres, so a tank measuring 1.2 by 0.5 by 0.5 metres holds 0.3 m³, which is 300 litres or about 79 US gallons.
US customary versus imperial: same names, different sizes
This is the single most common source of error in volume conversion. The US liquid gallon is defined as exactly 231 cubic inches, which works out to 3.785411784 litres. The imperial gallon, used in the UK until metrication and still behind Commonwealth fuel economy figures, is 4.54609 litres — about twenty percent larger. Everything derived from them inherits the difference. A US pint is 16 US fluid ounces, or 473.18 ml; an imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces, or 568.26 ml, which is why a British pint of beer is noticeably bigger than an American one. Even the fluid ounces differ, though in the opposite direction: a US fluid ounce is 29.5735 ml while an imperial fluid ounce is 28.4131 ml, because the imperial version was defined as the volume of one avoirdupois ounce of water. This converter uses US customary units throughout, so if your source is a British recipe or a UK fuel figure, convert with those imperial numbers rather than relying on the cup and pint options here.
How the metric volume units nest, and the cup problem
The metric side is refreshingly simple because everything is a power of ten of a cube. A litre is defined as one cubic decimetre, which is a cube ten centimetres on each side, so it equals exactly 1,000 cubic centimetres and one cubic metre holds exactly 1,000 litres. A millilitre and a cubic centimetre are the same thing, which is why medical syringes are marked cc and ml interchangeably. The litre is not technically an SI unit but is officially accepted for use alongside them. The cooking measures nest neatly too: three US teaspoons make a tablespoon, two tablespoons make a fluid ounce, eight fluid ounces make a cup, two cups a pint, two pints a quart and four quarts a gallon. The complication is the cup itself. The US customary cup used here is 236.588 ml, but the US legal cup used on nutrition labels is defined as 240 ml, metric recipes commonly assume 250 ml, and Japanese recipes use 200 ml. A recipe that does not say which it means introduces an uncertainty of up to six percent, which is survivable in a soup and fatal in a cake.
Tips
- Volume measures for dry ingredients are unreliable because packing density varies — a cup of flour can differ by 20% depending on how it was filled.
- Cubic metres to litres is a straight multiply by 1,000; do not confuse it with the length factor of 100 between metres and centimetres.
- Where a recipe originates in the UK or Australia, treat every cup, pint and gallon as imperial before converting.