Tablespoons to Cups Converter

The kitchen rule says 16 tablespoons make a cup, and here it holds exactly: type 16 and you get 1 cup. Both units are US customary measures cut from the same gallon:

• the tablespoon is the US tablespoon, 14.7868 ml, or half a US fluid ounce;
• the cup is the US cup, 236.59 ml, or 8 US fluid ounces.

So the ratio is 16 with nothing left over, and a single tablespoon shows as 0.0625 cups, a sixteenth. You can also type a spoon count the way a recipe writes it: 5 1/3 tablespoons converts to 0.33333 cups, a third of a cup.

Measuring cups come in fractions, not decimals. This table puts the tool's answer next to the fraction you would actually reach for:

The thirds are the awkward ones. A third of a cup is not a whole number of tablespoons, which is why recipes write it as 5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon. One tablespoon is 3 teaspoons in this tool.

Tablespoons pile up fast when you multiply a recipe. Say a sauce uses 3 tablespoons of oil and you make six batches: that is 18 tablespoons. The tool shows 1.125 cups, which is 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Measure the full cup, then add the 2 spoons. That beats scooping 18 level spoons and losing count halfway.

Going the other way, if you are cutting a recipe down and a cup amount becomes awkward, convert it to tablespoons first and then halve or quarter the spoons.

Many measuring spoons are stamped 15 ml. That spoon is 1.44% larger than the tool's US tablespoon, so 16 of them make 240 ml, which the converter shows as 1.0144 US cups. Metric cups of 250 ml differ the other way round: filling one takes about 16.907 US tablespoons, or close to 17 of the 15 ml spoons. In soups and sauces none of this matters. In baking, measure with one set of spoons and cups from the same system.