Milliliters to cups

International recipes, particularly from Europe, Australia, and much of Asia, list liquid ingredients in milliliters, which needs converting for a US kitchen built around cup measures. 240 milliliters is close enough to 1 US cup that many home cooks round to it, though the precise figure is nearer 236.6 milliliters, a gap that adds up across a recipe with several cup measurements, particularly in baking where ratios matter.

Infant feeding is a second common trigger: pediatric guidance and formula instructions are usually written in milliliters for dosing precision, while US parents often think in terms of ounces or cups when preparing a larger batch. Converting a pediatrician's milliliter figure to a cup measurement makes it easier to work with standard US kitchen measuring tools without needing a separate metric measuring jug on hand, especially when mixing a larger batch of formula ahead of time rather than measuring every single feed from scratch.

The milliliter and the US cup are both volume units on the same linear scale, so converting between them is a single fixed multiplier with no offset.

Multiply the milliliter value by 0.004226752838 to get US cups:

cup = mL × 0.004226752838

At common volumes: 100 mL comes to 0.4227 cup, 250 mL comes to 1.0567 cup, and 500 mL comes to 2.1134 cup, a useful range for scaling a recipe up or down.

Since most measuring cups are only marked in quarter-cup lines, rounding the result to the nearest quarter cup (0.25) is usually more useful in the kitchen than keeping four decimal places, which a measuring cup cannot read anyway.

The most common mistake is confusing the US customary cup used here (236.588 mL) with the rounded legal cup used on US nutrition labels (240 mL) or the metric cup used in Australian and UK recipes (250 mL). All three are called a cup but differ enough to throw off a recipe scaled by several cups, especially in baking.