Convert Cups to Liters

About converting Cups to Liters

Cups (cup) and Liters (L) are both units of volume, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Cups figure by 0.2366. Ten Cups comes to 2.3659 Liters, and a hundred works out at 23.6588 Liters.

Rule of thumb: going from Cups to Liters divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 4.2268 Cups to make a single Liter. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Cup?

The cup is a cooking unit and nothing else — no scientific or trade use — and it is dangerously ambiguous. The US customary cup in recipes is about 237 mL, the metric cup used in Australia and much of Europe is exactly 250 mL, and the US legal cup that nutrition labels are calculated against is 240 mL, different again from the one in the cookbook. Recipes almost never say which they mean. The problem compounds for dry goods, since a cup measures volume while baking actually depends on mass: how hard you pack the flour changes the answer.

What is a Liter?

The liter is not, strictly speaking, an SI unit — it is merely accepted for use alongside SI, and is defined as exactly one cubic decimetre: the volume of a cube ten centimetres on a side. That pedantic status has done nothing to slow it down, since it is how most of the world buys fuel, milk, paint and soft drinks. Both L and l are accepted symbols, but the capital L is preferred in the United States and increasingly elsewhere, because a lowercase l in most typefaces is almost indistinguishable from the digit 1 — a genuine hazard on a dosage label.

To put both in perspective: a cup is the measure American recipes count flour in, while a large bottle of soda holds two liters.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Liters to Cups converter, or browse all Volume converters.