Convert Cups to Pints

About converting Cups to Pints

Cups (cup) and Pints (pt) are both units of volume, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Cups figure by 0.5. Ten Cups comes to 5 Pints, and a hundred works out at 50 Pints.

Rule of thumb: going from Cups to Pints divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 2 Cups to make a single Pint. 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 Pint?

The pint is where the US-imperial split becomes most visible, because both countries still use the word every day. A US pint is 16 US fluid ounces; an imperial pint is 20 imperial fluid ounces, making the British pint the larger by about a fifth. So a pint of beer in London is meaningfully more beer than a pint in New York — the same word, a different drink, and no label anywhere warns you. The imperial pint is also one of the few imperial units still legally mandated in the UK, where draught beer and cider must be sold in pints or fractions of one.

To put both in perspective: a cup is the measure American recipes count flour in, while a pint is the standard glass of beer in a British pub.

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