Convert Quarts to Cups

About converting Quarts to Cups

Quarts (qt) and Cups (cup) are both units of volume, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Quarts figure by 4. Ten Quarts comes to 40 Cups, and a hundred works out at 400 Cups.

Rule of thumb: going from Quarts to Cups multiplies, so the figure always grows — one Quart is already 4 Cups. If your answer came out smaller, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Quart?

A quart is a quarter of a gallon, which is exactly where the name comes from — the Latin for a fourth part. Because the American and imperial gallons are different sizes, so are their quarts: the imperial quart is the larger by roughly a fifth, a discrepancy that quietly ruins recipes and technical specs copied across the Atlantic without checking. In the United States the quart is a supermarket fixture — milk, cream, motor oil and paint are all sold in them. Britain, having gone metric on the shelf, has largely dropped it and kept only the pint.

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.

To put both in perspective: a quart is the size of a standard carton of American milk, while a cup is the measure American recipes count flour in.

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