A Stick of Butter Is 113 g — But Not Always the Same Butter
July 25, 2026
The recipe says 1 cup butter, softened. You are standing in front of a 250 g block with no markings on it, holding a measuring cup, wondering whether you are supposed to pack the butter in like brown sugar or just wedge it and hope.
Nobody should have to do this. Butter is the one baking ingredient where the American measurement is secretly already a weight — a stick is a quarter pound, 113 g, and it has been since long before anyone printed tablespoon marks on the wrapper. The cup is the impostor.
Here’s the chart, the reason the wrapper is the best measuring tool in your kitchen, and the 2% difference that means two identical 113 g portions can bake differently.
A stick is a quarter pound. That’s the whole trick.
US butter is sold in 1 lb packages split into four sticks, so one stick is 4 oz — 113 g. Everything else falls out of that:
- 1 stick = ½ cup = 8 tbsp = 4 oz = 113 g
- 2 sticks = 1 cup = 16 tbsp = 8 oz = 227 g
- 1 tbsp = 14 g
King Arthur Baking’s ingredient weight chart lists 8 tablespoons of butter as 4 oz / 113 g, which is the same number our butter converter runs on. There is no controversy here and no density estimate involved — unlike flour, where a cup can vary by 20% depending on how you scoop, butter’s “cup” is defined by a block that was weighed at the dairy.
The chart
| US measure | Sticks | Grams | Ounces |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 tbsp | ⅛ | 14 g | 0.5 oz |
| 2 tbsp | ¼ | 28 g | 1 oz |
| ¼ cup (4 tbsp) | ½ | 57 g | 2 oz |
| ½ cup (8 tbsp) | 1 | 113 g | 4 oz |
| ¾ cup (12 tbsp) | 1½ | 170 g | 6 oz |
| 1 cup (16 tbsp) | 2 | 227 g | 8 oz |
| 2 cups (32 tbsp) | 4 | 454 g | 16 oz (1 lb) |
And going the other way, from the blocks sold outside the US:
| Block | Cups | Sticks |
|---|---|---|
| 200 g (the shrunken UK block) | 0.88 | 1.8 |
| 227 g (Irish half-pound) | 1.00 | 2.0 |
| 250 g (standard metric block) | 1.10 | ≈2¼ |
That middle row is worth remembering: an Irish 227 g block is exactly one US cup of butter, because 227 g is half a pound. Meanwhile the UK’s 250 g block is 10% too much, and Kerrygold cut its UK block from 250 g to 200 g, so “one block” isn’t even a stable unit within one supermarket aisle. Weigh it.
The wrapper is a ruler — use it
The tablespoon marks printed along a stick are the fastest accurate measuring device in an American kitchen. Eight marks, 113 g, cut on the line. You do not need a scale and you do not need to wash a measuring cup.
One catch: sticks come in two shapes. East Coast “Elgin” sticks are long and skinny (about 4.8″ × 1.3″); West Coast “Western stubby” sticks are short and fat (about 3.1″ × 1.5″) — a hangover from different packaging machinery in the early 1900s. The weight is identical, so a recipe never cares. But the marks are spaced differently, which is why eyeballing “about a third of a stick” travels badly and cutting on a printed line doesn’t.
If your butter has no wrapper — an odd hunk left in the dish, or a metric block you’ve already hacked at — the old water-displacement trick works: fill a liquid measure with 1 cup of cold water, push butter in until the level reads 1½ cups, and you have exactly ½ cup of butter. The Kitchn has been recommending it for years, and the cleanup is genuinely better than a greasy cup. Cold water only, and never for melted butter.
Where 113 g isn’t 113 g: the butterfat gap
Now the part that actually changes your bake.
The USDA requires butter to be at least 80% butterfat. EU rules require 82%, and many European makers run to 84–86%. The rest is mostly water. So 113 g of American butter carries roughly 90 g of fat and 20 g of water, while 113 g of a rich European butter carries closer to 96 g of fat and 14 g of water.
Same weight. Different recipe.
In practice that extra fat makes European butter melt more smoothly, brown faster and taste richer — and the missing water makes pastry flakier and cookies spread less, because water in butter turns to steam and steam does a lot of the lifting in a bake. It’s why butter-forward recipes — shortbread, pound cake, pie crust, croissants — are the ones where the swap is most obvious, and why plain chocolate chip cookies barely notice.
Two things follow:
- Converting units is not converting butter. Our converter turns 2 sticks into 227 g precisely. It cannot turn American butter into European butter — no chart can.
- If a recipe was developed with one and you’re using the other, adjust the liquid, not the butter. Baking a US recipe with 84% European butter, expect a slightly stiffer dough; a splash more milk or water gets you back. Going the other way, hold a little liquid back.
One more trap: whipped butter in a tub is mostly air. 4 oz of whipped butter measures a full cup, not the half cup a stick does. Substitute it by weight and it bakes fine; substitute it by volume and you’ve halved the fat in the recipe.
The one-line version
Butter’s American units are weights in disguise — a stick is a quarter pound, full stop — so cut on the wrapper’s lines or weigh it, and never scoop it into a cup. The butter converter does the sticks ↔ cups ↔ tablespoons ↔ grams arithmetic in one step, in either direction.
If the rest of the recipe is in cups too, the cups to grams converter handles flour, sugar and the ingredients where density does matter. Halving or doubling the bake? The recipe scaler rewrites every quantity at once, and if you’re swapping tins along the way, the cake pan converter tells you how much batter the new one actually wants.