How many grams in a tablespoon? Sugar 12.6 g

A tablespoon holds about 12.6 g of granulated sugar, 14.2 g of butter or 18 g of table salt. The spoon is the same size in every case, so the only thing that changes is what you put in it. The figures below are read from the US government's own portion data rather than copied between recipe sites.

How many grams in a tablespoon, by ingredient

Start here and go back to your recipe. Every figure is either read directly from USDA FoodData Central or worked out from a USDA figure by the arithmetic set out further down.

Sugar and salt

Sugar and salt look alike in the spoon and behave nothing alike on the scale. A tablespoon of salt outweighs a tablespoon of sugar by almost half again, which is why a recipe that confuses the two fails in a way nobody misses.

One caution on the salt row: the figure is for table salt, which is the salt USDA measures. A recipe that names a coarser salt is one to weigh rather than convert, because grain size changes how much salt fits in the spoon.

Fats and syrups

Butter is worth memorizing a second way. A US stick is 113 g and is scored into eight tablespoons, so the wrapper works out to 14.1 g per tablespoon before you open a chart — near enough to USDA's 14.2 g that either will do.

Honey is the heaviest thing most kitchens measure by the spoon. At 21 g it outweighs the same spoon of sugar by two thirds, so swapping honey for sugar spoon for spoon changes the weight of the batch and not only its sweetness.

Flour

Flour is the one ingredient here that USDA does not measure by the spoon at all. It publishes the cup, 125 g, and the spoon figures come from dividing that down — which is also the reason flour is the ingredient most worth weighing rather than scooping.

All six ingredients above trace to USDA's SR Legacy records, read on 2026-09-05 — directly where USDA gives a spoon figure, and through the cup where it does not. The butter record states the stick and the spoon in the same line.

The spoon is 15 mL. The cup is where charts go wrong

The volumes themselves are not in dispute. Federal regulation fixes them for nutrition labeling, and they are the same figures your measuring spoons are manufactured to.

What the regulation actually fixes

A teaspoon is 5 mL, a tablespoon is 15 mL, and a cup is 240 mL. The first two match Japan and the UK, which is why a tablespoon figure written for either of those kitchens is safe to use on American spoons.

The cup is not the same figure

The agreement stops at the cup. A Japanese cup is 200 mL, and conversion charts translated out of Japanese carry that cup into English without ever saying so.

Hold the ingredient still and change only the cup, and the size of the problem shows up on its own. Granulated sugar is the fairest test, because it is the ingredient people measure by the cup most often.

What makes a chart like that hard to catch is that it is not wrong everywhere. Its tablespoon column is correct, because the tablespoon is 15 mL on both sides of the Pacific, and only the cup column comes up short.

You can test any chart in one glance. If its cup row for sugar is near 200 g it is built on the US cup, and if it is nearer 167 g it is built on the Japanese one.

How many grams in a teaspoon

A teaspoon is one third of a tablespoon, exactly and by definition, so every row in the table above divides by three. Granulated sugar is 4.2 g, table salt 6 g, olive oil 4.5 g.

For those three USDA publishes the teaspoon itself, so they are measurements rather than arithmetic — which matters when a recipe calls for a teaspoon of something and you are working on a scale. For everything else, divide the tablespoon figure and you are done.

Half and quarter spoons

Half a tablespoon is 7.5 mL and a quarter is 3.75 mL, but weighing beats splitting a spoonful by eye. Half a tablespoon of butter is 7.1 g, which a kitchen scale reads directly and a knife edge only approximates.

Why the same spoon weighs different amounts

The spoon measures volume and the scale measures mass. Density is the bridge between them, and density is the only thing that changes from row to row in the table above.

The one formula

Multiply density in grams per milliliter by 15 and you have grams per tablespoon. Water sits at 1.0 g/mL, so a tablespoon of water is 15 g, and every ingredient in the table is that same spoonful scaled up or down. Granulated sugar works out at 0.833 g/mL, which puts a spoonful at 12.5 g — close enough to the 12.6 g that USDA's teaspoon figure gives to show the two methods agree.

Working out an ingredient that is not in the table

Take the cup weight of the ingredient, then divide by 240 and multiply by 15. All-purpose flour is 125 g per cup, so 125 ÷ 240 × 15 = 7.8 g per tablespoon, which is exactly how the flour row above was built.

How many tablespoons is 50 grams

Divide the grams by the grams per tablespoon. The three most-asked ingredients land here.

Butter has a shortcut here too. Half a stick is 56.5 g, so 50 g is a little under half a stick and you can cut it against the tablespoon marks printed on the wrapper.

Summary

• A tablespoon is 15 mL and a teaspoon is 5 mL, fixed by federal regulation and shared with most of the world
• A US cup is 240 mL, and this is the figure that imported charts get wrong
• Per tablespoon: granulated sugar 12.6 g, table salt 18 g, butter 14.2 g, olive oil 13.5 g, honey 21 g, all-purpose flour 7.8 g
• A stick of butter is 113 g in 8 tablespoons, so the wrapper is itself a measuring tool
• For anything not listed here: density in g/mL × 15 = grams per tablespoon