How many grams in a cup of icing / powdered sugar?
One US cup of icing / powdered sugar weighs 120 g.
Unsifted. Sifted it drops to about 100 g, and icing recipes usually mean sifted.
Every amount a recipe asks for
| icing / powdered sugar | In grams |
|---|---|
| ¼ cup | 30 g |
| ⅓ cup | 40 g |
| ½ cup | 60 g |
| ⅔ cup | 80 g |
| ¾ cup | 90 g |
| 1 cup | 120 g |
| 2 cups | 240 g |
Going the other way
If you have a weight and need cups — rounded to the quarter cup, because that is the finest division a cup set actually has:
| 50 g | ½ cup |
| 100 g | ¾ cup |
| 200 g | 1 ¾ cups |
| 250 g | 2 cups |
| 500 g | 4 ¼ cups |
| 1000 g | 8 ¼ cups |
Which cup does your recipe mean?
“A cup” is four different volumes, so the weight above changes with the recipe's origin. Same icing / powdered sugar, same cup measure, different answer:
| Cup | Volume | One cup weighs | Used in |
|---|---|---|---|
| US customary | 237 ml | 120 g | American recipes and measuring cups |
| US legal | 240 ml | 122 g | nutrition labels |
| Metric | 250 ml | 127 g | Australia, New Zealand, Canada |
| Imperial | 284 ml | 144 g | British recipes before roughly 1980 |
120 g per US customary cup. Source: King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart (confectioners' sugar, unsifted). Published values differ by a few grams between references; for anything but bread, a few grams is noise.
Or stop converting by hand
Paste any recipe into RecipeTables and the whole thing converts at once — every ingredient, in one table, with a Cups/Grams switch that remembers which you use. It converts what the author wrote rather than inventing a weight the recipe never gave.
Try it on the recipe you're reading, or read why a cup isn't a cup — four volumes, the 25% flour problem, and the Australian tablespoon that's a third too big.
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