Butter sticks to grams: chart for ¼ to 4 sticks of butter

American recipes measure butter in sticks. Almost everyone else measures it in grams. This guide converts between the two, so you can bake a US recipe with a 250 g European block, or a metric recipe with American sticks. The short answer: one US stick of butter is 113.4 grams, and it is also 4 ounces, 8 tablespoons and half a US cup.

Why a stick has a fixed weight

A US stick is a quarter of a one-pound package. A pound is exactly 453.59237 g by definition, so a quarter pound is 113.4 g when you round to one decimal. Because the stick is sold by weight and the wrapper is printed with tablespoon marks, butter is one of the few ingredients where a cup measure and a gram measure agree reliably. Flour, by contrast, changes weight per cup depending on how you scoop it.

Sticks of butter to grams, tablespoons, cups and ounces

Grams of butter to sticks (for metric recipes)

European butter is usually sold in 250 g blocks, and recipes from the UK, Europe and Australia call for round gram amounts. Here is how those amounts look in sticks and tablespoons:

Worked example: 200 g of butter with US sticks

A shortbread recipe asks for 200 g of butter and you only have American sticks. Divide by the stick weight: 200 ÷ 113.4 = 1.764 sticks. That is 1 whole stick plus 0.764 of a stick. A stick has 8 tablespoon marks, so the part stick is 6.11 tablespoons. In practice: use 1 whole stick and cut at the 6 tablespoon line of the next one. You will be within a few grams, which does not matter for shortbread.

Where butter conversions go wrong

Three mistakes cause most problems. First, the "cup" in an Australian or UK recipe is a 250 ml metric cup, not the US cup, so a "cup of butter" there is a little more; see our US cup vs metric cup guide. Second, US West Coast sticks are short and wide while East Coast sticks are long and thin, but both weigh the same 4 oz, so don't adjust for shape. Third, melted butter measured in a liquid cup loses the trapped air and water separates, so weigh it before you melt it.

Our view: if you bake from both US and metric recipes, buy a kitchen scale and weigh butter in grams. Sticks are fine for US recipes because they were written for sticks. For everything else, grams avoid the rounding.