US pints to US cups converter

How many cups are in a pint?

A US pint holds exactly 2 US cups, so multiply pints by 2: cups = pints × 2. For example, 1.5 pints is 3 cups and 6 pints is 12 cups. That is the US liquid pint; a British pint, a US dry pint or a 250 mL metric cup gives a different answer.

Why a pint is two cups

Both units are built from the US fluid ounce: a cup is 8 fl oz and a pint is 16 fl oz, so the ratio is exactly 2.

In metric terms the US pint is 473.176473 mL and the US cup is 236.5882365 mL (NIST Handbook 44, Appendix C).

The doubling continues up the scale: 2 pints make a quart (4 cups), and 8 pints make a gallon (16 cups).

Pints to cups chart

Fractions follow the same rule: a quarter pint is half a cup, and a third of a pint is 2/3 cup (about 0.667 cup).

British pints, metric cups and dry pints

• Imperial (UK) pint: 568.26125 mL, or 20 imperial fluid ounces (imperial measure tables). That is about 2.4 US cups, or 2.27 metric cups, so a pint of milk in a British recipe is about 20% more than a US pint.
• Metric cup: 250 mL, the cup in Australian and New Zealand recipes (NSW cooking-measure reference). A US pint is 1.892705892 metric cups, so filling a 250 mL cup twice gives 500 mL, about 5.7% more than a US pint.
• US dry pint: the measure used for baskets of berries. It holds 550.61 mL, about 2.33 US cups by volume and 16% more than a liquid pint.

Common mistakes

• Dividing by 2. A pint is the larger unit, so the cup number is always the bigger one: 1 pint is 2 cups, not half a cup.
• Writing "1 pint 1 cup" as 1.1 pints. One cup is half a pint, so the amount is 1.5 pints, or 3 cups; 1.1 pints is only 2.2 cups.
• Measuring flour or sugar by the pint. A pint is a volume, and what it weighs depends on the ingredient. The cups to grams converter gives weights for common baking ingredients.

Related kitchen conversions

For milliliters, use cups to mL; for fluid ounces, cups to ounces. The volume converter handles imperial pints and quarts, and the recipe scaler resizes a whole recipe.