What Does a Pint Equal? Ounces, Cups and Millilitres

What does a pint equal? In the US, a liquid pint equals 16 US fluid ounces, 2 cups or about 473 millilitres. In the UK, an imperial pint is bigger: 20 imperial fluid ounces, or about 568 millilitres. Which of those you need depends on where your recipe, drink or container comes from, so the first job is to find out the country.

A US pint in kitchen units

American recipes and measuring jugs lean heavily on cups and spoons, so this table covers the conversions most often needed at the worktop.

One US liquid pint equals	Amount
Fluid ounces	16 fl oz
Cups	2 cups
Tablespoons	32 tbsp
Teaspoons	96 tsp
Millilitres	about 473 ml
Litres	about 0.47 L
Quarts	half a quart

So if a recipe asks for a pint of cream, measure two cups. A half pint is one cup, or 8 fluid ounces, and a quarter pint is half a cup. That is helpful when your jug is marked in cups but the carton, or the recipe, speaks in pints. For half-pint questions in particular, see our separate guide on how many ounces are in a half pint.

The British pint is a different size

A pint in Britain, whether it is beer in a pub or milk on the doorstep, is the imperial pint: 20 imperial fluid ounces, about 568 ml. It is one eighth of an imperial gallon. Because an imperial fluid ounce is slightly smaller than a US fluid ounce (about 28.4 ml against about 29.6 ml), the numbers do not line up neatly. Overall, the imperial pint is about 20 per cent larger than the US pint, which explains why a British pub pint looks generous to an American visitor.

Modern UK recipes mostly use metric, so you may see 570 ml in place of a pint. That is just a rounded imperial pint. Older British cookbooks, on the other hand, may use pints and fluid ounces without telling you, and they assume the imperial version.

Dry pints and why they are separate

American supermarkets sell cherry tomatoes, blueberries and strawberries in dry pint baskets. A US dry pint is about 551 ml, which is a little larger than the liquid pint, and it measures volume of produce, not weight. A dry pint of blueberries does not weigh the same as a dry pint of cherry tomatoes. If a recipe says one pint of berries, a punnet of roughly that size is fine, but if you are baking and want accuracy, a scale gives a better answer. Our article on the US dry pint in ounces goes into this further.

Scaling a recipe between pints, cups and millilitres

If you need to adapt a recipe from another country, this simple routine avoids most errors.

1. Work out the origin of the recipe: US, UK, Australian or something else. Look at the spelling, the oven temperature units and the measures used.
2. Convert each liquid measure to millilitres using the table above or the factors 473 ml (US pint) and 568 ml (imperial pint).
3. Multiply or divide for the number of servings you want.
4. Measure in a clear jug on a flat surface, reading the level at eye height.
5. Taste and adjust. Sauces and soups are forgiving, but bread dough and sponge batters are not.

Take a worked case: a US soup recipe wants 3 pints of stock. That is 3 x 473 = 1,419 ml, or about 1.4 litres. Reading it as British pints would give 1,704 ml, almost 300 ml too much, and the soup would come out thin.

Memory tricks

• Two cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon.
• The old rhyme “a pint’s a pound the world around” works roughly for water in US measure, where a pint of water weighs a little over one pound. It does not hold for the imperial pint, or for liquids such as honey and oil.
• For a rough metric answer, think “half a litre” for either pint, while remembering that the imperial one is just over.

Reading labels and glassware

Packaging can add to the confusion. A bottle marked 473 ml is a US pint, while one marked 568 ml or 570 ml is an imperial pint. Pub glasses in the UK carry a line or a crown stamp showing the measure, but American pint glasses are not regulated in the same way, so a “pint” of beer may fall short of 16 ounces once you allow for the foam. Cocktail shakers and pint-style tumblers often hold more than 16 ounces when brimful, which is another reason to rely on a measuring jug in the kitchen and not on a glass you happen to have to hand.

When accuracy really matters

For stew or lemonade, a few millilitres either way will not matter. For baking, canning, brewing and anything involving safety margins, use the proper unit and a good measuring tool. Weighing ingredients on a kitchen scale beats volume measures every time. Never use kitchen measures for children’s liquid medicine; use the dosing syringe or cup that comes with it and follow the instructions from a pharmacist or doctor.

For official definitions of units, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes reference material at nist.gov, and there is a clear overview of the unit at Wikipedia’s pint page.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

A pint is only a reliable measure once you know whose pint it is. Remember 16 ounces and 473 ml for the American one, 20 ounces and 568 ml for the British one, and convert to millilitres whenever the source is unclear.