Recipe Serving Size Converter

Cooking for a different crowd? Enter a recipe's ingredients and its original serving count, then set your target servings to rescale every quantity at once.

How to use

  1. Enter the recipe's ingredients and amounts, line by line.
  2. Set the original serving count and your target serving count.
  3. Get every ingredient rescaled to the new ratio automatically.

For strong seasonings like salt or spices, scale a little less than the ratio suggests and adjust to taste. Baking is more sensitive to exact ratios, so stick closely to the scaled amounts there.

In depth

Not every ingredient scales the same way

Flour, sugar, water, milk, meat and vegetables scale linearly. Doubling the recipe doubles these.

Salt and spices scale less than linearly. Doubling salt exactly usually tastes too salty. Start at 1.5–1.75× and adjust by tasting.

Baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and yeast need a separate calculation. More batter needs more lift, but scaling them proportionally tends to leave a bitter taste or a cake that rises then collapses.

Oil for greasing a pan barely scales at all, since it depends on pan area rather than batch size.

Cooking time does not scale

This is the most common mistake. Doubling a recipe does not double the cooking time.

Heat travels inward from the surface. Doubling the quantity cubes the volume but only squares the surface area, so time increases with thickness, not with batch size.

Oven dishes spread across a larger pan keep the same depth, and the time barely changes. Double the depth in the same pan and it can take 1.5× longer or more.

When simmering, reaching the boil takes longer; the simmering time afterwards is similar.

When frying, overloading the pan drops the temperature and turns a sauté into a steam. Cook in batches.

Weight beats volume

A cup of flour can be 100g or 140g depending on whether you scoop or spoon it, and whether you pack it down — up to a 40% difference.

Baking is especially sensitive: a small change in the flour ratio transforms the dough.

Use a scale. An inexpensive kitchen scale is far more accurate than any set of measuring cups.

Reference weights: flour ≈ 120g per cup, sugar ≈ 200g, butter ≈ 227g, water ≈ 240g.

A cup is not the same everywhere

US 240ml · Japan and Korea 200ml · Australia 250ml · Imperial (old UK) 284ml.

A 20% difference changes results, particularly in baking.

Tablespoons differ too — 15ml in most places but 20ml in Australia.

Check which country a recipe comes from, or look for weights in grams, which are unambiguous.

Changing pan size

For cakes and traybakes, scale by area.

Round pans scale with the square of the radius: 20cm and 23cm diameters differ by about 1.3× in area. Three centimetres is not a small change.

Rectangular pans are simply width × length. Moving from 20×20cm (400cm²) to 23×33cm (759cm²) is about 1.9×, so the recipe needs roughly doubling to keep the same depth.

Changing depth means adjusting time and temperature too — shallower bakes faster, deeper wants 10–15°C lower for longer.

Awkward fractions

Rescaling produces quantities like "1.5 × ⅓ cup". This tool resolves them into fractions you can actually measure.

When the fraction gets unwieldy, convert to tablespoons: 1 cup = 16 tablespoons, so ⅓ cup is 5⅓ tablespoons.

Everything is computed in the browser and nothing is transmitted.

FAQ

How do I scale a recipe to more or fewer servings?

Enter the original number of servings and your target number, and each ingredient amount is multiplied by that ratio automatically.

Does it work for any unit?

Yes. Amounts in grams, millilitres, cups or spoons are all scaled by the same ratio, so proportions stay correct.

Should cooking time scale up with the servings too?

No — cooking time doesn't scale proportionally with ingredient quantity. Judge doneness by appearance and texture rather than multiplying the time.

Method and sources

What this tool bases its numbers on, and how far those numbers go.

What this tool is
It multiplies quantities by a ratio. Cooking does not scale by that ratio — time, pan size and heat transfer follow their own rules, and this tool touches none of them.
Formula
Every parsed quantity is multiplied by target servings divided by original servings. Units are preserved as written, so the output is the same recipe expressed at a different size — no unit conversion and no density assumption is applied.
Worked example
Going from 3 servings to 5 is a factor of 5 ÷ 3 ≈ 1.667, so 200 g of flour becomes 200 × 1.667 ≈ 333 g.
Limitations
  • Cooking time does not scale. Double a stew and it needs longer to come to temperature but not double; double a cake batter in the same tin and the middle will not set. Judge by temperature and doneness, not by the multiplied minutes.
  • Strong seasonings scale sub-linearly. Salt, chilli, garlic and spices taste stronger than the ratio suggests in a larger batch. Scale them under and adjust at the end.
  • Baking is ratio-sensitive but pan-sensitive too. A scaled batter needs a pan whose area scales with it, or the depth changes and with it the bake.
  • Leaveners and gelling agents have thresholds. Baking soda, yeast and gelatine do not behave proportionally at very small or very large amounts.
  • It parses text you typed. An ambiguous line — «1 can», «a pinch», «2 eggs» — either cannot be scaled meaningfully or gives a fractional result you have to round yourself.
Sources
Effective date
Last reviewed

Related tools

  • Multi Timer — Run several named timers at once. It reads the name aloud when done.
  • Boiling Times — Egg, pasta, and veggie boiling times — start a timer in one tap.
  • Measurement Converter — Convert spoons, cups, ml and grams with per-ingredient density.
  • Unit Converter — Convert length, weight, temperature, and area.