How Many Cups In A Quart? (+ Conversion Charts)

Everything you need to know about converting cups in a quart (and other helpful imperial measurements)!

Diagram of cups, pints, and quarts in a gallon

Cups to Quarts

There are 4 cups in 1 quart.
One cup is a ¼ of 1 quart.
A cup is 8 fluid ounces and a quart is 32 fluid ounces. A half-quart is a pint at 16 fluid ounces or two cups.

These are all key measurements that are hard to remember, but oh so important in cooking and home brewing. The metric system would definitely be easier, but we Americans like our imperial measurements and will likely keep fluid ounces, cups, and quarts around a while longer.

But how did we get to this system when the rest of the world uses the decimal based metric system? Well, it is a long story, or at least an old one going back to Ancient Rome. In Rome everything was measured in 1/2s, 1/4s, 1/8s etc. This seems awkward today as the decimal based metric system makes so much sense, but in Roman times a quart, or 1/4 of a gallon, was easy to measure. A gallon jug was divided in half then half again. An easy task that accurately resulted in equal sized quarts. Dividing a wine jug into 1/10s was hard to do accurately.

A picture of various liquid and dry measurements on a colorful background

What Is A Quart?

1 Quart is 32 fluid ounces or 4 cups. The word quart comes from the Latin word Quartus meaning a fourth and the later old French word Quarte also meaning a ¼ portion. In liquid measurements this means ¼ of a gallon.

What Is A Cup?

1 cup is 8 ounces. There are 16 cups in a gallon, 4 cups in a quart, and 2 cups in a pint.

Unlike the term quart, the cup did not come from Rome. Cups didn’t really become a thing until 1896 when Fannie Farmer, the director of the Boston Cooking School, forced this measurement in her popular book “The Boston Cooking School Cook Book”. Before Fannie introduced this change many recipes used terms like a handful of rice or a generous portion of sugar. I know people who can magically cook this way. They just pour in ingredients and their cooking comes out fantastic. For the rest of us Fannie Farmer’s standardization was a great service.