Brine Calculator — How Much Salt per Gallon of Water

Background.

There are two ways a brine goes wrong, and only one of them is about salt strength. The first is picking a ratio out of the air. The second, far more common, is following a perfectly good ratio with the wrong salt: a cup of table salt weighs 288 grams and a cup of Diamond Crystal kosher weighs 134, so a recipe written for one and measured in the other is out by more than a factor of two. This page fixes both. It gives you the salt in grams — which is brand-independent and always correct — and then converts that weight into cups of the specific salt sitting in your cupboard.

The default strength is not a house recipe. It is the ratio USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service publishes in its own fact sheet on brining poultry: three-quarters of a cup of table salt to one gallon of water, or three tablespoons per quart. Those are two statements of the same thing, and they agree exactly, which is a good sign that the number is a real published figure rather than a rounding. Worked through USDA's own table-salt density of six grams per teaspoon, three-quarters of a cup is 216 grams, and 216 grams in a gallon of water is 5.71% of the water's weight.

That percentage needs a word of explanation, because it is the single most confusing thing about brine recipes. A "5% brine" can mean five grams of salt per hundred grams of water, or five grams per hundred grams of finished solution — and those are different brines. This page uses percentage of the water, because that is what almost every cooking source means and it is the easier one to measure, but it returns both numbers on every calculation so you are never guessing which convention a recipe was written in. The USDA brine is 5.71% of the water and 5.40% of the solution; the gap widens as brines get stronger.

What this page deliberately does not do is as important as what it does. It will not tell you how much sugar to add, because FSIS says only "add sweetener if desired" and publishes no quantity, and no other primary source publishes a sugar-to-salt ratio either — it is a flavour preference, not a measurement. It will not tell you how long to brine by weight, and it will not tell you how much water a given bird needs, because neither is published. The honest method for the water is mechanical rather than mathematical: put the meat in the container you intend to brine in, cover it with water, lift the meat out, and measure what is left. That volume is your answer, and it accounts for the shape of your container in a way no formula can.

Two food-safety points belong up here rather than in a dropdown, because both change what you should do. Brining happens in the refrigerator, in food-grade plastic, stainless steel or glass, covered, with the meat completely submerged — never on the counter, and the brine goes down the sink afterwards because it has held raw meat. And do not brine a bird that is already sold as basted, self-basted, marinated or enhanced: FSIS states that those products already carry an added solution of up to 3% of their weight bone-in, or 8% boneless. Kosher poultry is salted at slaughter for the same reason. Brining an already-brined bird is how a Thanksgiving turkey becomes inedible, and the label is the only place that information appears.

Finally, brining changes nothing about how the meat is cooked. Whole poultry and poultry parts are safe at an internal temperature of 165°F measured with a food thermometer, brined or not. A brine makes meat juicier and better seasoned; it is not a preservation method and it is not a substitute for cooking properly.

What is brine calculator?

A brine is a solution of salt in water that food is soaked in before cooking. The salt does two things, and USDA's fact sheet quotes Dr Alan Sams of Texas A&M's poultry science department on both: it dissolves protein in the muscle, and the salt and dissolved protein together reduce moisture loss during cooking. The result is meat that is juicier, more tender and better seasoned all the way through rather than only on the surface.

A brine calculator turns a volume of water and a target strength into a quantity of salt. That sounds trivial, and the arithmetic is — the difficulty is entirely in the constants. You need a published ratio, a density for the specific salt being measured, and a clear statement of which of the two competing percentage conventions is in use. This page takes its ratio from USDA FSIS, its table-salt density from USDA's Home and Garden Bulletin No. 72, and its kosher and sea salt conversions from Morton's own published conversion chart, and it states the convention on the field label and returns both versions as outputs.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Work out your water volume the reliable way: put the meat in the container you will brine in, cover it with water, lift the meat out, and measure what remains.
2. 02Enter that volume and its unit.
3. 03Leave the strength on the USDA ratio unless a recipe has given you a percentage, in which case switch to 'my own strength' and type it in.
4. 04Choose the salt you actually have. This changes the cups, never the grams.
5. 05Weigh out the grams if you own a scale — that number is right for any salt. Otherwise use the cups figure for the salt you selected.
6. 06Stir until the salt dissolves fully. If salt is still sitting on the bottom after a good stir, the water is at its limit and the extra is doing nothing.
7. 07Submerge the meat completely, cover, and refrigerate. Discard the brine afterwards; it has held raw meat.

The formula.

Start with the published ratio. USDA FSIS states, in its fact sheet on basting, brining and marinating poultry: add three-quarters of a cup of salt to one gallon of water, or three tablespoons of salt per quart of water, and use sodium chloride — table salt. Those two statements have to be checked against each other before anything is built on them. A cup is 16 tablespoons, so three-quarters of a cup is 12 tablespoons; a gallon is four quarts, so three tablespoons per quart is also 12 tablespoons per gallon. They agree exactly. The fact sheet checks itself, and this page reproduces both statements: ask it for a gallon and it returns 0.75 cups, ask it for a quart and it returns 3 tablespoons.

To turn that into a weight you need a density for table salt, and USDA publishes one: Home and Garden Bulletin No. 72 lists a teaspoon of salt at 6 grams. Three-quarters of a cup is 36 teaspoons, so the USDA brine is 36 × 6 = 216 grams of salt per US gallon. A US gallon is 3785.411784 millilitres by definition, and water is taken here as exactly 1 gram per millilitre, so the gallon weighs 3785.41 grams and the ratio works out to 216 ÷ 3785.41 = 5.71% of the water's weight. Expressed against the finished brine instead — water plus salt, 4001.41 grams — the same solution is 5.40%. Neither number is more correct than the other; they are answers to different questions, and both are returned.

Now the part that actually ruins brines. Take the worked example: two gallons of water at the USDA ratio needs 432 grams of salt. As table salt at 6 grams a teaspoon that is 72 teaspoons, or 1.5 cups. As Morton coarse kosher at 4.8 grams a teaspoon it is 90 teaspoons, or 1.875 cups. As Diamond Crystal at 2.8 grams a teaspoon it is over 3.2 cups. Same brine, same 432 grams, three completely different measurements — and a cook who reaches for a cup measure without checking which salt the recipe meant can be out by more than half. Morton's own conversion chart agrees precisely with this arithmetic: it says half a cup of table salt is replaced by half a cup plus two tablespoons of its coarse kosher salt, which tripled gives 1.5 cups plus six tablespoons, which is 1.875 cups.

The grams figure is therefore the honest output and everything else is a convenience. If you own a kitchen scale, weigh the salt and ignore the cups entirely; that single habit removes the largest source of error in brining.

One density on this page comes with a caveat that is printed beside the result rather than hidden. Diamond Crystal's 2.8 grams per teaspoon comes from the product's own Nutrition Facts panel, which states a quarter-teaspoon serving as 0.7 grams — but Cargill's website refused to load for us, so that panel was read from a transcribed label record rather than from the manufacturer directly. It survives a chemistry check: table salt is 39.34% sodium by mass, so 0.7 grams should carry about 275 milligrams of sodium and the panel prints 280, which is inside label rounding. It is shipped as what it is, with the recommendation to weigh.

Rounding: nothing is rounded until the answer is displayed. In particular the USDA fraction is carried as the exact quotient 216 ÷ 3785.411784 rather than as the decimal 5.71%, which is why asking for one gallon returns 216 grams and not 216.15.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service. "Poultry: Basting, Brining, and Marinating," Food Safety Information fact sheet, revised May 2007 — the source of this page's ratio and of every food-safety statement on it: "To prepare a brine solution for poultry, add 3/4 cup salt to 1 gallon of water, or 3 tablespoons of salt per quart of water. For best flavor, use sodium chloride — table salt. Add sweetener if desired." Also the container, refrigeration and two-day guidance, "Discard brine after use," the note that products labelled basted, self-basted or marinated carry an added solution "up to 3% by weight for bone-in poultry and up to 8% by weight for boneless poultry," and the 165 °F safe minimum internal temperature. Retrieved 2026-07-30 from the U.S. Government Publishing Office permanent archive (GOVPUB-A101-PURL-gpo6145), because fsis.usda.gov itself refused the request.
2. [2]U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. "Nutritive Value of Foods," Home and Garden Bulletin No. 72 (2002 revision), table 9 — the table-salt density this page converts with: "Salt … 1 tsp … 6" grams. Three-quarters of a cup is 36 teaspoons, so USDA's brine ratio is 216 g of table salt per US gallon. Retrieved 2026-07-30.
3. [3]Morton Salt, "Salt Conversion Chart" — the manufacturer's own substitution table, and the independent check on this page's kosher-salt arithmetic: 1 teaspoon of table salt is replaced by 1¼ teaspoons of Coarse Kosher Salt, 1 teaspoon of Fine Sea Salt or 1 teaspoon of Coarse Sea Salt, with the same 1.25 ratio repeated at 1 tablespoon ("1 tablespoon + ¾ teaspoon"), ¼ cup ("¼ cup + 1 tablespoon") and ½ cup ("½ cup + 2 tablespoons"). Retrieved 2026-07-30.
4. [4]Clemson University Home & Garden Information Center, factsheet "Food Safety for Outdoor Cookouts" — independent confirmation of the handling rules repeated on this page: liquid that has held raw meat "must first bring it to a rolling boil for at least one minute" before any further use, and meat must be kept refrigerated and checked with a thermometer rather than by appearance. Retrieved 2026-07-30.
5. [5]Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt, Nutrition Facts panel: serving size ¼ teaspoon (0.7 g), sodium 280 mg — the source of the 2.8 g per teaspoon figure used for that salt. Shipped as a transcribed label record rather than a manufacturer page, because diamondcrystalsalt.com returned HTTP 403 to us twice; the figure is cross-checked against sodium chloride's composition (39.34% sodium by mass, so 0.7 g should carry about 275 mg against the 280 mg printed, which is within label rounding). Retrieved 2026-07-30. Weigh this salt rather than measuring it if you can.