Uncooked to Cooked Rice Calculator

Background.

One cup of uncooked rice makes about three cups cooked — except when it does not, which is more often than the rule of thumb suggests. The USDA Food and Nutrition Service publishes a per-variety yield table in the Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs, and across the nine rice rows in it the yield runs from 1.5 cups cooked per cup dry for instant white rice up to 3.625 for parboiled brown. Long-grain white regular rice — the default here, and the rice most recipes assume — is published at 3.25 cups cooked per cup dry. This calculator converts in either direction using those figures: uncooked to cooked when you are wondering whether the bag will stretch, cooked to uncooked when a recipe specifies cooked rice and you need to know what to put in the pot.

The number that most often surprises people is instant rice, and it is worth stating up front rather than burying in an FAQ. Instant rice has already been fully cooked and then dried again before packaging, so most of its expansion happened in the factory rather than in your kitchen. USDA publishes it at 1.5 cups cooked per cup dry, less than half the yield of the regular long-grain white rice sitting next to it on the shelf. It is also far less dense: 4½ cups of instant rice make a pound, against 2⅓ cups of regular long-grain. Substituting instant for regular cup-for-cup will leave you with roughly half the cooked rice you expected.

Parboiled and quick-cooking varieties sit in between for the same reason, partly processed before they reach you. Quick-cooking medium-grain brown rice is published at 2.44×, ordinary long-grain brown at 2.89×, and parboiled (converted) white at 2.75×. Regular short- and medium-grain white rice is 3×, and black or purple rice works out to 3.1×. The pattern is that the more processing a rice has already had, the less it has left to gain in your pot.

A note on what this page is and is not. It answers how much rice you will end up with; the companion rice water ratio calculator answers how much water to add, which is a different question with a different published table. If you are cooking dinner you probably want both, and they are linked to each other. Also, a warning about the general 'rice triples' shorthand that appears on a great many pages, including as an estimate on our own rice water ratio page: USDA's per-variety data does not support it for instant, parboiled or brown rice, and this page uses the per-variety figures instead.

Finally, the honest limits. Jasmine, basmati and wild rice do not appear in the Food Buying Guide's rice rows at all, so they are not in the dropdown — an invented yield for them would look identical to a sourced one, and this page does not do that. All figures are for plain rice simmered in water on a stovetop or held on a steam table; rice cookers and pressure cookers trap steam differently and rinsed rice starts wetter. And because USDA publishes no cooked WEIGHT for rice, only cooked volume, cooked amounts on this page are always in cups.

What is uncooked to cooked rice calculator?

An uncooked-to-cooked rice calculator converts a measure of dry rice into the amount of cooked rice it will produce, or works backwards from a target amount of cooked rice to the dry rice you need to start with. The conversion matters because the two states are very different in volume — dry rice absorbs water and swells as its starch gelatinises — and because the size of that change depends on the variety and, above all, on how much processing the rice has already had.

This page uses the yields USDA's Food and Nutrition Service publishes in the Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs, Section 4 (Grains), under RICE (Group H). For five of the nine varieties the guide states the answer directly in the form '1 cup dry = about 3-1/4 cups cooked'; for the other four it publishes cups dry per pound and cups cooked per pound, and this page uses the quotient of those two published cells. It also reports the weight of one cup uncooked for each variety, derived from the same cups-per-pound cell, so you can work from a kitchen scale instead of a measuring cup.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Choose the direction — uncooked → cooked to find your yield, or cooked → uncooked to work back from a recipe.
2. 02Pick the variety. The yield for each one is shown in the dropdown, because that number is the whole answer.
3. 03Enter the amount you know, in cups, grams, ounces or pounds. Weight units always describe the uncooked rice.
4. 04Read the cooked cups, and the ½-cup and 1-cup serving counts if you are portioning for a group.
5. 05In the cooked → uncooked direction, enter cups of cooked rice — USDA publishes no cooked weight for rice, so cups is the only cooked measure available.
6. 06If you are also deciding how much water to add, use the rice water ratio calculator alongside this one.
7. 07Treat all of it as a stovetop figure. Rice cookers, pressure cookers and pre-rinsed rice all shift the result slightly.

The formula.

There is a second, completely independent route to the same 3¼ figure, and it is worth walking through because it is what gives confidence that the Food Buying Guide's number is right. Cooking adds water and destroys no dry matter, so the dry matter in the pot is conserved. USDA's FoodData Central lists raw enriched long-grain white rice at 11.62% water with 1 cup weighing 185 g, and cooked enriched long-grain white rice at 68.44% water with 1 cup weighing 158 g. One dry cup therefore contains 185 × (1 − 0.1162) = 163.5 g of dry matter; once cooked, that dry matter represents (1 − 0.6844) = 31.56% of the mass, so the cooked rice weighs 163.5 ÷ 0.3156 = 518 g, which fills 518 ÷ 158 = 3.28 cups. The Food Buying Guide's independently measured figure is 3.25. Two USDA datasets, two methods, 0.9% apart — and a test in this calculator's suite asserts that agreement, so an edit that corrupted the yield constant would fail immediately.

The arithmetic itself is one multiplication; the work is in the yield figure. For long-grain white regular rice USDA's Food Buying Guide states '1 lb dry = about 2-1/3 cups dry enriched rice; 1 lb dry = about 7-1/2 cups cooked; 1 cup dry = about 3-1/4 cups cooked'. Taking the last of those directly: 1 cup dry × 3.25 = 3.25 cups cooked, which is 6.5 of USDA's ½-cup grain servings. One cup of that rice weighs 453.59237 ÷ 2⅓ = 194 g, so the same calculation can start from a scale reading instead of a cup.

The reverse direction divides. Six cups of cooked long-grain white rice needs 6 ÷ 3.25 = 1.85 cups dry, which is 359 g. The two directions are exact inverses, so converting one way and back returns the amount you started with rather than drifting.

Where USDA does not print a one-cup line, the ratio comes from dividing two cells that it does print. Long-grain brown regular rice is published as 2¼ cups dry per pound and 6½ cups cooked per pound, so the yield is 6.5 ÷ 2.25 = 2.889 cups cooked per cup dry. The same method gives 2.815 for instant brown, 2.444 for quick-cooking brown and 3.10 for black or purple rice. This is arithmetic on published values rather than an estimate, but it is not USDA stating the number itself, so the page marks the distinction and the calculator's own summary line says which basis it used.

The two routes can disagree slightly, because USDA rounds its per-pound cells to the nearest eighth of a cup. Parboiled white is published as 2½ cups dry and 7 cups cooked per pound, which divides to 2.80, while the same row's one-cup line says 2¾ (2.75). This page uses 2.75 — the published answer to exactly the question being asked — and the 1.8% gap is USDA's own rounding, not a disagreement about how rice behaves. The same check run the other way is reassuring: one pound of long-grain white at 2⅓ cups dry × 3.25 gives 7.58 cups cooked against the published 7½, a 1.1% difference in the same rounding direction.

Nothing is rounded until the very end. Every ratio is held as an exact fraction — 13/4, 26/9, 76/27 — in decimal arithmetic and rounded once at the return boundary, so the derived yields are not degraded by intermediate rounding.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. "Food Buying Guide for Child Nutrition Programs," Section 4 (Grains) yield table, heading RICE (Group H) — nine rice rows giving cups dry per pound, cups cooked per pound, and for five varieties an explicit "1 cup dry = about X cups cooked" line. Retrieved 2026-07-30; the yield-table PDF carries no printed revision date.
2. [2]U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, SR Legacy record 168877, "Rice, white, long-grain, regular, raw, enriched" (published 2019-04-01) — water 11.62 g/100 g, 365 kcal/100 g, 1 cup = 185 g.
3. [3]U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central, SR Legacy record 168878, "Rice, white, long-grain, regular, enriched, cooked" (published 2019-04-01) — water 68.44 g/100 g, 130 kcal/100 g, 1 cup = 158 g. Together with record 168877 this gives an independent moisture-balance check on the 3¼× yield.
4. [4]USA Rice Federation. "How To Cook Rice" — variety-specific stovetop liquid ratios and cook times, and the general observation that rice roughly triples in volume, which this page tests against USDA's per-variety data.
5. [5]National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST Special Publication 811 (2008 edition), Table B.8 — avoirdupois pound = 453.59237 g and ounce = 28.349523125 g exactly, used for every weight conversion here.