Tablespoons to ML Converter

A US tablespoon is 14.7868 milliliters — half a US fluid ounce, or three teaspoons:

milliliters = US tablespoons × 14.78676

The tablespoon is not standard internationally, and the outlier is large enough to ruin a recipe:

Tablespoon	Milliliters
US	14.79
UK / metric	15
Australia	20
Japan	15

An Australian tablespoon holds four teaspoons, not three. Following an Australian recipe with a US tablespoon leaves you 26% short on every spoonful — and in the other direction, using an Australian spoon for an American recipe adds a third again. On baking soda or salt, that is not a subtlety.

Most of the world uses 15 ml, which is 1.4% off the US 14.79 ml. That difference is genuinely negligible; the Australian one is not.

Common amounts, in US tablespoons:

• 1 tbsp → 14.79 ml
• 2 tbsp → 29.57 ml (1 fl oz)
• 4 tbsp → 59.15 ml (¼ cup)
• 8 tbsp → 118.29 ml (½ cup, or one US stick of butter)
• 16 tbsp → 236.59 ml (1 cup)

Butter is the one solid measured this way in the US. A stick is 8 tbsp, ½ cup, 4 oz, or 113 g — worth remembering as a weight, since butter converts to grams far more reliably than it does to spoonfuls.

For everything except Australian recipes, treating a tablespoon as 15 ml is close enough.