Quick Answer: 1 cup of raw spinach weighs only about 30 grams, since fresh leaves are light and full of air pockets. Once cooked, spinach collapses dramatically — 1 cup of cooked, drained spinach weighs about 180 grams, six times heavier than the same cup raw. Use the calculator below to convert raw or cooked amounts.
Spinach: Cups ↔ Grams Calculator
Type in either box — the other updates automatically. How tightly leaves are packed into the cup also shifts the raw weight somewhat.
Spinach: Raw vs Cooked Weight Reference Table
| Amount | Raw | Cooked, Drained |
|---|---|---|
| ¼ cup | ~8g | ~45g |
| ½ cup | ~15g | ~90g |
| 1 cup | ~30g | ~180g |
| 2 cups | ~60g | ~360g |
This is one of the largest raw-to-cooked weight swings of any common vegetable — roughly 10 cups of raw spinach cooks down to about 1 cup once wilted. Keep reading for why this happens, full nutrition facts, and how much spinach recipes actually need.
Why Spinach Shrinks So Dramatically When Cooked
Raw spinach leaves are mostly water held inside a rigid cell structure that keeps the leaves standing up and full of air pockets between them — that’s why a cup of raw spinach is so light. Heat breaks down the cell walls, releasing that trapped water and collapsing the leaf structure entirely. The spinach doesn’t lose the water (it stays in the pan unless drained away); it just stops holding its shape, so the same mass packs into a far smaller volume.
This is the opposite of what happens with foods like oats or rice, which absorb water and gain weight per cup when cooked. Spinach doesn’t absorb meaningful water during cooking — it just loses its structure, so cooked spinach weighs more per cup only because it’s no longer full of air, not because it’s gained mass.
How Much Raw Spinach Do You Need for a Recipe?
If a recipe calls for “1 cup cooked spinach,” you’ll need far more than 1 cup of raw leaves to get there — roughly 10 cups of raw spinach (about 300g by weight) cooks down to approximately 1 cup once wilted and drained. This trips people up constantly in the grocery store: a standard 5 oz (142g) container of pre-washed baby spinach looks like a lot of volume raw, but it cooks down to well under 1 cup.
Spinach Nutrition: Raw vs Cooked
| Nutrient | 1 Cup Raw (30g) | 1 Cup Cooked (180g) |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | ~7 kcal | ~41 kcal |
| Protein | ~0.9g | ~5.3g |
| Fiber | ~0.7g | ~4.3g |
| Iron | ~0.8mg | ~6.4mg |
Because cooked spinach is so much more concentrated per cup, eating a cup of cooked spinach delivers far more nutrients — including a notably larger iron dose — than eating a cup of raw spinach, simply because you’re consuming roughly six times more actual plant material in that same cup measurement.
Practical Examples
A green smoothie recipe calling for “2 cups spinach” almost always means raw, unpacked leaves (about 60g) — trying to use 2 cups of cooked spinach (360g) instead would massively oversaturate the recipe. On the other hand, a sautéed side dish or spinach-and-egg recipe that says “1 cup spinach” after the cooking instruction is referring to the cooked measurement, meaning you’d start with close to 10 cups raw.
Frozen chopped spinach, already blanched before freezing, behaves similarly to fresh-cooked spinach once thawed and drained — a 10 oz (283g) box of frozen chopped spinach yields close to 1.5 cups drained, useful to know if a recipe assumes fresh spinach but you only have frozen on hand. Spinach is also a common addition to protein shakes — see our protein shakes for weight loss guide for a green shake recipe that uses raw spinach by the handful rather than a precise cup measurement.
Frequently Asked Questions
1 cup of raw spinach weighs about 30 grams. 1 cup of cooked, drained spinach weighs about 180 grams.
Cooking breaks down spinach’s cell structure and collapses the air pockets between leaves, so the same mass packs into a much smaller volume — the water isn’t gained, the structure is just lost.
Approximately 10 cups of raw spinach (about 300g) cooks down to roughly 1 cup once wilted and drained.
1 cup of raw spinach (30g) contains approximately 7 calories, making it one of the lowest-calorie vegetables by volume.
Roughly, once thawed and drained. Frozen chopped spinach is typically pre-blanched, so it behaves similarly to fresh-cooked spinach in weight and volume.
Per cup, cooked spinach delivers more nutrients simply because it’s more concentrated — a cup of cooked spinach contains roughly six times more actual plant material than a cup of raw spinach.
Final Answer: How Many Grams in 1 Cup of Spinach
1 cup of raw spinach weighs about 30 grams, while 1 cup of cooked, drained spinach weighs about 180 grams — a sixfold difference driven entirely by the collapse of the leaf’s air-filled structure during cooking, not water gain. This makes spinach one of the trickiest common vegetables to convert between raw and cooked measurements, so always check which state a recipe means before measuring. When in doubt, weighing rather than eyeballing cup measurements avoids the most common spinach recipe mistake.