Baker’s Percentage & Hydration Calculator
Baker’s percentage and hydration calculator — enter your flour and ingredient weights to get every ingredient as a percentage of flour and the dough hydration, so you can read, compare and scale any bread recipe like a professional formula. Runs in your browser.
Baker’s Percentage & Hydration Calculator
How to Use the Baker’s Percentage Calculator
Enter your flour
Type the total flour weight in grams — this is the 100% everything is measured against.
Add the other ingredients
Enter water, salt, yeast or starter and any sugar, fat or extras in grams.
Read the hydration
See the dough hydration and what kind of dough that makes, plus the total dough weight.
Capture the formula
Use the baker’s percentages to record and rescale the recipe to any batch size.
Reading Bread Like a Formula
Professional bakers rarely think in cups or even in fixed gram weights; they think in baker’s percentages, a simple system in which every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour, and the flour itself is defined as one hundred per cent. The beauty of it is that a recipe written this way is really a formula: it describes the relationships between ingredients independently of batch size, so the same numbers make one loaf or a hundred. This calculator turns your weights into that formula. Enter the flour and the other ingredients in grams, and it tells you each one as a percentage of the flour, with the headline figure being the most important of all — hydration.
Hydration is the water as a percentage of the flour, and it is the master dial of bread. It governs how the dough feels in your hands, how open and airy the crumb turns out, and how the crust develops. A stiff, easy-to-handle dough for a sandwich loaf might sit around sixty per cent; a typical everyday loaf around sixty-five to seventy; and the open, holey artisan breads — ciabatta, rustic sourdough — climb to seventy-five, eighty-five or beyond, trading easy handling for a spectacular crumb. Knowing your hydration is what lets you reproduce a result, troubleshoot a dough that is too slack or too tight, and move confidently between recipes that all suddenly speak the same language.
Two habits make the system work. The first is weighing everything, ideally in grams: a cup of flour can vary enormously depending on how it is scooped, and that variation wrecks both your hydration and your consistency, whereas a scale makes every bake repeatable. The second is reading the other percentages as sanity checks — salt is usually around two per cent of the flour, for instance, so seeing it expressed that way tells you instantly whether a recipe is in the normal range and keeps it consistent as you scale. One quirk to expect: the percentages happily add up to far more than a hundred, because they are all measured against flour rather than against the total, which is exactly the feature that makes them scale so cleanly. Everything here is computed in your browser, so the formula you build never leaves your device — capture a recipe you love and you can rescale it forever.
A recipe in baker’s percentages isn’t a recipe at all — it’s a formula that makes one loaf or a hundred with the same numbers.
10 Facts About Baker’s Percentages
In baker’s percentages, flour is always 100%.
Hydration = water ÷ flour × 100.
Everything is measured relative to flour weight.
A standard loaf is roughly 60–70% hydration.
Artisan and ciabatta doughs run 75–85%+.
Salt is typically around 2% of flour.
Percentages can total more than 100% — that’s normal.
A formula in percentages scales to any batch.
Wetter dough gives a more open crumb.
This calculator runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
- It is the system professional bakers use to write recipes, where every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, and flour itself is always 100%. So if a formula has 500 g flour and 350 g water, the water is 70%. Because everything is relative to flour, the same percentages describe the recipe at any batch size.
- Hydration is the water expressed as a percentage of the flour — water divided by flour, times 100. It is the single most important number for a bread dough because it largely determines the texture: how the dough handles, how open the crumb is, and how the crust behaves. The calculator shows it as the headline figure.
- It depends on what you are making. A typical sandwich or everyday loaf sits around 60–70%, enriched doughs are often a little lower, and open, artisan styles like ciabatta or rustic sourdough run 75–85% or higher. Lower hydration is stiffer and easier for beginners to shape; higher hydration is stickier but rewards you with a more open, airy crumb.
- Because they are all measured against flour, not against the total. Flour is 100% by definition, and water at 70%, salt at 2% and so on are added on top, so the figures naturally sum to well over 100%. That is expected and is exactly what lets the system scale so cleanly.
- Decide the flour weight you want, then multiply it by each ingredient’s percentage to get that ingredient’s weight. Because the percentages are fixed, you can make any size batch from the same formula. This calculator works the other way — you enter weights and it reveals the percentages — so you can capture a recipe as a reusable formula.
- Around 2% of the flour weight is the usual range for flavour and to control fermentation, though it varies by taste and style. Much less and the bread tastes flat and ferments too fast; much more and it slows the yeast noticeably. Seeing salt as a percentage makes it easy to keep consistent across batch sizes.
- Yes. Wholemeal and high-protein bread flours absorb more water than white or low-protein flours, so the same hydration percentage feels different from one flour to another, and even brand to brand. Use the calculated hydration as a guide and adjust by feel, then record what worked as a percentage for next time.
- It does, though for precise sourdough work bakers often account for the flour and water inside the starter separately, since a starter is itself part flour and part water. Enter your starter under the relevant field for a good working estimate; for exact formulas, split the starter’s flour and water into the flour and water inputs.
- Because baker’s percentages and reliable bread both depend on weight. A cup of flour can vary by a large margin depending on how it is scooped, which throws off hydration and consistency. Weighing in grams makes your results repeatable and lets the percentages mean something.
- Completely free, with no account or usage limit. It runs entirely in your browser, collects no data, and works offline once the page has loaded.
Related News
You may be interested in these recent stories from our newsroom.
No related news yet for this tool. Our editorial team publishes new pieces every week.
Browse all news →75 more free tools
Calculators, converters, security tools — no signup.