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Baker's Percentage Calculator: Scale Any Bread Formula

By Robert Roessler, Food Scientist · Published 14 November 2026

Enter a formula in baker's percent, tell the calculator how much dough or flour you have, and read off the weight of every ingredient in grams. It also shows the hydration of your formula. The explanation below shows the maths behind each number, so you can check it by hand.

1. What do you know?
2. Dough weight
3. Formula in baker's percent

Tick "Flour" on every flour (they must add up to 100 %). Tick "Liquid" on the water and any other ingredient you want counted in the hydration.

Result

IngredientBaker's %Weight

What baker's percent means

In baker's percent every ingredient is stated as a percentage of the total flour weight, and the flour is always 100 % (King Arthur Baking). When a formula uses several flours, together they count as 100 % (BAKE Magazine). Because the other ingredients add to the flour, the total of all percentages is always above 100 %, and this is different from "true percent", where the ingredients add up to 100 % of the dough (BAKERpedia).

The advantage is that a formula written this way can be scaled to any batch, and that you can see at a glance how wet, salty or sweet a dough is compared with another one (BAKERpedia).

The three formulas

  1. Flour weight = dough weight ÷ (total of all percentages ÷ 100). BAKERpedia describes the same step: divide the batch weight by the total baker's percent in decimal form to get the flour weight (BAKERpedia).
  2. Ingredient weight = flour weight × (ingredient percent ÷ 100).
  3. Hydration = liquid weight ÷ flour weight × 100. King Arthur Baking defines hydration as the percentage of liquid in a dough, based on the flour weight (King Arthur Baking).

Worked example

The values below are an illustration of the method, not a recommendation for your product. Take 2 loaves of 500 g, so 1,000 g of dough, with this formula: flour 100 %, water 65 %, salt 2 %, instant yeast 1 %.

  1. Total of the percentages: 100 + 65 + 2 + 1 = 168 %.
  2. Flour weight: 1,000 g ÷ 1.68 = 595.2 g.
  3. Water: 595.2 g × 0.65 = 386.9 g. Salt: 595.2 g × 0.02 = 11.9 g. Yeast: 595.2 g × 0.01 = 6.0 g.
  4. Check: 595.2 + 386.9 + 11.9 + 6.0 = 1,000.0 g.
  5. Hydration: 65 % ÷ 100 % × 100 = 65 %.

Things to watch

  • A percentage of 2 % salt means 2 % of the flour weight, not 2 % of the finished dough. In the example, the salt is 11.9 g of 1,000 g, or about 1.2 % of the dough.
  • Milk, eggs, honey and other ingredients contain water. The calculator counts only what you tick as "Liquid", so decide for each formula how you want to count them.
  • A preferment, such as a sourdough starter or a poolish, contains flour and water too. For a precise formula, add its flour to the flour rows and its water to the liquid rows.
  • Typical nutrition values of common ingredients are in our ingredients database.

Sources

Information current as of 14 November 2026. The calculator rounds to 0.1 g and does not replace your own trials, your scale checks or a quality plan.