Baker's Percentage Calculator
Calculate baker's percentages and dough hydration from your ingredient weights. Baker's percentage is the language bread bakers use to describe a formula: every ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, which is fixed at 100%. It makes recipes easy to scale and compare — a 70% hydration dough behaves the same whether you mix 500 grams of flour or five kilograms. Enter your flour, water, salt, and starter, and the calculator returns each as a percentage.
Calculate
Default result: 70.0
Baker's Percentage Calculator · Result
calculators.dev
Hydration
500 × 350 × 10 × 10
- Salt %
- 2.0
- Starter %
- 2.0
Reviewed by the calculators.dev team · Last updated 2026-06-24
Formula reviewed against Standard bread-baking baker's-percentage definition (flour = 100%); King Arthur Baking hydration guidance
How to calculate
Enter the flour weight first — it is the 100% baseline — then the water, salt, and any starter or preferment, all in grams. Each ingredient's baker's percentage is its weight divided by the flour weight, times 100. For 500 g flour and 350 g water, hydration is 350 ÷ 500 = 70%. To scale a formula, pick a new flour weight and multiply each percentage back out.
ingredient % = (ingredient weight ÷ total flour weight) × 100. Hydration % is the water (and other liquid) as a percentage of flour. With 500 g flour: 350 g water is 70% hydration, and 10 g salt is 2%. Flour is always 100% by definition.
Example calculation
A dough of 500 g flour, 350 g water, 10 g salt, and 10 g starter is 70% hydration with 2% salt. Flour is the 100% baseline, so each ingredient is its weight divided by the flour weight: 350 ÷ 500 = 70% water, 10 ÷ 500 = 2% salt and 2% starter.
- hydration
- 70
- saltPct
- 2
- starterPct
- 2
Assumptions
- Flour is the 100% baseline; every other ingredient is measured against the total flour weight, so percentages can add up to well over 100%.
- Hydration here counts the water you enter; if your starter or other ingredients contain water, a full 'total hydration' calculation would include that liquid too.
- Weights are in grams. Baker's percentage is a weight-based system, so measuring by weight rather than volume is essential for it to be meaningful.
Common mistakes
- Treating the percentages as fractions of the whole dough — they are relative to the flour, which is why they can exceed 100% in total.
- Forgetting the water already in a sourdough starter, which makes the true hydration higher than the water field alone suggests.
- Measuring by volume instead of weight. Baker's percentage only works with weights, so a kitchen scale is required.
Frequently asked questions
What is dough hydration?
Hydration is the weight of water as a percentage of the flour. A 70% hydration dough has 700 g of water for every 1,000 g of flour. Higher hydration generally means a wetter, more open crumb.
What is a good hydration for bread?
It depends on the bread. Many sandwich loaves sit around 60–65%, rustic and sourdough breads often run 70–80%, and ciabatta can be higher still. Higher hydration doughs are stickier to handle.
Why is flour always 100%?
Baker's percentage uses flour as the reference. Setting flour to 100% lets bakers express every other ingredient relative to it, so a formula scales cleanly to any batch size.
Can the percentages add up to more than 100%?
Yes. Because each ingredient is measured against the flour rather than the total dough, the sum of all percentages is normally well above 100%.