Water
The hydration range for most sourdough loaves.
Sourdough · Calculator
Sourdough Baker's Percentage Calculator
Use this baker's percentage calculator to turn your flour weight and ingredient percentages into exact gram weights for water, salt, starter, fat, and sugar.
Live calculator · updates as you type
Your recipe
g
70%
20%
2%
Enrichments (optional)Fat / oil
%
Sugar / honey
%
Calculation assumptions
- Flour baseline
- Flour is 100%. Every other ingredient is measured against its weight.
- Percentage total
- The total exceeds 100% because water, starter and other ingredients are added relative to flour.
Your recipe, weighed
960gtotal dough weight · 72.7% overall hydration with a 100% starter
Flour · 100% 500 g
Water · 70% 350 g
Starter · 20% 100 g
Salt · 2% 10 g
What to do next
Bake this dough in 4 steps
From your 500 g of flour at 70% hydration.
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A batch card made from your numbers, to save as a PDF or receive by email:
- Your weights in big type
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- Mix, shape and bake times
- A bake log for temperature and rise
New · Featured tool
Sourdough Starter Manager
Log each feed, watch your starter rise in a 3D jar and record when it peaks. After two feeds it learns your own starter’s timing, so you know when it will be ready.
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Baker's percentage guide
Think in percentages, bake any batch size
Baker's percentage is the language professional bakers use to write, scale, and compare recipes. Once your recipe is expressed as percentages of flour, you can make one loaf or ten without ever rewriting it.
Flour is always the anchor at 100% . Every other ingredient is weighed against it.
Use these reference values to interpret your results
- 65–80%
- 15–25%
Starter
More starter ferments faster; less takes longer.
- 1.8–2.2%
Salt
Enough for flavour and controlled fermentation.
The formula
ingredient ÷ flour × 100Example: 10g salt ÷ 500g flour = 2% salt. To get grams, multiply: 500 × 2 ÷ 100 = 10g .
What baker's percentage means
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight. Flour is always 100%. Water at 70% means 70g of water for every 100g of flour; salt at 2% means 2g per 100g of flour.
The percentages usually add up to well over 100%, and that's correct — they're each measured against flour, not against the whole dough.
Why bakers work this way
Percentages make recipes portable. Two loaves at very different sizes can share the exact same formula, and you can compare any two recipes at a glance — a 75% dough is wetter than a 68% one, whatever their batch sizes.
It also makes troubleshooting easier. If a loaf is too slack, you adjust the water percentage; too bland, the salt percentage — small, precise changes rather than guesswork.
Scaling any recipe up or down
To scale, keep the percentages fixed and change only the flour weight. Doubling from 500g to 1000g of flour doubles every ingredient automatically — the loaf stays identical in character, just larger.
Working backward from a target dough weight is just as easy: adjust the flour until the total matches the size you need.
Counting starter's flour and water
Starter contains both flour and water, so for precise work bakers sometimes calculate "total" hydration that includes the starter's water. A 100% hydration starter is half flour, half water by weight.
This calculator treats starter as its own percentage line for simplicity. For a deeper split, pair it with the starter feeding calculator and the hydration calculator.
Typical baker's percentages
| Ingredient | Percentage | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | Always the anchor. Every other ingredient is measured against it. |
| Water | 65–80% | Hydration. Lower is firmer and easier to shape; higher is more open and slack. |
| Starter | 15–25% | More starter speeds fermentation; less slows it down. |
| Salt | 1.8–2.2% | 2% is the common default for flavour and controlled fermentation. |
| Fat / sugar | 0–10% | Optional. Used in enriched and sandwich doughs for softness and flavour. |
FAQ
Baker's percentage questions
Quick answers for reading, writing, and scaling formulas.
What is baker's percentage?
Baker's percentage expresses every ingredient as a percentage of the total flour weight, which is always 100%. If a dough has 500g flour and 350g water, the water is 70%. It lets bakers scale and compare recipes regardless of batch size.
How do you calculate baker's percentage?
Divide each ingredient's weight by the total flour weight, then multiply by 100. For example, 10g of salt with 500g of flour is 10 ÷ 500 × 100 = 2% salt. This calculator does the reverse: you set the percentages and it returns the grams.
What are typical baker's percentages for sourdough?
A common sourdough is around 70–78% water (hydration), 1.8–2.2% salt, and 15–25% starter, all relative to the flour. Enriched doughs add fat (4–10%) and sugar (2–8%). These are starting points — adjust to your flour and taste.
Why does flour always equal 100%?
Flour is the anchor of a bread formula, so it's fixed at 100% and every other ingredient is measured against it. This makes recipes easy to scale: change only the flour weight and every other ingredient recalculates in proportion.
How much salt should I use in baker's percentage?
Most bread doughs use 1.8–2.2% salt by baker's percentage, with 2% being a common default. Below about 1.5% the bread tastes flat and ferments faster; above 2.5% it can taste salty and slow fermentation noticeably.
Does baker's percentage add up to 100%?
No — the totals usually exceed 100%. Because every ingredient is a percentage of flour (not of the whole dough), adding water at 70%, salt at 2%, and starter at 20% gives a total of 192%. That's expected and correct.
From our shop
Printed book · Delivered to you
The Sourdough Log
A spiral-bound book delivered to your door, ready to write in. 52 bake records in a spiral-bound journal that lies flat.
Digital download · Print at home
The Sourdough Log
Download the files and print your own copy. No book is shipped. 52 guided bake spreads to download and print at home.
Digital download · Print at home
The Sourdough Formula Book
Download the files and print your own copy. No book is shipped. Baker's percentages, worked out for you.
Download the free Sourdough Baking Playbook
Get the complete Sourdough Baking Playbook — all the calculators in one printable reference.
Continue with the next calculator
Calculators and guides for your next step.
- Pizza Dough Calculator Calculator · Scale sourdough or yeast pizza, with size presets, starter hydration and party batches.
- International Flour Type Converter Calculator · Compare German, French, Italian and US labels with approximate matches and substitution guidance.
- Sourdough Hydration Calculator Calculator · Enter your total dough weight and hydration percentage to calculate exact flour and water weights for a sourdough formula.
- Bulk Fermentation Time Calculator Calculator · Enter dough temperature, starter %, flour blend, hydration and target rise to estimate bulk fermentation time — with fold times and a full bake schedule on the clock.
- Sourdough Starter Feeding Calculator Calculator · Exact starter, flour, water, and discard for 1:1:1, 1:5:5, or any custom feeding ratio, with a ratio chart and peak times.
