Baker's Percentage Calculator

What Are Baker’s Percentages? Baker’s percentage, or baker’s math, is the professional standard for expressing every ingredient as a proportion of the flour. Flour is always 100%, no matter how much of it there is. That is why the numbers add up to well over 100% and why nobody should worry about it.

The Formula Baker’s % = (Ingredient Weight / Flour Weight) × 100

For example: a recipe with 500g flour and 350g water has a water baker’s percentage of 70%.

Why Bakers Use This System

• You can scale any recipe instantly by changing the flour amount
• You can compare recipes: a 65% hydration bread is always drier than an 80% one
• You can diagnose problems: if your bread is too dense, check if salt % is too high or yeast too low

Hydration Percentage The water percentage is called hydration. It is the most important baker’s percentage because it determines dough texture:

• Below 60%: Stiff dough: firm, easy to shape (bagels, pretzels)
• 60–70%: Standard dough: easy to handle, good crumb (sandwich bread, dinner rolls)
• 70–80%: Wet dough: slack, sticky, open crumb (sourdough, ciabatta)
• Above 80%: Very wet dough: requires folding technique, not kneading (high-hydration sourdough, focaccia)

Standard Baker’s Percentages

• Salt: 1.8–2.2% (under 1.8% tastes flat, over 2.5% holds the yeast back)
• Instant yeast: 0.5–1% (less yeast means longer fermentation and more flavor)
• Active dry yeast: 1–2%, since it is roughly a third weaker than instant
• Sourdough starter: 10–30% (less starter means a longer proof)
• Sugar: 0–8%, up to 20% in enriched doughs like brioche
• Fat or oil: 0–5% in lean breads, up to 20% in brioche

Counting a sourdough starter properly

This is where most people’s math quietly goes wrong. A starter is not a separate ingredient sitting alongside the flour and water. It is flour and water, already mixed, and both halves belong in the formula.

Split it before you calculate:

Starter flour = starter weight ÷ (1 + starter hydration) Starter water = starter weight − starter flour

So 100g of a normal 100% starter is 50g flour and 50g water. Add those to the recipe totals before working out any percentage.

The difference is not academic. Take 500g flour, 350g water, and 100g of 100% starter. Read it off the recipe flour alone and you get 350 ÷ 500, or 70%, and you would expect a manageable dough. Count the starter and it is 400 ÷ 550, which is 72.7%, and it will feel noticeably wetter in the hands than the recipe led you to believe. The bigger the starter, the wider that gap gets.

Total Dough Weight Total Weight = Flour + All Ingredients (in grams)