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Baker's Percentage Calculator

Find the hydration and baker's percentages of your dough.

How it is calculated

Every ingredient is compared with the flour weight, which counts as 100%: percentage = ingredient weight / flour weight × 100. The tool gives hydration (water), salt and yeast this way, all in the same weight unit, normally grams. It also adds the four weights into a total dough weight, shown with a g label.

The flour weight must be greater than zero. Water, salt and yeast are optional; any you leave out are counted as zero. The total covers only the four ingredients here, so sugar, fat, milk, seeds or a pre-ferment you add will not be in it and you must add them yourself. Percentages add up to more than 100% in total because each one is measured against flour alone, not against the whole dough. If your recipe uses several flours, enter their combined weight.

Worked example

A dough with 1000 g flour, 700 g water, 20 g salt and 3 g yeast. Hydration: 700 / 1000 × 100 = 70.00%. Salt: 20 / 1000 × 100 = 2.00%. Yeast: 3 / 1000 × 100 = 0.30%. Total dough weight: 1000 + 700 + 20 + 3 = 1,723.00 g. To make a half batch, halve every weight and the percentages stay the same.

Try this example →

Common mistakes

  • Dividing by the total dough weight instead of the flour weight. A dough of 1723 g with 700 g water is 70% hydration, not 40.6%.
  • Entering the weights in different units, such as flour in kilograms and water in grams. Use one unit for every box.
  • Leaving out part of the flour, for example flour in a starter or a second flour. Hydration is wrong unless all the flour is counted.
  • Expecting the percentages to add up to 100%. They always sum to more, since flour alone is the 100% base.
  • Forgetting the total excludes anything else in the recipe, such as fat, sugar or seeds, which you must weigh separately.

About this calculator

This calculator computes baker's percentages, the professional bread-baking convention where flour is always set to 100% and every other ingredient — water, salt, yeast, fat — is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight, regardless of batch size. Hydration is simply the water percentage in this system.

Professional and home bakers use baker's percentages to scale recipes up or down reliably, compare dough formulas across recipes, and hit a target hydration for a specific bread style (lean doughs around 60-65%, ciabatta well above 75%).

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Comments (1)

  • Editorial team

    Once you know the percentages, scaling is multiplication: for 1,000 g of flour, a 68 percent hydration dough needs 680 g of water and 2 percent salt is 20 g. The total line is labelled in grams, so enter your weights in grams to read it correctly. The tool takes flour, water, salt and yeast only; a sourdough starter must be split into flour and water by hand. Which other ingredients would you want to track?

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