You have a huge desire to bake bread. You’ve created your sourdough starter, started exploring recipes online, and quickly noticed that many professional bread formulas are written using percentages instead of simple ingredient lists. At first, baker’s percentages may seem confusing or overly technical, but once you understand the concept, they become one of the most valuable tools in bread baking.

In baker’s percentage, flour is always considered 100%, regardless of the amount used. Every other ingredient in the formula — water, starter, salt, yeast, sugar, butter, or seeds — is calculated as a percentage of the total flour weight. For example, if a recipe contains 1000g flour and 700g water, the dough hydration is 70%. Here are some common hydration ranges:

To make everything simpler, I created two practical baker’s percentage calculators below. The first calculator converts baker’s percentages into actual ingredient weights, making it easy to scale recipes for any dough size. The second calculator works in reverse, allowing you to enter ingredient weights and instantly calculate the baker’s percentages of an existing formula.

In every recipe total weight of flour is always expressed as 100%.

Example: Sourdough Loaf

Now, if I want to bake a small loaf of bread, with total amount of flour 300g and we see this formula:

• Flour 100%
• Water 70%
• Starter 20%
• Salt 2%

We have 300g flour , to recalculate bakers percentage, you’ll have to use formula #1

• Flour 300g
• Water 70% ( (300g x 70) : 100 = 210g
• Starter 60g
• Salt 6g

Now we know that for 300g flour, we will need 210g water, 60g starter and 6g salt.

If for example you want to bake 10 loaves of bread, 300g flour each. You’ll need:

300g x 10 = 3000g flour

• Flour 3000g
• Water 2100g
• Starter 600g
• Salt 60g

Now, if you have a recipe without percentage in it, but you want to make a bigger or smaller amount, and make sure you recalculate everything properly.

Example

• Flour 400g
• Water 250g
• Starter 88g
• Salt 8g

How to find percentage of each ingredient?

In this case you’ll need formula #2

• Flour 400g 100%
• Water 250g (250 x 100) : 400 = 62.5%
• Starter 22%
• Salt 2%

Formula #2 showed us the percentages of all required ingredients

• Flour 100%
• water 62.5%
• starter 22%
• salt 2%

Learning baker’s percentages may take a little practice in the beginning, but once you become comfortable using them, they completely change the way you approach bread baking. Instead of relying entirely on fixed recipes, you gain the ability to scale, adjust, analyze, and even create your own formulas with far greater confidence and consistency.

Once you begin understanding formulas this way, you stop simply following recipes and start understanding how dough actually works. Higher hydration doughs often create a more open crumb, while lower hydration doughs are usually easier to shape and produce a tighter texture. Baker’s percentages also make it much easier to compare different recipes and immediately recognize differences in hydration, fermentation, enrichment, or salt levels.

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