Dough Hydration Percentage Calculator

About this calculator

Bakers describe dough not by absolute ingredient weights but by baker’s percentages, where flour is always the 100% baseline and every other ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight — hydration specifically is hydration % = (water weight / flour weight) × 100. A lean sandwich loaf typically sits around 60–65% hydration, a rustic artisan loaf 70–75%, and a wet dough like ciabatta or focaccia can run 80% or higher, with each step up producing a more open, irregular crumb and a stickier, harder-to-handle dough.

Bakers rely on hydration percentage because it’s scale-independent — it describes a dough’s character the same way whether you’re making one loaf or fifty, which absolute weights can’t do — and it’s the standard language recipes and bread formulas use to communicate texture before a single gram is weighed. Knowing the target hydration also tells an experienced baker what handling technique to expect: low-hydration doughs knead easily by hand, while high-hydration doughs typically need stretch-and-fold techniques instead.

This calculator takes your flour and water weights and returns the hydration percentage and total dough weight, so you can compare your dough against a target formula or scale a recipe up or down.