TDEENet

TDEE Calculator: How Many Calories You Burn a Day

Your total daily energy expenditure is everything you burn in a day: staying alive, digesting food, moving around, and training. Fill in six fields and you get the number, a breakdown of where it goes, and an honest account of how far off it might be.

  • Instant result
  • Nothing stored
  • 4 published equations
  • Save as image or PDF

Your details

Sex at birth

Be strict with yourself here. Overstating activity is the single biggest source of error in any TDEE estimate. If you are torn between two options, take the lower one.

A DEXA, BodPod or caliper reading switches the calculator to a lean-mass equation, which is more accurate at either end of the range.

Nothing you type here leaves your device. No account, no tracking of your numbers, nothing sent to a server.

Fill in the form and your daily energy budget appears here, broken down into the four things your body spends calories on.

The TDEENet calculator: an input form on the left asking for sex, age, height, weight and activity level, and a downloadable result card on the right showing a daily total of 2,245 calories with its energy breakdown, calorie targets and macronutrients
What the calculator gives you: the daily total, where it goes, and targets for every goal.

Instant

Runs in your browser the moment you press the button. No spinner, no server round trip.

Free, with no catch

No sign-up, no email wall, no upsell. Every result is on the page.

Accurate, and honest about it

Four published equations, an error range beside the result, and safety limits built in.

Sourced to the literature

Every equation and claim links to the paper it came from, on PubMed.

Three steps

How to use this calculator

Enter your numbers

Six fields. Add a body fat reading if you have one and the calculator switches to a better equation.

Read the breakdown

Your daily total, split four ways, plus calorie targets, macros, BMI and lean mass. Take it with you as an image or a PDF.

Check it against reality

Eat at the estimate for two to three weeks and track a weekly average. Adjust by 100 to 200 calories if it drifts.

Getting it right

Three things that decide whether your number is any good

The equation is the easy part. Nearly all the error in a TDEE estimate comes from three places, and every one of them is under your control. Open whichever applies to you.

Be honest about how much you move

The activity multiplier does more damage than any other input. Jumping from light to moderate adds somewhere near 300 calories a day to your estimate, which is roughly the difference between losing half a kilo a week and losing nothing at all.

The trap is that a hard session feels like it should count for more than it does. What actually separates the levels is the whole week, including the parts you do not think of as exercise:

  • Three gym sessions plus a desk job is light, not moderate.
  • A desk job with 12,000 steps a day is moderate, even with no gym at all.
  • Standing or walking for work moves you up a level on its own.
  • The athlete setting means two sessions a day, most days. Very few people belong there.

When you are torn between two levels, take the lower one. An estimate that is slightly low corrects itself in three weeks. One that is high leaves you wondering why nothing is happening.

Four people going about a normal day: one at a desk, one walking with shopping bags, one lifting weights in a gym, one running outdoors
The same person can land two activity levels apart depending on what happens outside the gym.
Weigh your food, at least for a fortnight

Self-reported intake is unreliable in a way that surprises almost everyone. Studies that compare what people say they eat against doubly labelled water, which is the reference method for measuring energy expenditure, routinely find large gaps. The under-recording is not dishonesty. It is oil in the pan, the handful of nuts, the drink that nobody logs, and portions estimated by eye.

You do not have to weigh food forever. Two weeks with a kitchen scale calibrates your eye, and after that you can go back to estimating with some idea of how far off you are. Weigh things raw where you can, log the cooking oil, and count everything you drink.

A digital kitchen scale on a worktop weighing a portion of cooked rice, with olive oil, chicken and vegetables beside it
Cooking oil alone can account for 200 calories a day that never make it into a food diary.
Judge progress by weekly averages, never by one morning

Bodyweight moves for reasons that have nothing to do with fat. A salty meal, a heavy training session, glycogen, hydration and what is still in your gut can swing the scale by a couple of kilograms inside 48 hours. Reacting to a single reading means reacting to noise.

Weigh yourself under the same conditions most mornings, after the toilet and before eating, and average the week. Compare that average with the previous week's. If it has not moved after three weeks and you are confident about your logging, the estimate needs adjusting by 100 to 200 calories, not scrapping.

A line chart showing jagged daily bodyweight readings with a smooth weekly average line trending gently downward through them
Daily readings jump around. The weekly average is the only line worth reacting to.

The four components

Where your calories actually go

Total daily energy expenditure is a sum, and every calculator you will find works by estimating the first part and multiplying. Knowing what sits inside that multiplier tells you where you have room to move.

Roughly 60 to 70%

Basal metabolic rate

The cost of staying alive: heart, brain, kidneys, liver, breathing, holding body temperature. Easily the biggest line on the ledger, and it scales with lean tissue rather than total weight.

Roughly 15 to 30%

Non-exercise activity

Everything that is not a workout: walking, cooking, standing, fidgeting, stairs. This varies more between two people of identical size than anything else, by hundreds of calories a day.

About 10%

Digesting your food

Breaking food down costs energy. Protein is the expensive one, burning perhaps a fifth of its own calories, while fat is nearly free. One reason higher-protein diets feel easier than the maths suggests.

0 to 30%

Deliberate exercise

Smaller than most people expect. A hard hour might cost 400 calories, roughly a bagel with cream cheese. Exercise earns its place through health and strength more than through calories burned.

Add the four together and you have your TDEE. No calculator measures any of them. They estimate the first from your height, weight, age and sex, then apply a multiplier standing in for the other three. That is the whole trick, and it explains both why these tools work and where they go wrong.

Under the hood

Which equations this calculator uses, and why

There is no single correct formula. There are several, published over the last century, each fitted to a different group of people. This calculator runs yours through all of them so you can see the spread rather than a false point of certainty.

Weight in kilograms, height in centimetres, age in years, lean body mass (LBM) in kilograms.
Equation Formula Where it fits
Mifflin-St Jeor
1990		 Men: 10W + 6.25H − 5A + 5
Women: 10W + 6.25H − 5A − 161		 The default here, and the one dietitians reach for. A systematic review of the four equations in common clinical use found it landed within ten percent of measured resting metabolic rate more often than the others, with the narrowest error band.2
Harris-Benedict
1919, revised 1984		 Men: 88.362 + 13.397W + 4.799H − 5.677A
Women: 447.593 + 9.247W + 3.098H − 4.330A		 The original, still quoted everywhere. It was built on a small, lean, early twentieth century sample and tends to run high for modern bodies, typically by five percent or so.3
Katch-McArdle 370 + 21.6 × LBM Ignores height, weight, age and sex entirely and works only from lean mass. If you have a credible body fat reading, this is the better estimate, and the calculator switches to it automatically.
Cunningham
1991		 500 + 22 × LBM Also lean-mass based, and it reads a little higher than Katch-McArdle. Popular in sports nutrition, where athletes often measure above what the general-population equations predict.4

The activity multiplier

The five steps this calculator uses (1.2, 1.375, 1.55, 1.725 and 1.9) are the standard set, and they are blunt instruments. One number cannot separate a builder who trains twice a week from an accountant doing the same sessions, though their daily totals differ by hundreds of calories. This is where nearly all the error creeps in, and people reliably pick a step too high.

What to do next

Turning an estimate into a plan

Treat the first number as a hypothesis

Eat at your estimated maintenance for two to three weeks, weigh yourself under the same conditions most mornings, and take the weekly average. If the average is flat, the estimate was good. If it drifted, adjust by 100 to 200 calories and repeat. After a month you will have something no equation can give you, which is your own measured intake.

Day-to-day weight is mostly water, glycogen and gut contents, and it can move by a couple of kilograms for reasons that have nothing to do with fat. Averages over a week are the only readings worth reacting to.

Choose a rate you can live with

A deficit of 500 calories a day is often quoted as a pound a week, which comes from a rule of thumb that treats fat as 3,500 calories a pound. That rule overstates long-term loss, because expenditure falls as you get smaller and lighter. The more careful models predict weight loss that decelerates and eventually plateaus at a new, lower maintenance level.5

Aiming for around 0.5 to 1 percent of bodyweight per week is a reasonable ceiling for most people. Faster than that and you lose more lean tissue, feel worse, and are more likely to quit.

Protect your lean mass

Two things reliably preserve muscle in a deficit: enough protein and resistance training. The meta-analytic evidence puts the point of diminishing returns for protein at roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day in trained people, with the confidence interval reaching to about 2.2.6 Going far beyond that is not harmful for healthy kidneys, it is just unnecessary.

Expect the target to move

As you lose weight your expenditure falls, partly because there is less of you to carry and partly because of an additional drop beyond what body size alone predicts.7 Recalculate every 4 to 5 kilograms, or whenever progress stalls for three or four weeks at a compliance level you are confident about.

Honest limits

How accurate is any of this?

For a typical adult, a good prediction equation gets within about ten percent of what indirect calorimetry would measure. On a 2,400 calorie day that is a window of roughly 240 calories in either direction, which over a month is enough to explain a kilogram of unexpected weight change.

The error is not evenly distributed. Estimates drift furthest for people at the extremes of body size, for older adults, and for ethnic groups who were underrepresented in the original validation work, a gap the authors of the main systematic review named explicitly.2 Illness, medication, thyroid function and pregnancy all shift resting metabolism in ways no height-and-weight formula can see.

None of that makes the number useless. It makes it a starting point. Every serious approach to this works the same way: estimate, observe, correct. The calculator handles the first step, and the other two are yours.

What this calculator will not do

  • It will not show a target below 1,200 calories for women or 1,500 for men. Intakes under those levels are difficult to make nutritionally complete and belong under clinical supervision.
  • It will not produce results for anyone under 18, because energy needs during growth are estimated differently and the equations here were not validated on children or teenagers.
  • It will not suggest a weight-loss target if your BMI is already below the healthy range.
  • It does not account for pregnancy or breastfeeding, both of which raise energy needs substantially.

Sources

References

Every claim about metabolism on this page traces to one of the following. Links open on PubMed and are marked nofollow.

  1. Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1990;51(2):241-247. PubMed
  2. Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C. Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults: a systematic review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2005;105(5):775-789. PubMed
  3. Roza AM, Shizgal HM. The Harris Benedict equation reevaluated: resting energy requirements and the body cell mass. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1984;40(1):168-182. PubMed
  4. Cunningham JJ. Body composition as a determinant of energy expenditure: a synthetic review and a proposed general prediction equation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1991;54(6):963-969. PubMed
  5. Hall KD, Sacks G, Chandramohan D, et al. Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight. The Lancet. 2011;378(9793):826-837. PubMed
  6. Morton RW, Murphy KT, McKellar SR, et al. A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of the effect of protein supplementation on resistance training-induced gains in muscle mass and strength in healthy adults. British Journal of Sports Medicine. 2018;52(6):376-384. PubMed
  7. Müller MJ, Bosy-Westphal A. Adaptive thermogenesis with weight loss in humans. Obesity. 2013;21(2):218-228. PubMed
  8. Rothman KJ. BMI-related errors in the measurement of obesity. International Journal of Obesity. 2008;32 Suppl 3:S56-S59. PubMed
  9. Levine JA. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). Best Practice & Research Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. 2002;16(4):679-702. PubMed
  10. Westerterp KR. Diet induced thermogenesis. Nutrition & Metabolism. 2004;1(1):5. PubMed

Written by: the TDEENet team Last checked against sources: How we source and review

Questions

Frequently asked

What is the difference between BMR, RMR and TDEE?

BMR is measured under strict conditions: fasted, fully rested, lying still in a controlled room. RMR is measured under more relaxed conditions and comes out roughly 10 percent higher. In practice the two get used interchangeably, and the equations on this page were mostly derived against resting measurements. TDEE is the whole day, BMR plus everything else you do.

Which activity level should I choose?

Think about the whole week, not your best day. Three genuinely hard sessions is moderate. Seven light walks is not heavy. If your job keeps you on your feet all day, move up a step even if you never see a gym, because standing and walking are where the non-exercise component lives. When you are torn between two options, choose the lower one and let your weight data promote you.

I am eating at my TDEE and still gaining weight. What is wrong?

Usually one of three things. The estimate is high, most often because activity was overstated. Intake is higher than recorded, which is extremely common: studies of self-reported eating find people routinely under-record by a wide margin, especially with cooking oils, drinks and anything eaten standing up. Or not enough time has passed for the signal to show through normal water-weight noise.

Weigh your food for two weeks rather than estimating portions. Most people find the gap that way, and it is nearly always larger than they expected.

Why does my BMI say overweight when I am clearly not?

BMI divides weight by height squared and has no way of knowing what that weight is made of. A muscular person and a sedentary one at the same height and weight get the same score. It was designed for describing populations and performs poorly on individuals, a limitation that has been documented at length.8 If you lift and your BMI reads high, a body fat measurement will tell you far more.

Do I have to exercise to lose weight?

No. Weight change is driven by energy balance, and you can create a deficit through diet alone. What exercise does is preserve muscle while you lose, improve cardiovascular and metabolic health, and make maintenance easier afterwards. Resistance training in particular changes what you lose rather than how much.

What is the best macronutrient split?

Beyond hitting adequate protein and enough fat for hormone and vitamin needs, the split matters much less than total calories and consistency. Controlled trials comparing low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets at matched calories and protein tend to find small differences that fade over time. Pick the pattern you can hold for a year.

How often should I recalculate?

Every 4 to 5 kilograms of weight change, or roughly every two months if your weight is stable and your training has changed. Recalculating every week gives you noise, not information.

Is my data stored anywhere?

No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is transmitted, logged or saved, and closing the tab discards it. See the privacy policy for what the site does collect, which is very little.