TDEE Calculator
Total daily energy expenditure is your resting metabolic rate multiplied by how much you move. That multiplier is a word you pick out of a dropdown, and it is by far the weakest link in the calculation — so this shows you the answer at all five levels at once, not just the one you chose.
Body and week
Count the whole week, not your best one. If you are between two levels, the lower one is nearly always the closer fit.
Which equation supplies the resting rate the multiplier is applied to. It matters far less than the level above.
Two of the equations were fitted to two groups and carry a different constant for each. Katch-McArdle has no sex term at all.
Whole years. It moves the resting rate, not the multiplier.
Centimetres, without shoes. 1.75 m is 175.
Kilograms. Weigh yourself at the same time of day for a figure you can compare week to week.
Only Katch-McArdle uses this. Leave it blank unless you have had it measured rather than estimated.
1,669 kcal at rest, multiplied by 1.55 for moderately active. The five levels span 1,168 kcal a day on this body, which is why the table below matters more than the equation does.
- Activity level
- Moderately active · Moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week
- Basal metabolic rate
- 1,669 kcal/day
- Equation used
- Mifflin-St Jeor
- Sedentary to extra active
- 1,168 kcal/day apart
| Activity level | Multiplier | Maintenance | Against your choice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sedentary | 1.20 | 2,003 kcal/day | -584 kcal/day |
| Lightly active | 1.375 | 2,295 kcal/day | -292 kcal/day |
| Moderately active | 1.55 | 2,587 kcal/day | Your choice |
| Very active | 1.725 | 2,879 kcal/day | +292 kcal/day |
| Extra active | 1.90 | 3,171 kcal/day | +584 kcal/day |
This is general information, not medical advice
This page exists to do arithmetic and to explain where the arithmetic came from. It is general educational information about a prediction equation and a lifestyle multiplier. It is not medical advice, it is not a diagnosis, and it is not a meal plan. It cannot see your health, your history, your medications, or what you are actually trying to do.
If you are deciding how much to eat — to lose weight, to gain it, to fuel training, or to manage a condition — talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before you act on a number from a web form. They can look at the things this page cannot, and they can arrange a measured resting rate through indirect calorimetry if the estimate is not good enough for the decision you are making.
If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, under 18, an older adult, recovering from illness, or living with an eating disorder, the equations underneath this page were not fitted with you in mind and the multipliers were not written for you either. Please do not use this page as a reason to eat less.
One multiplication, five choices
The whole method is a resting rate times a factor. The resting rate comes from a prediction equation — Mifflin-St Jeor by default, with revised Harris-Benedict and Katch-McArdle available — and the factor comes from a five-step ladder that has been quoted in fitness material since the 1990s.
TDEE = BMR × activity factor- 1.2 — sedentary
- Desk work and little or no deliberate exercise
- 1.375 — lightly active
- Light exercise 1 to 3 days a week
- 1.55 — moderately active
- Moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week
- 1.725 — very active
- Hard exercise 6 or 7 days a week
- 1.9 — extra active
- Hard daily training plus a physical job, or two sessions a day
The multiplication uses the rounded resting rate, the one printed on screen, so the arithmetic you can check in your head is the arithmetic the page did. Multiplying the unrounded figure would be marginally more precise on a number whose real error is measured in hundreds of kilocalories, and it would make the page appear to be wrong by one.
Worth knowing: this 1.2-to-1.9 ladder is not the same scale as the physical activity level (PAL) values in the FAO/WHO/UNU human energy requirements report, which run from 1.40 for a sedentary lifestyle to 2.40 for a vigorously active one. Both are applied to a basal rate as a factorial multiplier, and they are not interchangeable — a “1.55” here does not mean the same thing as a PAL of 1.55 there.
A 30-year-old man, 175 cm and 72 kg, at every level
Mifflin-St Jeor gives the resting rate first: 10 × 72 + 6.25 × 175 − 5 × 30 + 5 = 1668.75, which prints as 1,669 kcal a day. That is the number every row below is built from.
Sedentary: 1,669 × 1.2 = 2,003. Lightly active: × 1.375 = 2,295. Moderately active: × 1.55 = 2,587. Very active: × 1.725 = 2,879. Extra active: × 1.9 = 3,171.
The distance from the bottom of that ladder to the top is 1,168 kcal a day — half again as much food, decided by choosing a word. One step is 292 kcal, about a large sandwich. Two steps is 584, which is roughly the difference between someone who trains three hours a week and calls themselves very active, and the 1.375 their week actually supports.
Set that against the equation underneath: swapping Mifflin-St Jeor for revised Harris-Benedict on the same body moves the answer by 82 kcal. The equation you agonise over is worth less than a third of one step on the ladder you picked in two seconds.
The multiplier is the error
There are two guesses stacked here, and they are not the same size. The resting rate underneath carries roughly ±10% — real, but measured and bounded, from equations fitted to a few hundred people under laboratory conditions. The activity factor carries no such pedigree at all. It is five round numbers, chosen decades ago to bracket a plausible range of daily movement, selected by the user from a list of adjectives about themselves.
- The buckets are enormous. Fifteen percentage points separate one step from the next. On the example above that is 292 kcal a day — more than the entire ±10% band on the resting rate, from a single dropdown selection.
- Self-assessment reads high.The labels describe a kind of person; the multipliers are supposed to describe a whole week including the days nothing happened. “Very active” is chosen far more often than the 6-or-7-days definition warrants, and the gap between that choice and “lightly active” is 584 kcal a day on the worked example. If you are between two levels, the lower one is nearly always the closer fit.
- NEAT is invisible and huge. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis — walking, standing, fidgeting, posture — varies more between two people than their training does. Levine, Eberhardt and Jensen fed 16 people the same 1,000 kcal daily surplus for eight weeks and saw tenfold differences in fat gain, driven by how much their NEAT changed. A single multiplier cannot represent that, so it silently averages it away.
- The exercise itself is double counted, often. The multiplier already includes training. Adding a workout’s calories on top of it counts the same session twice, which is the most common way this figure is inflated in practice.
None of that makes the number worthless — it makes it a starting point. The only way to find your real maintenance intake is empirical: eat at a consistent figure for two or three weeks, weigh yourself under the same conditions, and adjust from what actually happens. This page tells you where to start, and the table tells you how wide the door is.
Which of these three tools do you actually want?
Use this page if the question is “how much do I burn in a day, and how much does the activity level change it?” Use the calorie calculator instead if the question is “how much should I eat to reach a particular weight, and by when?” — that one starts from a maintenance figure like this one and applies a goal, a rate, and a target date to it.
If you want the resting rate on its own, without any multiplier over it, the BMR calculator runs all three equations side by side and shows how far apart they land.
What this calculator assumes
- You are a healthy adult. The Mifflin-St Jeor sample underneath ran from 19 to 78 years old, and the activity ladder was not written for children, athletes in competition preparation, or anyone who is acutely ill.
- The activity level you picked describes your whole week, including rest days — not your best week and not your intention.
- Training is already inside the multiplier. Adding individual workout calories on top of it double counts them.
- Your weight is roughly stable. After a long period of restriction, measured expenditure tends to sit below what any equation predicts, and nothing here has a term for that.
- The thermic effect of food — roughly 10% of intake, spent digesting it — is treated as already absorbed into the activity factor, as it is in every version of this method.
- “BMR” and “RMR” are being used interchangeably, as they are almost everywhere. Measured strictly they differ by about 10%.
- Imperial figures are converted with the exact definitions — 1 inch = 2.54 cm, 1 pound = 0.45359237 kg — before any coefficient is applied.
TDEE FAQ
What activity level am I, really?
Probably one below the one you were about to pick. The labels describe an identity — nobody wants to select "sedentary" — while the multipliers describe a whole week, including the days you did nothing. A useful test: count the hours in the last seven days you spent genuinely training, then add your job. Three or four gym sessions on top of desk work is moderately active at best, and for many people lightly active is closer. On the worked example below, that one step is worth 292 kcal a day, and two steps is 584.
Is TDEE the same as maintenance calories?
Yes — the two terms mean the same thing. TDEE is the total energy your body spends in a day: the basal rate, plus the cost of digesting food, plus every bit of movement from a training session to standing up to make tea. Eating that amount is expected to hold your weight steady, which is why it is called maintenance. It is an estimate with a wide error, not a prescription, and the only way to find your real figure is to eat at a consistent intake for several weeks and watch what your weight does.
Why is my fitness tracker's number different?
Because it is answering a slightly different question with different information. A watch estimates expenditure from heart rate, motion and its own resting-rate model, updated through the day; this page multiplies a predicted resting rate by a fixed lifestyle factor. Trackers tend to read high on active days and are known to be unreliable for energy expenditure specifically, even when their step and heart-rate data are good. Neither figure is a measurement. If they disagree by a few hundred calories, that is the size of the uncertainty, not a bug in one of them.
Should I add my workout calories on top?
Not if you have already chosen an activity level that includes them — that is double counting, and it is the most common mistake with this calculator. The multiplier is meant to cover your whole week, training included. Adding a session's calories on top of a "very active" multiplier counts the same run twice. If you would rather track exercise separately, pick sedentary as the base and add sessions individually, but be aware that both halves of that sum carry their own error.
What is NEAT, and why does it matter here?
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis: everything you burn moving that is not deliberate exercise — walking to the shops, standing, fidgeting, gesturing, keeping your posture. It is the most variable component of daily expenditure between two similar people, and it is completely invisible to the activity multiplier, which lumps it in with training. In Levine, Eberhardt and Jensen's 1999 overfeeding study, 16 people fed the same 1,000 kcal daily surplus for eight weeks showed tenfold differences in fat gain, and the changes in their NEAT predicted who gained what.
TDEE or the calorie calculator — which do I want?
This one, if the question is "how much do I burn in a day, and where does that number come from?" The calorie calculator, if the question is "how much should I eat to reach a particular weight, and when would I get there?" TDEE is the maintenance figure everything else is built on; the calorie tool takes that figure and applies a goal, a rate and a date to it.
Sources and review notes
- Human energy requirements: report of a Joint FAO/WHO/UNU Expert Consultation, Rome 2001 — the factorial method (resting rate × physical activity level) and the PAL bands this page distinguishes itself from
- 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 — the default resting rate the multiplier is applied to
- Levine JA, Eberhardt NL, Jensen MD. “Role of nonexercise activity thermogenesis in resistance to fat gain in humans.” Science, 1999;283(5399):212–214 — the overfeeding study behind the NEAT figures above
- 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 — the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics review behind the default equation
The equation coefficients are fixed constants from published papers. The five activity multipliers are a convention rather than a finding, which is exactly why every one of them is shown here instead of just the one you selected — the honest output of this method is a range, and the table is that range.