TDEE Calculator: Maintenance Calories per Day
Estimate your total daily energy expenditure, the calories that keep your weight steady, for five activity levels from sedentary to extra active, with BMR by Mifflin-St Jeor, Harris-Benedict or Katch-McArdle. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Enter your age, height and weight to see your calories.
About the TDEE Calculator
The TDEE Calculator estimates your total daily energy expenditure: the number of calories you burn in a typical day, including everything you do. It is also called your maintenance calories, because eating about this much keeps your weight steady. Enter your age, sex, height and weight, choose an activity level, and the calculator shows your maintenance calories, your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and a table of maintenance calories for all five activity levels, so you can see how much difference a more active week makes.
You can type measurements in centimetres and kilograms or in feet, inches and pounds, and read results in kcal or kJ. Nothing is uploaded; everything is worked out in your browser and never leaves your device.
This is an estimate, not medical advice. Real energy use varies from day to day and from person to person, so treat the figure as a starting point and adjust it after a few weeks of watching your weight.
How TDEE is calculated
TDEE is BMR multiplied by an activity factor:
BMR comes from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation by default, or the revised Harris-Benedict or Katch-McArdle equations if you prefer. The activity factors are a convention used by dietitians for decades:
Activity factors
- Sedentary (little or no exercise, desk job): × 1.2
- Lightly active (light exercise 1 to 3 days a week): × 1.375
- Moderately active (moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week): × 1.55
- Very active (hard exercise 6 to 7 days a week): × 1.725
- Extra active (very hard exercise or a physical job): × 1.9
Choosing a level
Most people overestimate how active they are. If you sit for most of the day and exercise three times a week, "lightly active" is often closer than "moderately active". Steps, standing and fidgeting count as much as gym sessions.
What makes up your daily energy
Daily energy has three main parts. BMR is the largest, usually 60 to 70 percent. The thermic effect of food, the energy used to digest and store what you eat, adds about 10 percent. Physical activity, both exercise and everyday movement, makes up the rest and is the part that varies most between people.
Worked example
A 30-year-old man, 180 cm and 80 kg, has a BMR of 1,780 kcal a day. Sedentary, his TDEE is 1,780 × 1.2 = 2,136 kcal; moderately active, 2,759 kcal; extra active, 3,382 kcal.
Related tools
To eat for a goal, open the Calorie Calculator, which adds daily targets for losing or gaining 0.25, 0.5 or 1 kg a week. The BMR Calculator compares the three resting equations, the Macro Calculator splits your calories into protein, carbohydrate and fat, and the BMI Calculator shows where your weight sits.
Sources
- Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, et al. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1990;51(2):241–247.
- Roza AM, Shizgal HM. The Harris Benedict equation reevaluated. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1984;40(1):168–182.
- McArdle WD, Katch FI, Katch VL. Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Open-source credits
The calculations are implemented in-house in TypeScript, with no third-party libraries. They follow the published Mifflin-St Jeor, revised Harris-Benedict and Katch-McArdle equations and the conventional activity factors 1.2 to 1.9.