TDEE Calculator

Enter your gender, age, weight, height and activity level — this free TDEE calculator works out your total daily energy expenditure and maintenance calories, plus your BMR, BMI, ideal weight, cutting and bulking targets and full macros.

TDEE Calculator

How to Use This TDEE Calculator

1. Pick your units and enter your stats. Choose US units (pounds, feet and inches) or metric (kilograms, centimetres), then enter your gender, age, weight and height. Every field starts empty, because a tdee calc only works with your real numbers.
2. Add body fat % only if you truly know it. A smart scale guess is worse than no number at all. If you have a DEXA scan, caliper reading or a reliable estimate, you can unlock the Katch-McArdle and Cunningham formulas, which calculate from lean body mass.
3. Choose your activity level honestly. The activity factor is the biggest error source in every how to calculate tdee guide: about 80% of people pick one level too high. Count your whole day, not just your workouts — a desk worker who trains 3 evenings a week is Light (x1.375), not Moderate.
4. Read your maintenance calories first. The big number is your TDEE — how to calculate maintenance calories comes down to exactly this. Below it you get your BMR, BMI, ideal weight, the full activity ladder, calorie targets to lose or gain at three speeds, and your macros for maintaining, cutting and bulking.
5. Test it for 2 to 3 weeks, then adjust. Eat at your TDEE, weigh yourself daily, and compare 7-day averages. If your weight holds, the estimate was right. If it drifts, adjust by 100 to 200 calories a day. No equation beats that real-world check. Tap an example chip to test a known case first: a man of 36, 94 kg and 178 cm at sedentary must return a BMR of 1,878 and a TDEE of 2,253.

Why Use This TDEE Calculator?

• It answers “what is my tdee” completely, in one result. The classic tdeecalculator net page gives maintenance calories, a BMI, ideal weight and macro tabs, then stops. This page gives all of that plus goal tiers at three speeds with percentages, a kilojoule figure, lean body mass, maximum muscular potential, and a full activity ladder — no second site needed.
• Four BMR formulas, not one. Calculator.net lets you pick between Mifflin-St Jeor, Harris-Benedict and Katch-McArdle. This tool adds the Cunningham equation for athletes, so you can compare formulas side by side and see how much the choice actually moves your number (usually 100 to 200 calories).
• The full 7-level activity scale. Most tools stop at five activity levels. This one includes the intermediate Moderate level (x1.465, exercise 4 to 5 days a week) from the calculator.net scale — the level many regular trainers actually live at, worth about 150 calories a day of accuracy.
• Macros the way lifters actually use them. Maintenance, cutting (TDEE minus 500) and bulking (TDEE plus 500), each in Moderate Carb, Lower Carb and Higher Carb splits — with protein also shown in grams so you can cross-check it against the 1.6 to 2.2 g per kilogram of body weight rule coaches use.
• Safety floors are built in, not buried. When a weight-loss row drops below 1,500 calories for men or 1,200 for women, the result flags it and tells you what to do instead. A tdee calculator weight loss plan should never quietly prescribe an intake a doctor would question.
• Weekly thinking, built in. Your result shows maintenance calories per week as well as per day, and the zigzag calorie cycling section below plans high and low days that hold your weekly average exact — the method Forbes Health and tdeecalculator org describe in theory but never calculate for you.
• Instant, private and free. This tdee calculator free tool runs entirely in your browser. No sign-up, no modal, no data leaves your device, and results update as you type.

Who Is This TDEE Calculator For?

• Anyone starting a weight loss plan who needs a defensible calorie target instead of a guess — the tdee calculator weight loss tiers show mild, standard and extreme deficits side by side, with the safety warning attached to the aggressive one.
• Lifters planning a cut or a bulk who need cutting and bulking macros in grams, not percentages they have to convert at the kitchen counter.
• Athletes and very active workers whose energy needs reach 3,000 to 3,500 calories — the Cunningham formula and the Extra Active tier exist for bodies the standard equations underestimate.
• People maintaining after a diet who want to find their true maintenance calories and hold them, using the 2 to 3 week test-and-adjust method instead of drifting back up.
• Coaches, dietitians and personal trainers who set client targets all day: four formulas, ideal weight from four classic equations, and every formula printed under the result with the client’s own numbers in it.
• Anyone confused by three different numbers from three different sites — calculate tdee here with each formula, compare them in the activity ladder, and understand exactly why they differ.

Learn How Many Calories You Burn Every Day

Your body burns calories around the clock, even in your sleep. Breathing, pumping blood, holding your body temperature, repairing cells, digesting food, walking to the kitchen, training in the gym — every one of those costs energy, and the sum of all of them across 24 hours is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, your TDEE. Most women burn between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day and most men between 2,000 and 3,200, but the spread inside those ranges is enormous: a small, sedentary woman and a tall, physical worker can differ by more than 2,000 calories a day while both are perfectly normal.

That is why generic diet advice fails. A meal plan built for an average 2,000-calorie person starves the active man who needs 3,100 and quietly fattens the sedentary woman who needs 1,750. When you calculate tdee from your own age, sex, weight, height and activity, you replace the average stranger with yourself — and every calorie decision after that, from a cutting target to a bulking surplus, stands on your number instead of a label on a food packet.

What Is TDEE?

TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure: the total number of calories your body burns in one full day. It is the same figure dietitians call maintenance calories, because eating exactly your TDEE keeps your weight stable over time. Expenditure has four components, and understanding them explains both why the calculator asks what it asks and where its errors hide.

BMR — Basal Metabolic Rate (About 60 to 70% of TDEE)

Your BMR is the energy your body spends at complete rest: brain, liver, heart, kidneys and muscle maintenance, with no movement at all. It is by far the largest slice of TDEE — roughly 65% for a typical person — and it is set mostly by your size, sex and age, which is why those are the calculator’s core inputs. A related figure, RMR (resting metabolic rate), measures nearly the same thing under slightly looser conditions and usually lands within 10% of BMR. Every formula on this page estimates BMR first.

NEAT — Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis

NEAT covers every calorie you burn moving outside formal exercise: walking to the printer, standing versus sitting, fidgeting, housework, carrying shopping, a physical job. It is the most variable component of TDEE — studies find differences of up to 400 calories a day between two people of the same size doing similar jobs — and it is the component no equation can see. NEAT is the hidden reason two people with identical calculator results maintain on different intakes, and it is why raising your daily step count is the easiest honest way to raise your TDEE.

EAT — Exercise Activity Thermogenesis

EAT is your deliberate training: runs, lifting sessions, sport, classes. A light one-hour session costs roughly 250 calories and a hard one about 500 for an average-sized adult. EAT feels like it should dominate TDEE, but for most people training 3 to 5 hours a week it contributes only 5 to 10% of the day’s total burn. The calculator captures NEAT and EAT together inside the activity factor, which is why choosing that factor honestly matters more than any other step.

TEF — The Thermic Effect of Food (About 10%)

Digesting food costs energy too. The thermic effect of food burns roughly 10% of what you eat, but it is not flat across macros: protein costs about 20 to 30% of its calories to process, carbohydrate about 5 to 7%, and fat only 2 to 3%. That is one quiet reason high-protein diets work slightly better than their paper calories suggest. Like Forbes Health and Calculator.net, this calculator does not add TEF separately — the validated BMR equations and activity multipliers were built on real total expenditure, so the effect is already inside the numbers.

How TDEE Is Calculated

Every credible TDEE calculator, from tdee calculator net to this one, follows the same two-step logic: estimate your BMR with a validated equation, then multiply it by an activity factor that stands in for NEAT, EAT and daily movement.

Step 1: Estimate BMR Using Mifflin-St Jeor

The Mifflin-St Jeor equation, published in 1990 (Mifflin et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), is the default here and on most serious tools because validation studies find it predicts resting metabolic rate within 10% for more adults than any rival — the American Council on Exercise treats it as the most accurate general equation, which is the same reasoning Forbes Health gives for using it. The older Revised Harris-Benedict equation (1984) tends to read 100 to 200 calories higher for many people. When body fat percentage is known accurately, Katch-McArdle (370 + 21.6 x lean body mass in kg) and Cunningham (500 + 22 x lean body mass) skip the sex and height terms entirely and calculate from the tissue that actually burns energy — lean mass — which serves lean athletes and people with obesity better than weight-based equations.

Step 2: Multiply by Your Activity Factor

Exercise intensity has working definitions on the calculator.net scale: an exercise session means 15 to 30 minutes of elevated heart rate, intense exercise means 45 to 120 minutes, and very intense exercise means 2 hours or more. If your training is real but your other 23 hours are spent in a chair, choose the lower level — the multiplier prices your whole day, not your best hour.

Worked Example: Calculate TDEE by Hand

Take a 30-year-old man who weighs 80 kg and stands 180 cm tall, training at the Active level. His BMR is (10 x 80) + (6.25 x 180) – (5 x 30) + 5 = 800 + 1,125 – 150 + 5 = 1,780 calories. Multiply by 1.55 and his TDEE is 2,759 calories a day — his maintenance calories. To lose about 1 lb a week he eats 2,759 – 500 = 2,259; to gain lean muscle slowly he eats about 2,759 + 250 = 3,009. Run those exact numbers in the tool above and it returns the same figures. A quick shortcut exists for a rough check — a moderately active adult maintains at about body weight in pounds x 15 (a 150 lb person at about 2,250 calories) — but the equation is always the better answer, because it prices age, height and sex as well.

Understanding Your Results

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)

Your BMR is the floor of your energy needs, not a diet target. Eating below it for long periods leaves too little energy for the repair work it pays for, which is why every responsible weight loss plan keeps intake at or above BMR where possible and treats a deficit as TDEE minus a margin — never BMR minus a margin.

TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) and Maintenance Calories

TDEE and maintenance calories are the same number wearing two names, and it answers the question how to calculate maintenance calories directly. Per week it is simply TDEE x 7 — the figure that matters if you zigzag your calories across days, because weekly balance, not any single day, decides whether your weight moves. The result also shows kilojoules (1 calorie = 4.184 kJ) for countries where food labels print kJ first.

BMI (Body Mass Index)

BMI divides your weight by the square of your height: under 18.5 is underweight, 18.5 to 24.9 is the normal range, 25 to 29.9 is overweight, and 30 and above is obese, in classes the result names for you. BMI is a population screening tool, not a body composition verdict — muscular people score high with low body fat, which is exactly why this page pairs BMI with body fat based formulas, ideal weight ranges and maximum muscular potential instead of printing BMI alone.

Ideal Weight and Maximum Muscular Potential

The ideal weight table runs four classic physician formulas — Hamwi (1964), Devine (1974), Robinson (1983) and Miller (1983) — which each give a slightly different healthy weight for your height, so the result quotes the range across all four rather than pretending one is gospel. For men, the Berkhan maximum muscular potential estimate (weight at 5% body fat is roughly height in cm minus 100) shows the heaviest lean physique a natural trainee of your height can realistically build, with the matching weights at 10% and 15% body fat — a useful reality check before setting a bulking target no natural body can reach.

Macros (Protein, Carbs, Fat)

Calories decide whether your weight moves; macros decide what the new weight is made of. Protein builds and protects muscle (4 calories per gram), fat carries hormones and fat-soluble vitamins (9 calories per gram), and carbohydrate fuels training (4 calories per gram). The maintenance, cutting and bulking macro tables hold protein steady as calories change — cutting at 30% protein of a smaller total is precisely why coaches raise protein to 1.8 to 2.2 g per kilogram of body weight during a diet — divide the protein grams in your cutting table by your weight in kilograms to check where your plan lands.

The Goal Calorie Ladder

One pound of fat stores about 3,500 calories (about 7,700 per kilogram), so a daily deficit of 250, 500 or 1,000 calories maps to roughly 0.5, 1 or 2 lb of loss per week, and the same surpluses map to the same rates of gain. Sustainable loss also respects a ceiling of about 1% of body weight per week, and safe intakes respect the floors of 1,500 calories for men and 1,200 for women without medical supervision. Your result shows every tier with its percentage of your TDEE, so a 500-calorie deficit reads honestly as a gentle 78% of maintenance for one person and a harsh cut for a smaller one.

How to Use Your TDEE for Your Goal

If You Want to Lose Weight

Start with the standard 500-calorie deficit — or the 250 tier if you are already lean, small, or know you abandon strict diets. Hold protein at the high end (1.8 to 2.2 g/kg), keep training, and judge progress on a 7-day average weight, never a single morning: day-to-day readings swing 2 to 4 lb on water, sodium and glycogen alone. Expect the simple maths to overpromise slightly late in a diet; metabolic adaptation trims roughly 100 to 150 calories from your TDEE for every 10 kg lost, so recalculate after every 10 to 15 lb and treat a two-week stall at a verified intake as the signal to trim another 100 to 200 calories — or add steps before food cuts.

If You Want to Maintain

Eat at your TDEE and verify it the only way that counts: 2 to 3 weeks of stable 7-day average weight. Maintenance is a range, not a point — most people hold weight comfortably within plus or minus 100 calories of true TDEE. This is also the phase where zigzag cycling earns its keep: bank calories for weekends and social meals by trimming weekdays, keep the weekly total at 7 x TDEE, and your weight never notices.

If You Want to Build Muscle

Muscle grows slowly, so the surplus should be small: 200 to 300 calories above TDEE (the mild gain tier) builds at close to the maximum natural rate for most trainees while adding minimal fat, and the full 500 tier suits underweight beginners who gain easily. Protein at 1.6 to 2.2 g/kg, progressive training, and a target gain of about 0.5 lb a week — faster gain past the beginner stage is mostly fat wearing a bulk’s clothing.

What Does a TDEE Look Like? — Ready Reference Tables

Tables make the activity multiplier real. Take one fixed BMR of 1,650 calories — a mid-sized adult — and run it through every level on this tdee calc:

The same person spans 1,980 to 3,135 maintenance calories purely on lifestyle — a range wider than most diets. It is the clearest demonstration on this page of why how to calculate tdee starts with an honest activity choice.

TDEE by Body Weight — 30 Years Old, Moderate Activity (x1.465)

Weight is the strongest single input in the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — every kilogram adds 10 calories to BMR before the multiplier touches it. For a 30-year-old at the Moderate activity level:

Most women maintain between 1,600 and 2,400 calories a day and most men between 2,000 and 3,200 — if your result lands far outside the matching band for your size, re-check the activity level before doubting the equation.

Zigzag Calorie Cycling — The Weekly Method No Rival Builds for You

Zigzag calorie cycling keeps your weekly calorie average identical to a flat diet while varying individual days: higher calories on hard training days and weekends, lower on quiet days. Dieters who cycle report better adherence, because no single day feels like a punishment and social eating stops breaking the plan. The standard pattern runs 2 high days at target plus 300 and 5 low days at target minus 120 — at a 2,000-calorie target that is 2 days at 2,300 and 5 days at 1,880 — which sums to exactly 7 times your target. The rule that makes zigzag honest is the same rule that makes it work: the weekly total is the diet, the daily pattern is just comfort engineering.

Common Mistakes That Wreck Your TDEE Estimate

• Picking the activity level you plan to reach, not the one you live. One tier too high adds roughly 250 to 300 phantom calories a day — a full meal of error, eaten daily, in the wrong direction.
• Trusting a body fat guess in a lean-mass formula. Katch-McArdle is more accurate than Mifflin only when the body fat input is. A 5-point body fat error moves BMR by over 100 calories; a bathroom scale’s body fat reading can easily be off by that much.
• Eating back exercise calories on top of TDEE. Your training is already inside the activity factor. Adding a watch’s workout calories again double-counts them and quietly erases a deficit.
• Judging by single weigh-ins. Water shifts of 2 to 4 lb hide a week of real fat loss. Daily weighing plus a 7-day average is the measurement the estimate deserves.
• Never recalculating. TDEE falls as you lose weight — about 2% per decade from age, 100 to 150 calories per 10 kg lost, and a further 10 to 15% suppression during long, hard dieting. A target set at 100 kg is wrong at 85 kg.
• Under-recording intake. Studies consistently find people under-report food by 20 to 40%. When a verified TDEE seems not to work, the gap is usually in the log, not the equation — weigh food for one honest week before blaming the calculator.

How to Increase Your TDEE

You cannot meaningfully change your BMR without changing your size, but TDEE has levers. Build muscle: each kilogram of lean mass burns roughly 21 calories a day at rest on the Katch-McArdle maths, and far more when it moves. Raise NEAT: 8,000 to 10,000 daily steps, a standing desk and walking meetings can add 200 to 400 calories of daily burn without a single workout. Train consistently rather than heroically: regular moderate sessions you actually repeat beat sporadic punishment. And eat enough protein — its 20 to 30% thermic effect means a high-protein diet burns measurably more of itself in digestion than a high-fat one at identical calories.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Tools on Jobi99

More free calculators and converters from the Jobi99 library — health, finance and tax tools, plus the full cooking collection. Pair this TDEE calculator with the calories converters when your food labels print kilojoules: