TDEE Calculator
Find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure and compare cut, maintain, and bulk targets.
Convert a measurement
TDEE Calculator — your inputs
- Sex
- Male
- Age
- 30 yrs
- Height
- 175 cm
- Weight
- 70 kg
- Activity level
- Moderate — exercise 4–5×/week
- BMR formula
- Mifflin-St Jeor (default)
- Unit system
- Metric
Key takeaways
- TDEE is everything you burn in a day: BMR plus movement plus digestion. BMR alone is usually 60–70% of it.1
- The activity multiplier is the weakest link. Between sedentary and very active there is often a 500 kcal gap, and most people place themselves too high.
- Exercise adds less to your daily total than expected. Pontzer's work suggests expenditure is partly constrained — the body offsets some training by spending less elsewhere.5
- Metabolism does not slow steadily from your twenties. Adjusted for body size it is flat from about age 20 to 60, then declines.4
- Use it as a starting point, then let two to three weeks of weight data correct it. Measured beats predicted every time.
How to use this calculator
Enter your sex, age, height, and weight.
Choose your activity level and BMR formula.
Understanding your result
TDEE is your BMR multiplied by an activity factor — an estimate of what you burn in a typical day.
We show a cut/maintain/bulk comparison so you can see the trade-offs at a glance.
The four components of your daily burn
Total daily energy expenditure is not one thing. It is four, and they behave very differently — which is why two people of the same size can differ by several hundred calories a day.
| Component | Share of TDEE | How much you control it |
|---|---|---|
| Basal metabolic rate (info) | 60–70% | Little, directly. It tracks lean mass, so building muscle raises it slowly and modestly. |
| Non-exercise activity (NEAT) (success) | 15–30% | A great deal, and mostly without noticing. This is the component that varies most between people. |
| Exercise (success) | 0–20% | Fully, but it is a smaller slice than most people assume. |
| Thermic effect of food (neutral) | ~10% | Barely. Protein costs more to digest than carbohydrate or fat, which is a real but small effect. |
The surprising one is NEAT. Levine's overfeeding study found that when people were fed 1,000 extra calories a day, the difference in how much fat they gained was explained largely by involuntary changes in fidgeting and spontaneous movement — a spread of roughly 700 calories a day between individuals.3 Nobody decided to move more. Their bodies did it for them, to wildly differing degrees.
Why exercise adds less than you expect
A hard hour of training might burn 500 calories. It rarely adds 500 to the day's total. Some of it displaces movement you would have done anyway; some is offset by sitting more afterwards and by hunger.
Pontzer's constrained-expenditure work goes further, finding that highly active populations do not burn proportionally more than sedentary ones — the body appears to compensate elsewhere as activity rises.5 The size and generality of that effect is still debated. What is not debated is the practical implication: exercise is excellent for health, fitness and appetite regulation, and unreliable as a way to create a calorie deficit on its own.
The most useful correction to make
Do not add your workout calories on top of an activity multiplier that already accounts for them. Choosing "moderately active" and then eating back what your watch says you burned is the most common way people double-count their way out of a deficit.
What actually changes your TDEE
- Body size. The largest single factor. A bigger body costs more to run and to move, which is why TDEE falls as you lose weight and why targets need recalculating.
- Lean mass. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, though the effect is modest — roughly 13 kcal per kg of muscle per day, not the hundreds sometimes claimed.
- Age — but not the way you think. Pontzer's analysis of over 6,400 people found size-adjusted expenditure essentially stable from age 20 to 60, then declining about 0.7% a year.4 The middle-age slowdown people describe is usually a change in activity and body composition, not the metabolism itself.
- Sex. Men average higher TDEE mostly because they average more lean mass. The equations account for this directly.
- Illness, pregnancy and lactation. All raise requirements, sometimes substantially, and none are handled by a general-purpose multiplier.
Turning TDEE into a plan
- Maintenance is TDEE. Eat at it and weight should hold steady over a few weeks.
- To lose, subtract 10–20%. The Calorie Calculator does this and applies safety floors.
- To gain, add 10–15%. More than that mostly adds fat, however hard you train.
- Verify with the scale, not the formula. Track a weekly average for three weeks. If it is not moving as predicted, the multiplier was wrong — adjust it rather than doubting the arithmetic.
- Set protein separately with the Protein Calculator; it does not scale with calories the way carbohydrate and fat do.
- Sedentary (×1.2)2040 kcal/day
- Light, 1–3×/week (×1.375)2338 kcal/day
- Moderate, 4–5×/week (×1.55)2635 kcal/day
- Active, daily (×1.725)2933 kcal/day
- Very active, 6–7×/week (×1.9)3230 kcal/day
- Extra active (×1.95)3315 kcal/day
| Method | Value (kcal/day) |
|---|---|
| Sedentary (×1.2) | 2040 |
| Light, 1–3×/week (×1.375) | 2338 |
| Moderate, 4–5×/week (×1.55) | 2635 |
| Active, daily (×1.725) | 2933 |
| Very active, 6–7×/week (×1.9) | 3230 |
| Extra active (×1.95) | 3315 |
Nearly 1,300 calories separate the ends of that scale for the same person, which is why choosing honestly matters more than any refinement to the BMR equation underneath. Most people overestimate: a desk job with three gym sessions a week is light to moderate, not active. If your weight is not moving as the number predicts, this dropdown is the first place to look.
Terms used on this page
- TDEE
- Total daily energy expenditure — everything you burn in 24 hours, from basal metabolism to digesting dinner.
- NEAT
- Non-exercise activity thermogenesis: fidgeting, walking, standing, gesturing. Varies by hundreds of calories a day between people and is largely involuntary.
- Thermic effect of food
- The energy cost of digesting and absorbing what you eat, around 10% of intake. Higher for protein (20–30%) than for carbohydrate or fat.
- Constrained expenditure
- The hypothesis that total daily burn is held within a range, so increases in activity are partly offset by reductions elsewhere rather than adding fully to the total.
The formula
- Man, 30y, 175 cm, 70 kg, moderate (1.55)
- BMR ≈ 1649
- TDEE = 1649 × 1.55
Source: BMR × activity multiplier. Published clinical/scientific formula.
Limitations
- Activity multipliers are population averages — your real TDEE may differ by 10–20%.
- Track your weight and intake over 2–3 weeks and adjust to dial in your real number.
References
- 1.A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. Mifflin, St Jeor et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 51(2):241–247, 1990.
- 2.Human energy requirements: report of a Joint FAO/WHO/UNU Expert Consultation. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2004.
- 3.Role of nonexercise activity thermogenesis in resistance to fat gain in humans. Levine, Eberhardt & Jensen, Science 283(5399):212–214, 1999.
- 4.Daily energy expenditure through the human life course. Pontzer et al., Science 373(6556):808–812, 2021.
- 5.Constrained total energy expenditure and metabolic adaptation to physical activity in adult humans. Pontzer et al., Current Biology 26(3):410–417, 2016.
Frequently asked questions
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Read articleNot medical advice. This calculator is for general informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical guidance. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making decisions about your health. Read the full medical disclaimer.
Printed from mystatura.com — for general information only, not medical advice.