TDEE Calculator

How to use the tdee calculator

Enter four things about your body and one about your week, and the tool returns your Total Daily Energy Expenditure — the calories your body burns in a typical day, often called your maintenance calories. Start with sex, age, weight, and height, then pick the activity level that honestly matches how you move through a normal week. Every field is pre-filled with a representative example (a 30-year-old, 70 kg, 175 cm, at a moderate activity level), so you can watch the tool work before you swap in your own numbers. Weight accepts kilograms or pounds and height accepts centimetres or inches, so you can stay in whichever units you think in.

Sex, age, weight, and height feed the first half of the calculation, the part that estimates your Basal Metabolic Rate — the energy your body spends just keeping you alive at complete rest, before you stand up, walk, or so much as lift a fork. These four numbers are simply describing the body that has to be maintained, and the more accurate they are, the more accurate the resting figure underneath your TDEE will be. There is nothing to optimise here; you are just describing yourself plainly so the math has honest inputs to work from.

The activity selector is where most of the real judgement lives, because it scales that resting number up to account for everything you do once you are out of bed. Sedentary (×1.2) means little movement beyond daily living; Light (×1.375) is light exercise a few days a week; Moderate (×1.55, the default) is moderate exercise most days; Active (×1.725) is hard training most days; and Very active (×1.9) is heavy physical work or twice-a-day training. Pick the band that matches a normal week, not your best week — and read the teaching note below before you reach for the higher rungs, because they move the result a long way.

Read the output as two linked numbers. The headline is your TDEE — roughly the calories that keep your weight steady if you eat that much, day in and day out. Just beneath it sits the BMR it was built on, so you can see the resting floor the activity factor multiplied upward. On the defaults the resting figure lands near 1,649 kcal and, at the moderate setting, the TDEE works out to about 2,556 kcal a day. Both are estimates, not measurements: real bodies vary, so treat the figure as a well-grounded starting point rather than a precise verdict.

To put the number to use, eat near your TDEE to hold steady, then nudge it gently if you want gradual change in either direction — the teaching section below walks through how small a sensible nudge should be. If you would rather see the resting figure on its own, without any activity multiplier folded in, reach for the bmr-calculator, which is this tool’s resting-only sibling and reports just the Basal Metabolic Rate that sits at the heart of this estimate.

The formula

Two steps. First estimate the resting burn from your body stats with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then multiply that resting figure by the activity factor that matches your week to scale it up to a full day’s expenditure:

BMR = Mifflin-St Jeor (sex, age, weight, height)
TDEE = BMR × activity factor

Worked example with the defaults — a 30-year-old male at 70 kg and 175 cm has a Mifflin-St Jeor BMR of about 1,649 kcal. At the moderate factor that is 1,649 × 1.55 ≈ 2,556 kcal a day. Hold the body the same and only the activity band changes the result: sedentary (×1.2) lands near 1,979 kcal, while very active (×1.9) reaches about 3,133 kcal. The spread between those two is the whole reason the activity choice matters so much.

Choose that activity level honestly, because it is the single input most people overstate. A desk job with a few workouts a week is usually Light or Moderate, not Active — the higher bands are for hard daily training or physically demanding work, and reaching for them inflates the estimate. Once you have a figure you trust, eat near it to maintain. For gradual change, a modest deficit of roughly 10–20% (about 250–500 kcal) supports a slow loss, and a modest surplus supports a slow gain. This is general guidance only, not a prescription: steep, crash-style deficits tend to backfire and are best avoided, and a registered dietitian or your doctor can build a plan around your own health and goals.

Frequently asked questions

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