TDEE Calculator

Your TDEE — Total Daily Energy Expenditure — is the number of calories your body burns in a day, including everything from breathing and digestion to walking and exercise. It's the single most useful number for anyone trying to lose weight, maintain, or build muscle, because every calorie goal — a calorie deficit, a maintenance calorie target, or a bulk — starts from this baseline. Instead of guessing how many calories you should eat a day, this TDEE calculator uses your age, sex, weight, height, and activity level to estimate your exact number in seconds. Enter your details above, pick your activity level, and you'll instantly see your calorie deficit, maintenance, and bulk targets — no sign-up, no spreadsheets, just your number.

What Is TDEE?

TDEE is made up of four components that add up to your total daily calorie burn.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the energy your body uses just to stay alive — breathing, circulating blood, repairing cells — while completely at rest. It typically makes up 60–75% of your total TDEE, which is why a basal metabolic rate calculator alone will always show a lower number than your full TDEE.

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) covers all the movement that isn't formal exercise — walking around the house, fidgeting, standing at your desk, doing chores. NEAT varies hugely between people and is one of the biggest reasons two people with similar stats can burn very different amounts of calories in a day.

Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT) is the calories burned during intentional workouts — gym sessions, running, sports, structured training.

Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) is the energy your body spends digesting and processing what you eat, usually around 10% of total intake. Add all four together, and you get your TDEE.

How Is TDEE Calculated?

This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — widely considered the most accurate formula for estimating BMR in healthy adults, and commonly used by dietitians in clinical practice.

Once BMR is calculated, it's multiplied by an activity factor to get your TDEE:

• Sedentary (little or no exercise): × 1.2
• Lightly active (light exercise 1–3 days/week): × 1.375
• Moderately active (moderate exercise 3–5 days/week): × 1.55
• Very active (hard exercise 6–7 days/week): × 1.725
• Extra active (very hard exercise & physical job): × 1.9

For example, a 30-year-old woman weighing 65kg and 165cm tall has a BMR of roughly 1,420 calories. If she's moderately active, her TDEE would be 1,420 × 1.55 ≈ 2,201 calories — the number she'd need to eat daily to maintain her current weight. For official government guidance on calorie needs and weight management, the NIH Body Weight Planner is a useful reference alongside this calculator.

TDEE vs BMR

BMR and TDEE are often confused, but they measure two very different things. BMR is the bare minimum — the calories your body burns just existing, lying still for 24 hours with zero activity. TDEE includes BMR plus everything else: walking, working, exercising, even digesting your meals. In other words, BMR is a baseline you should rarely eat below for long periods, while TDEE is the realistic number that reflects your actual lifestyle. If you use a basal metabolic rate calculator on its own, you'll get a lower number than this TDEE calculator shows — that's expected, since BMR deliberately excludes activity. For everyday calorie planning — losing weight, maintaining, or bulking — TDEE is almost always the more useful number to work from.

How to Use Your TDEE Number

Once you know your TDEE, turning it into a calorie target is simple — it's just a matter of eating above, at, or below that number.

To cut (lose weight)

Eat roughly 500 calories below your TDEE — a calorie deficit calculator rule of thumb that creates about a 3,500-calorie weekly deficit, generally leading to around 1 pound (0.45kg) of fat loss per week, a sustainable pace for most people.

To maintain

Eat at your TDEE. This is your maintenance calorie number — your weight should stay roughly stable over time, give or take normal day-to-day fluctuation from water and food volume.

To bulk (gain muscle/weight)

Eat 300–500 calories above your TDEE. A smaller surplus (closer to 300) tends to favor lean muscle gain with less fat, while a larger surplus (closer to 500) speeds up weight gain but adds more fat along with muscle.

This calculator shows all three numbers automatically above, so you don't have to do the subtraction yourself — just pick the goal that matches what you're trying to do and start there.

TDEE for Men vs Women

Men and women calculate TDEE slightly differently because the Mifflin-St Jeor formula accounts for typical differences in body composition. At the same age, weight, and height, men generally have a higher BMR than women, mainly because men tend to carry more lean muscle mass, which burns more calories at rest than fat tissue does. This is why the formula adds 5 to the men's equation and subtracts 161 for women. It's a population-level average, though — individual muscle mass, genetics, and metabolism vary widely within each sex, so use your TDEE number as a starting point and adjust based on real results over a few weeks.

More Free Calculators

A few other tools on this site people often use alongside their calorie goals.

FAQs