TDEE Calculator

Fill in your gender, age, weight, height, and activity level above, and the tool works out your TDEE, the number of calories your body burns across a full day. Not just lying still, everything: breathing, digesting, walking to the kitchen, the gym session, all of it.

Most adult women land somewhere between 1800 and 2400 kcal a day, and most adult men fall between 2200 and 3000 kcal. Activity level swings that number more than almost anything else, which is exactly why a generic average never fits any one person as well as a calculator built around their own numbers.

What Is TDEE, Actually?

TDEE, short for Total Daily Energy Expenditure, is the calorie cost of an entire day, not just existing. It starts with BMR, the resting number, and adds everything layered on top: digestion, walking, work, and any deliberate exercise.

Trainers and dietitians reach for TDEE because it’s the number that actually matches how someone eats and moves, not just how they’d burn calories lying in bed all day. Activity level, on top of age, gender, height, and weight, is what pushes the number up or down, which is why the calculator above asks for all five.

How to Use the TDEE Calculator

Five fields, one click, done.

1. Pick gender from the dropdown.
2. Enter age in years.
3. Type in weight, measured in kilograms.
4. Type in height, measured in centimeters.
5. Select an activity level from the five options.
6. Select Calculate.
7. Read the daily calorie number that appears underneath.

Nothing here gets saved or sent anywhere, so feel free to run it again with different numbers to compare.

Typical TDEE Ranges by Activity Level

Someone who trains six days a week and someone who barely leaves their desk can share the exact same BMR and still post very different TDEE numbers, purely from movement.

Two people at the same activity level can still land in different spots within that range once body composition enters the picture, which the body fat calculator breaks down in more detail.

How TDEE Is Calculated

TDEE starts with BMR, then multiplies it by an activity number. The BMR calculator runs the resting half of the math using the Mifflin-St Jeor formula, split by gender.

Formula for men, BMR = (10 x weight in kg) plus (6.25 x height in cm) minus (5 x age) plus 5

Formula for women, BMR = (10 x weight in kg) plus (6.25 x height in cm) minus (5 x age) minus 161

Once BMR is set, this calculator multiplies it by an activity number, anywhere from 1.2 for sedentary up to 1.9 for very active.

Take the same 25 year old man weighing 70 kg at 175 cm from the BMR example. His BMR lands at 1674 kcal. Add a moderate activity level, exercise 3 to 5 days a week, and the multiplier is 1.55, which pushes his TDEE to roughly 2595 kcal a day. That’s the number that actually matches his real life, not just his hours in bed.

From TDEE to a Real Plan

TDEE on its own is just a number. Turning it into a plan means deciding whether to sit at maintenance, eat below it, or eat above it.

1. Maintenance: eat close to TDEE, weight holds steady.
2. Fat loss: eat roughly 15 to 20% below TDEE.
3. Muscle gain: eat roughly 10 to 15% above TDEE.

A 500 kcal daily gap below TDEE tends to move the scale by about half a kilo a week, give or take, based on the standard energy-balance estimate.

Once a daily calorie target exists, splitting it across protein, carbs, and fat becomes the next logical step, which the macro calculator handles directly.

Nudging TDEE Higher

Muscle is the biggest lever here too. More of it raises resting burn, and resting burn makes up half of TDEE. Staying on your feet through the day, walking more, taking the stairs, adds up faster than most people expect, since that everyday movement sits right inside the TDEE number.

Enough dietary protein supports that muscle rather than working against it, and the protein intake calculator gives a target worth aiming for. Sleeping seven to nine hours and steering clear of extremely low calorie diets for long stretches round out the list.

Crash dieting works against this number over time. The body adapts to less food by burning less of it, which pulls TDEE down right when someone needs it working in their favor.

Where the TDEE Formula Falls Short

TDEE inherits every limitation BMR already has, then stacks a second layer of guesswork on top: the activity multiplier is a rough category, not a measurement. Someone who trains hard but sits the rest of the day, and someone with a genuinely active job, can both tick “active” and land on the same multiplier despite very different real-world movement.

Extremely muscular individuals, people with certain medical conditions, and anyone significantly outside average body composition should treat the result as a solid starting estimate rather than a lab-grade number.

Cross-checking against the ideal weight calculator or a full BMI calculator reading rounds out the picture nicely.