TDEE Calculator
Total daily energy expenditure: your BMR (Mifflin-St Jeor) scaled by the conventional activity multipliers, with all five levels shown so the honest range stays visible. To turn the estimate into loss or gain targets, use the Calorie Calculator; to split it into grams, the Macro Calculator.
Estimate your TDEE
Example: male, 80 kg, 180 cm, age 30, moderately active → 2,759 kcal/day.
BMR times a multiplier — and what that convention hides
The arithmetic is short. Mifflin-St Jeor turns four inputs into a resting estimate: for a 30-year-old man at 80 kg and 180 cm, 10×80 + 6.25×180 − 5×30 + 5 = 1,780 kcal/day. Multiplying that by the moderately active factor of 1.55 gives 2,759 kcal/day. Every figure on this page is produced by the same engine the calculator runs, at build time, so the copy and the code cannot drift apart.
The two halves of that sentence are not the same kind of thing, and the difference is most of what there is to say about a TDEE estimate. The first half is a published equation fitted to measurements of a study population, and it carries a documented expectation of roughly ±10% around measured resting expenditure — about 178 kcal/day of uncertainty for this example, in the resting figure alone. The second half is a factor picked from a dropdown. Nothing measures it, and the estimate inherits whatever was chosen.
The full chain — resting estimate, activity factor, goal offset, and how far the answer moves when one link is set differently — is walked in order in the companion guide, calorie needs: BMR, TDEE, and why targets drift. This page stops after the second link.
Five rungs, and what "conventional" is doing in that sentence
The engine offers five factors, and these are the labels attached to them:
- ×1.2 — Sedentary (little or no exercise)
- ×1.375 — Lightly active (1–3 days/week)
- ×1.55 — Moderately active (3–5 days/week)
- ×1.725 — Very active (6–7 days/week)
- ×1.9 — Extra active (hard exercise + physical job)
Read the labels rather than the adjectives. They are written almost entirely in exercise days per week, which is a narrow question to ask of a whole week: two people whose weeks hold the same number of training days can spend the rest of those weeks very differently, and the ladder has no rung for that. Calling the multipliers conventional rather than precise is not modesty for its own sake — it is a deliberately weaker claim than the one made for the resting equation, which names a study population and an error band. The multipliers name neither.
That is also why the result lists every level rather than only the one selected in the dropdown. A single figure would be the most confident-looking and the least honest thing this page could print.
The same person at every rung
Holding the worked example fixed — same weight, same height, same age, the same resting estimate of 1,780 kcal/day — and changing nothing but the dropdown:
- Sedentary (little or no exercise) (×1.2): 2,136 kcal/day
- Lightly active (1–3 days/week) (×1.375): 2,448 kcal/day
- Moderately active (3–5 days/week) (×1.55): 2,759 kcal/day
- Very active (6–7 days/week) (×1.725): 3,071 kcal/day
- Extra active (hard exercise + physical job) (×1.9): 3,382 kcal/day
Bottom to top, that is a span of 1,246 kcal/day for one unchanged body. The rungs are evenly spaced — each factor sits exactly 0.175 above the one below it — so the exact distance between two adjacent rungs is the same wherever on the ladder the step is taken: 312 kcal/day for this person. Those rows are rounded to whole kilocalories, as every calorie figure on this site is; the arithmetic keeps full precision internally and rounds only at display, so subtracting two printed rows can land a kilocalorie away from the exact step.
The spacing belongs to the multiplier set rather than to the person, which is why the size of a one-rung step follows the resting estimate rather than being a fixed number of kilocalories. Run the same step for a woman of 58 kg and 163 cm aged 45, whose resting estimate is 1,213 kcal/day: one rung is 212 kcal/day for her, against 312 for the man above. The proportion is identical; the consequence is not.
The rung is a self-assessment, and it moves the answer most
Choosing between "lightly" and "moderately" active is a self-assessment that most people get wrong in the optimistic direction, and the difference alone shifts the estimate by hundreds of kcal/day. On the worked example that is concrete rather than rhetorical: lightly active returns 2,448 kcal/day and moderately active 2,759, a gap of 312 kcal/day produced by one dropdown and nothing else (the printed rows are each rounded, so subtracting them lands a kilocalorie off the exact step).
Two comparisons put that gap in scale. It is larger than the roughly 276 kcal/day that the resting estimate's ±10% contributes on either side of the maintenance figure, once the multiplier has scaled it. And it sits between the two offsets the Calorie Calculator applies to a maintenance figure — 250 kcal for the milder step, 500 for the larger one. The arithmetic consequence is worth stating plainly: subtract the milder offset from a rung that was one step too high and the result is still above the maintenance figure the lower rung would have produced. The dropdown outweighed the deficit.
This page asserts that ordering at build time — one rung larger than the milder offset, smaller than the larger one, and larger than the band carried through from the resting estimate. If the engine's factors or offsets ever changed, these paragraphs would fail to build rather than quietly become false.
TDEE is the start of an experiment, not the end of one
Because the multiplier is chosen rather than measured, the defensible framing of the output is as the starting point of a two-to-three-week comparison against the actual weight trend, not as a fixed prescription. What makes it a starting point rather than an answer is that the formula never saw the week it is estimating: the trend is the one piece of evidence the arithmetic cannot supply, because none of the four inputs observes it.
The window is described in weeks rather than days because the quantity of interest is a direction, and a direction cannot be read from a single point. The formula contributes nothing to that part: weight enters it as one static input, so it carries no representation of how that input moves or of what moves it. That is the gap the two-to-three-week framing is meant to sit in — it leaves the output in a position to be revised rather than defended, and re-running the calculator at a different rung is the intended use of the dropdown rather than an admission that the first pass was broken.
One term makes that revision arithmetic rather than judgement. Weight enters Mifflin-St Jeor with a coefficient of 10 kcal per kilogram, and this page's multiplier carries it straight through: at the moderately active factor, one kilogram of the weight input moves the TDEE figure by 15.5 kcal/day. The output is therefore tied to the weight that produced it, and a materially different weight is a different calculation rather than a stale one.
Where TDEE sits: BMR below it, calorie targets above it
Three calculators expose the same arithmetic at three depths rather than offering three different opinions. The BMR Calculator stops after the resting equation. This page adds the activity factor and stops there. The Calorie Calculator carries on, applying fixed offsets of 250 and 500 kcal above and below the maintenance figure to produce the loss and gain rows, and the Macro Calculator splits a calorie figure into grams by labeled ratio conventions. After the multiplication, nothing new is estimated — only addition and subtraction.
Two things follow from that structure. Because this page's only step beyond BMR is a single multiplication, there is no separate exercise term to add to — layering a session estimate on top of the TDEE figure double-counts against the factor already applied; building a day from a base plus individual sessions means starting from the resting estimate instead. And because every later step is an offset from this one, everything downstream inherits the rung that was picked — an offset applied to an overestimated maintenance figure is an offset from the wrong place.
The calorie page also checks its loss rows against two floors: the person's own estimated BMR, and the commonly cited minimum intakes of about 1,200 kcal/day for women and 1,500 for men. It flags a target below either rather than hiding or silently raising it, because targets in that territory call for qualified medical supervision rather than a calculator.
The inputs are bounded by the same engine that does the arithmetic: ages 15 to 100, weights 10 to 500 kg, heights 50 to 280 cm, with an explicit message rather than a wrong answer outside those ranges. Everything runs in your browser, and nothing you enter is transmitted.
Frequently asked questions
How is TDEE calculated here?
Basal metabolic rate from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation (10×kg + 6.25×cm − 5×age, +5 for men, −161 for women) multiplied by an activity factor: 1.2 sedentary, 1.375 lightly active, 1.55 moderately active, 1.725 very active, 1.9 extra active. Nothing else happens on this page — the TDEE figure is one multiplication away from the BMR figure.
Where do the activity multipliers come from?
They are a convention. This site describes them as conventional rather than precise, which is deliberately weaker than what it says about the resting equation: that equation names a study population and a published error band, and the multipliers carry no comparable claim. They are useful anchors, but the labels are subjective — one person’s "moderately active" is another’s "very active".
How accurate is a TDEE estimate?
Treat it as a band, not a measurement. The resting step carries a published expectation of roughly ±10% around measured resting expenditure, and because the activity factor multiplies rather than adds, that band is scaled along with everything else. The factor itself is chosen rather than measured, so it contributes uncertainty of its own on top. The practical calibration is a two-to-three-week experiment against the actual weight trend.
What is the difference between TDEE and BMR?
BMR is the Mifflin-St Jeor estimate of energy used at rest — the figure the worked example on this page puts at 1,780 kcal/day. TDEE is that same figure after exactly one more operation: ×1.55 at the moderately active rung turns it into 2,759 kcal/day. Nothing is added between them, so the resting inputs move both figures together and the dropdown moves only the second.
Which activity level should I pick?
Picking a rung is a self-assessment, and it is one most people get wrong in the optimistic direction. The rungs are described almost entirely in exercise days per week, so the label that matches a typical week — not a good one — is the one the formula was built to take. Because the factor multiplies rather than adds, a rung chosen one step high carries through every figure downstream.
Why does changing one dropdown move the estimate by hundreds of kcal?
Because the factor multiplies the whole resting estimate rather than adding to it, and the five factors are evenly spaced 0.175 apart. The gap between two adjacent rungs is therefore a fixed fraction of the BMR figure — 312 kcal/day for the worked example on this page, and larger again for a larger resting estimate.
Should I add workout calories on top of the TDEE figure?
This page's only step beyond BMR is a single multiplication, so there is no separate exercise term to add to — layering a session estimate on top of the TDEE figure double-counts against the factor already applied. To build a day from a base plus individual sessions, start from the BMR figure rather than this one.
Are my inputs sent anywhere?
No. The TDEE arithmetic happens entirely in your browser: what you type into the form stays on the page and reaches no server. The activity ladder printed in the text above is produced by that same engine at build time, which is why the rungs described in the prose and the rungs offered by the dropdown cannot disagree — if they did, the site would fail to build.
Not medical advice: this calculator provides general educational estimates from published population formulas. It cannot account for your individual health context and must not be used to diagnose or treat any condition — consult a qualified healthcare professional before changing diet or exercise, especially with any medical condition. Data is processed locally in your browser and never transmitted. See the methodology page.