TDEE Calculator
Understanding Your TDEE — and What to Do With It
Your TDEE is the total number of calories your body burns in a day — not just at rest, but including everything you do: walking, working, exercising, even digesting food. It's the most important number in nutrition because it's the baseline everything else is built on. Eat at your TDEE and your weight stays the same. Eat below it and you lose weight. Eat above it and you gain.
How to Use This Calculator
Enter your age, gender, weight, and height, then select your activity level as honestly as you can — this is the most important input and the one most people get wrong. Hit Calculate TDEE to see your maintenance calories, your BMR (what you'd burn doing absolutely nothing), and calorie targets for cutting or bulking at mild and aggressive levels.
What Is BMR vs. TDEE?
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the number of calories your body burns just to keep you alive — breathing, circulating blood, regulating temperature, and maintaining organ function. If you lay completely still in bed all day, you'd burn roughly your BMR.
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is your BMR multiplied by an activity factor that accounts for everything you actually do during the day. For most people, TDEE is 1.3–1.9× their BMR.
How the Math Works
This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the most widely validated BMR formula for the general population:
Female BMR = (10 × kg) + (6.25 × cm) − (5 × age) − 161
TDEE is then calculated by multiplying BMR by an activity multiplier:
- Sedentary (1.2) — desk job, little to no exercise
- Lightly active (1.375) — light exercise 1–3 days/week
- Moderately active (1.55) — moderate exercise 3–5 days/week
- Very active (1.725) — hard exercise 6–7 days/week
- Extra active (1.9) — physical job plus daily training
Real-World Example
Using the calculator's default values — a 30-year-old male, 175 lbs, 5'10", moderately active:
- BMR: ~1,760 calories/day
- TDEE (maintenance): ~2,728 calories/day
- Activity calories: ~968 cal/day above resting
- Mild cut (−10%): ~2,455 cal/day
- Aggressive cut (−20%): ~2,182 cal/day
- Mild bulk (+10%): ~3,001 cal/day
At a mild deficit of ~2,455 calories, this person would expect to lose roughly 0.6 lbs per week — slow and sustainable. The aggressive cut at 2,182 calories would produce about 1.1 lbs per week, which is near the upper limit of what most people can lose without significant muscle loss.
Cutting, Maintaining, and Bulking
Cutting means eating below your TDEE to lose fat. A 10% deficit is conservative and sustainable for most people. A 20% deficit is more aggressive — effective for faster results but harder to maintain and more likely to cause muscle loss if protein intake isn't kept high.
Bulking means eating above your TDEE to support muscle growth. A 10% surplus provides enough extra energy for muscle building with relatively little fat gain. A 20% surplus accelerates gains but also increases fat accumulation — often called a "dirty bulk."
Maintenance eating is useful during diet breaks, when recovering from illness or injury, or when you're happy with your current composition and just want to stay there.
Why TDEE Is an Estimate — and How to Calibrate It
No formula can perfectly predict your metabolism. Individual variation, hormones, gut microbiome, sleep quality, and stress all affect how many calories you actually burn. Most people find their real TDEE is within 10–15% of the calculated figure — but that gap matters.
The most reliable way to calibrate your TDEE: eat at the calculated maintenance number for 2–3 weeks while tracking food intake carefully and weighing yourself daily. If your weight stays the same, the estimate is accurate. If you're gaining, lower calories by 100–150. If you're losing, raise them. Let the scale — not the formula — have the final word.
NEAT: The Hidden Variable
NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis — the calories you burn through all movement that isn't formal exercise: fidgeting, walking to your car, taking the stairs, gesturing while talking. NEAT varies enormously between people (by up to 2,000 cal/day in extreme cases) and is the main reason two people with the same stats can have very different TDEEs. A naturally restless person burns far more than a naturally still one, even with identical workouts.
This is also why activity level is the most important input in this calculator — and why most people underestimate it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between BMR and TDEE?
BMR is your resting calorie burn — what you'd use lying still all day. TDEE is your actual daily burn including all movement and exercise. For most people TDEE is 30–90% higher than BMR. You should almost never eat at your BMR — it's too low to sustain normal activity and will cause muscle loss.
Which activity level should I choose?
Be honest, and when in doubt, go lower. Most people overestimate their activity level, which results in an inflated TDEE and unexpected weight gain. A desk worker who goes to the gym 3 times a week is "lightly active" at best — not "moderately active." Choose the level that describes your typical week, not your best week.
How accurate is this calculator?
The Mifflin-St Jeor formula is accurate to within ±10% for most healthy adults. It tends to overestimate for very sedentary people and underestimate for very muscular people (since muscle burns more calories than fat at rest, and the formula only uses total weight). Use it as a starting point and calibrate from there.
Should I eat back the calories I burn during exercise?
If you selected an accurate activity level that already includes your workouts, no — those calories are already baked into your TDEE. If you selected "sedentary" and then did a workout, eating back a portion of those burned calories is reasonable. The key is consistency: pick one approach and use it for several weeks before drawing conclusions.
How do I use my TDEE to lose weight?
Subtract 10–20% from your TDEE to create a calorie deficit. Track your food intake using any calorie-counting app and aim to hit that target consistently. Pair it with our macro calculator to set protein, carb, and fat targets — protein intake is especially important during a cut to preserve muscle mass.