TDEE Calculator

Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the number of calories your body burns in a full day — everything from keeping your heart beating and your brain running to walking, working out and digesting food. Knowing this single number is the starting point for almost every nutrition plan: eat below it to lose weight, at it to hold steady, or above it to build muscle.

This calculator estimates your TDEE from your sex, age, height, weight and activity level, then shows three ready-to-use daily calorie targets — a 500-calorie cut, your maintenance figure, and a 500-calorie bulk. It uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the resting-energy formula most dietitians consider the accurate default for healthy adults.

TDEE is built in two steps. First, your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) — the energy you would burn lying still all day — is estimated with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. Then that BMR is multiplied by a physical activity level (PAL) multiplier between 1.2 and 1.9 to account for movement and exercise.

BMR (men) = 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age + 5
BMR (women) = 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age − 161
TDEE = BMR × activity factor

The three calorie targets are simple daily offsets from your TDEE: cut = TDEE − 500, maintain = TDEE, bulk = TDEE + 500. A 500-calorie daily deficit maps to roughly one pound (454 g) of body-mass change per week. If you only want the resting figure on its own, the BMR calculator breaks it out with alternative formulas, and the calorie calculator extends TDEE into full macro and meal-planning targets.

The multiplier is where most people go wrong. Choose the level that matches your whole week, not your best day — occasional gym sessions rarely justify the higher brackets. When in doubt, pick one level lower and adjust from real-world results.

For a 30-year-old man who is 175 cm and 75 kg with a moderately active routine, here is the full calculation, produced by the same engine that powers the tool above:

The three targets bracket your maintenance figure by ±500 calories. A cut creates a deficit for fat loss; maintenance holds your weight; a bulk provides the surplus energy that supports muscle growth alongside resistance training. Weight change is never perfectly linear — as you lose or gain, your BMR shifts and the body adapts — so treat these as starting points and adjust every two to four weeks based on the scale and the mirror.

To turn a target into a full plan, split it into protein, carbohydrate and fat with the calorie & macro calculator, and cross-check your weight against a healthy range with the BMI calculator.

• Mifflin-St Jeor was validated on healthy adults aged 19–78; it is less accurate for children, the elderly, and pregnant or lactating women.
• It uses total body weight rather than lean mass, so it under- or over-estimates for very muscular or very obese individuals — a body-fat-based formula fits those cases better.
• Predictive equations land within roughly ±10% of a lab measurement; individual metabolism varies, so use your own weight trend as the real feedback loop.
• The PAL multipliers are coarse buckets; true expenditure also depends on non-exercise movement (NEAT), exercise type and body composition.
• Goal calories should not drop below safe floors (about 1,200 kcal for women, 1,500 kcal for men) without professional supervision — the calculator flags a cut target that falls below this line.