How to Calculate TDEE

TDEE is short for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. It is an estimate of how many calories your body burns in a normal day, including everything from breathing and digesting food to walking around the house and going to the gym. The number depends on body size, sex, age, height, weight, and how active you are. For a longer plain-language overview of the term itself, see What Is TDEE?. For the difference between TDEE and resting calorie burn, see BMR vs TDEE.

The fastest way to get your TDEE is to use the TDEE calculator. Enter your sex, age, height, weight, and activity level, and the result is ready in a few seconds, along with calorie targets for weight loss, maintenance, and weight gain. The rest of this guide walks through the calculation piece by piece so you can see where the number comes from.

The TDEE formula has two parts. Compute BMR, then multiply by an activity factor.

The pieces work together. If you increase how active you are without changing your body size, your TDEE goes up. If you lose weight, your BMR drops a little, and your TDEE drops with it.

BMR depends mostly on your sex, age, height, and weight. The most widely used BMR equation today is Mifflin–St Jeor, which performs better than the older Harris–Benedict equation in most accuracy studies on modern adults.

• Men: BMR = 10 × weight (kg) + 6.25 × height (cm) − 5 × age + 5
• Women: BMR = 10 × weight (kg) + 6.25 × height (cm) − 5 × age − 161

If your weight is in pounds, multiply by 0.45359 to convert to kilograms (or divide by 2.2046). If your height is in inches, multiply by 2.54 to get centimeters. The math is then simple addition and subtraction.

For a quick number that handles unit conversions for you, the BMR calculator does the same calculation in one step.

Five standard activity categories cover most people. Pick the one that best describes a typical week, not your most active week.

• Sedentary (1.2): little or no exercise, mostly desk work.
• Lightly active (1.375): light exercise 1 to 3 days per week, or a job with a moderate amount of standing and walking.
• Moderately active (1.55): moderate exercise 3 to 5 days per week.
• Very active (1.725): hard exercise 6 to 7 days per week.
• Extra active (1.9): very hard exercise plus a physically demanding job.

Most people overestimate this number. If you sit at a desk most of the day and exercise three times a week, lightly active is usually a better fit than moderate.

Take the BMR from Step 1 and multiply it by the activity factor from Step 2. The result is your TDEE in calories per day. That is the number that, on average, will keep your weight roughly the same if you eat at it consistently.

Round to the nearest 10 calories. The formula is precise, but real-world calorie tracking and metabolism are not, so extra decimal places only add false confidence.

Take a 30-year-old man, 180 lb, 5 ft 10 in, with a moderate activity level. Convert the units first.

• Weight: 180 × 0.45359 ≈ 81.65 kg
• Height: 70 in × 2.54 = 177.8 cm
• Age: 30

Plug those into Mifflin–St Jeor for men:

1. BMR: 10 × 81.65 + 6.25 × 177.8 − 5 × 30 + 5 ≈ 1,783 calories
2. Activity factor: 1.55 (moderately active)
3. TDEE: 1,783 × 1.55 ≈ 2,763 calories per day

If he eats around 2,763 calories per day, his weight should hold steady. Less than that and he loses slowly; more than that and he gains. The TDEE calculator produces the same result for these inputs and rounds to the nearest whole calorie.

Maintenance is the simplest goal: eat at your TDEE. Because the number is an estimate, plan to nudge it up or down over the first month based on what your weight actually does on the scale. If your weight stays roughly the same for 2 to 3 weeks, you have your maintenance figure.

One small habit helps a lot: weigh yourself in the morning a few times a week and track the 7 to 14 day average rather than chasing day-to-day swings.

For a slow, sustainable cut, eat 250 to 500 calories below your TDEE each day. That is roughly 0.5 to 1 lb of fat loss per week for most healthy adults.

A bigger deficit is not always better. Aggressive cuts often backfire because hunger and fatigue make them hard to stick with, much of the early scale weight is water and glycogen rather than fat, and very low calorie targets should be supervised by a qualified professional. Pick a deficit you can hold for several weeks, then check in.

If you also want to see how your current weight compares to a standard healthy range for your height, the BMI calculator gives you a separate frame of reference.

To build muscle, eat slightly above your TDEE. A surplus of 250 to 500 calories per day is enough for most lifters. Larger surpluses tend to add more fat than muscle.

Pair the surplus with enough protein (most research lands around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day) and a consistent resistance-training plan that gets harder over time.

If you want to break those daily calories into protein, carb, and fat targets, the macro calculator does it in one step.

TDEE formulas are based on population averages. Two people with the same height, weight, age, and sex can still have BMRs that differ by 10 percent or more. The activity multiplier is a rough guess on top of that, because how much you actually move at a desk job versus a warehouse job is hard to capture in a single number.

Real-world results also depend on:

• Tracking accuracy. Nutrition labels and apps both have margins of error.
• Exercise intensity. The same workout done harder or longer burns different amounts.
• Muscle mass. More lean mass means a higher BMR.
• Consistency. Adherence over weeks matters more than any single day.

Treat the TDEE number as a sensible starting point. After 2 to 3 weeks of eating at your target, the scale will tell you whether to adjust up or down.

A few traps that catch people:

• Picking a higher activity level than reality. Most people overestimate. A desk job with three exercise sessions per week usually sits at lightly active, not moderate. Inflated activity inflates TDEE and any calorie targets you build from it.
• Treating TDEE as a precise number. The formula is precise; the inputs are not. Use TDEE as a starting point and adjust based on 2 to 3 weeks of weight tracking.
• Combining big deficits with hard training. Aggressive cuts (more than 500 calories per day below TDEE) often backfire through hunger, muscle loss, and poor adherence. Build muscle during a maintenance or surplus phase.
• Ignoring weekly averages. Body weight bounces around daily from water, sodium, and glycogen. Compare 7 to 14 day averages, not single-day weights.
• Forgetting to recompute. TDEE shifts as your weight, age, or activity changes. The same target a year ago may not match your current body.

TDEE is not a once-and-done number. Recompute when:

• Your body weight has changed by 10 lb (about 4.5 kg) or more.
• Your activity pattern has changed, such as a new training program, a more sedentary job, or an injury that limits exercise.
• It has been 6 to 12 months since the last calculation, even with no major changes.

TDEE is most sensitive to body weight and activity, so a stale number can drift far enough to affect your goal. The TDEE calculator runs in seconds, so rerunning it whenever you make a meaningful change is cheap insurance.

You can run the math by hand. It only takes a few minutes once you know the formula, and walking through it once is a good way to understand what the result means.

The calculator is faster:

• It converts pounds to kilograms and inches to centimeters automatically.
• It applies the right activity factor for your selection.
• It rounds the result and shows maintenance, weight-loss, and weight-gain calorie targets at the same time.

Use the TDEE calculator when you want a quick number. Reach for the manual approach when you want to see exactly where the figure comes from.