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 what the term means, see What Is 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.

If you would rather understand each step before trusting a number, the rest of this guide walks through the calculation piece by piece.

The TDEE formula has two parts:

TDEE = BMR × activity factor

BMR is your Basal Metabolic Rate, the calories your body would burn if you stayed in bed all day. The activity factor is a multiplier that scales BMR up to account for everything you actually do. Multiply the two and you get your TDEE in calories per day.

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 bit, and your TDEE drops with it.

BMR depends mostly on your sex, age, height, and weight. The most widely used BMR formula today is Mifflin-St Jeor:

• 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, divide by 2.2046 to convert to kilograms. If your height is in inches, multiply by 2.54 to get centimeters. The math itself is simple addition and subtraction once everything is in the same units.

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.
• Light (1.375): light exercise 1 to 3 days per week.
• Moderate (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): physically demanding job, hard daily training, or both.

Most people overestimate this number. If you sit at a desk most of the day and exercise three times a week, light 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 (about 82 kg), 5 ft 10 in (about 178 cm), with a moderate activity level.

1. BMR: 10 × 82 + 6.25 × 178 − 5 × 30 + 5 = about 1,788 calories
2. Activity factor: 1.55 (moderate)
3. TDEE: 1,788 × 1.55 = about 2,770 calories per day

If he eats around 2,770 calories per day, his weight should hold steady. Less than that, he loses slowly; more than that, he gains.

For a slow, sustainable cut, eat 250 to 500 calories below your TDEE each day. That is roughly half a pound to one pound of fat loss per week.

A bigger deficit is not always better. Aggressive cuts often backfire because hunger and fatigue make them hard to stick with, and a lot of the early scale weight is water and glycogen, not fat. 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.

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 two to three 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 weekly average rather than chasing day-to-day swings.

To build muscle, eat slightly above your TDEE. A surplus of 200 to 400 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 training plan that gets harder over time.

If you want to break those daily calories into protein, carbs, 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 two or three weeks of eating at your target, the scale will tell you whether to adjust up or down.

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.