Free TDEE Calculator
Find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure — the exact number of calories your body burns every day based on your size and activity level.
Calculate Your TDEE
Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
—
calories/day at rest
Your TDEE at All Activity Levels
What is TDEE?
TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure — the total number of calories your body burns in a 24-hour period. It accounts for everything: your resting metabolism, the energy cost of digesting food, daily movement, and structured exercise.
Think of TDEE as your personal calorie budget. It's the single most important number in nutrition because it determines whether you gain weight, lose weight, or stay the same. Eat below your TDEE and you lose weight. Eat above it and you gain. Eat at it and you maintain.
TDEE is calculated by first finding your BMR (the calories you'd burn lying completely still all day), then multiplying by an activity factor that reflects your actual lifestyle.
TDEE = BMR × Activity Factor
Your BMR is the base, your activity multiplies it to reflect how much you actually move throughout the day.
4 Components of TDEE
- BMR: ~60-70% of TDEE — resting energy
- NEAT: ~15-30% — non-exercise movement
- EAT: ~5-10% — structured exercise
- TEF: ~10% — digesting food
How to Use Your TDEE
Fat Loss (Cutting)
Eat 300-500 calories below your TDEE per day. A 500 calorie daily deficit creates a 3,500 calorie weekly deficit, which equals approximately 1 pound of fat loss per week.
Maintenance
Eat at your TDEE to maintain your current weight. This is ideal when you want to build strength without significant body composition changes, or during a diet break.
Muscle Gain (Bulking)
Eat 250-500 calories above your TDEE. A smaller surplus (lean bulk) minimizes fat gain while still providing energy for muscle growth. Most beginners can build muscle on just +200-300 cal.
Why TDEE is an Estimate
No formula can perfectly predict how many calories your body burns — there are simply too many individual variables. Two people with identical stats and activity levels can have metabolisms that differ by 200-300 calories per day due to genetics, hormones, gut microbiome composition, and years of dieting history.
Metabolic adaptation is another key factor. When you consistently eat below your TDEE, your body responds by lowering its metabolic rate. It becomes more efficient, meaning the same TDEE calculation will overestimate your actual caloric needs after weeks of dieting.
The right way to use your TDEE: treat it as a starting point. Track your weight for 2-3 weeks while eating at your calculated TDEE. If your weight is consistently rising, reduce by 100-150 calories. If it's consistently falling, increase by the same amount.
Factors That Affect TDEE Accuracy
- Muscle mass: More muscle = higher BMR (muscle burns ~6 cal/lb/day at rest)
- NEAT variation: Fidgeting, posture, and spontaneous movement vary enormously between people
- Hormones: Thyroid, testosterone, and cortisol all impact metabolism
- Diet history: Chronic dieting can lower adaptive thermogenesis
- Sleep: Poor sleep increases hunger hormones and reduces metabolic rate
Activity Level Guide
Choosing the right activity level is the most common source of error in TDEE calculations. Most people overestimate their activity. When in doubt, choose the lower level and adjust based on real-world results.
Sedentary
You have a desk job or spend most of your day sitting. You do little to no planned exercise. This is appropriate if your total daily step count is typically under 5,000 steps and you don't work out regularly.
Lightly Active
You exercise 1-3 days per week with light to moderate intensity (walking, casual cycling, light yoga). Your daily step count is typically 5,000-7,500. Most "I go to the gym a couple times a week" people fall here.
Moderately Active
You exercise 3-5 days per week with moderate to hard intensity (weight training, running, cycling). Daily step count is typically 7,500-10,000. This is appropriate for most consistent gym-goers with a non-physical job.
Very Active
You exercise hard 6-7 days per week, often with double training sessions, or you have a physically active job (construction, landscaping) plus regular gym sessions. Daily step count exceeds 10,000.
Extra Active
This level is reserved for professional athletes in training, military personnel in active service, or people with extremely demanding physical jobs combined with hard daily exercise. Very few people genuinely qualify for this category.
Related Calculators
BMR Calculator
Find your Basal Metabolic Rate — the calories your body needs at complete rest.
Try it →Macro Calculator
Turn your TDEE into precise protein, carb, and fat targets for your goal.
Try it →Calorie Deficit Calculator
Calculate the exact deficit you need to reach your goal weight by a target date.
Try it →Frequently Asked Questions
There's no universally "good" TDEE — it depends entirely on your body size and activity level. For reference, sedentary adult women typically have TDEEs between 1,600-2,000 calories, while sedentary adult men range from 2,000-2,500 calories. Active individuals can have TDEEs of 2,800-4,000+ calories. What matters is knowing your specific number so you can use it as a baseline for your nutrition goals.
Recalculate your TDEE whenever your weight changes by 10+ pounds, your activity level changes significantly, or after 3-4 months of consistent dieting (due to metabolic adaptation). If you've lost 20 pounds, your new body burns fewer calories at rest, so your old TDEE is no longer accurate. Many people plateau on a diet because they don't update their numbers as they lose weight.
Different calculators use different BMR formulas (Mifflin-St Jeor, Harris-Benedict, Katch-McArdle, etc.) and different activity multipliers. This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which is considered the most accurate for general use by most nutrition researchers. Small differences between calculators (50-150 calories) are normal and within the margin of error for any formula-based estimate.
Yes — and significantly. TDEE changes as you age (BMR naturally decreases about 2-3% per decade after age 30), as your body weight changes, as you gain or lose muscle mass, and in response to diet history. Short-term caloric restriction can lower TDEE by 10-15% through adaptive thermogenesis. This is why dieters often need to periodically increase calories (diet breaks) to "reset" their metabolism after prolonged cuts.
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is the number of calories your body needs to sustain basic life functions — breathing, circulation, cell repair — if you were lying completely still in a temperature-controlled room for 24 hours. It does not account for any movement or food digestion. TDEE is your BMR multiplied by an activity factor, and represents how many calories you actually burn in a real day. TDEE is always higher than BMR — typically 20-100% higher depending on how active you are.