Calories Burned Calculator — 2024 MET Values

Every activity uses the same arithmetic: kcal = MET × 3.5 × weight in kg ÷ 200 × minutes. The MET value is the activity’s cost relative to sitting still. Pick the activity, enter your weight and the time. Thirty minutes of brisk walking runs about 202 kcal for a 155 lb (70 kg) person.

Where the 3.5 and the 200 come from

The Compendium of Physical Activities sets one MET at 3.5 mL of oxygen per kilogram per minute — its standard placeholder for resting metabolic rate. Everything else follows from oxygen bookkeeping:

1. MET × 3.5 × your weight in kg gives milliliters of oxygen per minute.
2. Divide by 1,000 for liters per minute.
3. Burning one liter of oxygen releases roughly 5 kcal.

So kcal/min = MET × 3.5 × kg × 5 ÷ 1,000, and 5 ÷ 1,000 collapses into the ÷ 200 you see in the formula. That is the whole derivation — there is no hidden term for sex, age or height, because the method has none.

Worked example. A 176 lb (80 kg) runner at 6 mph, Compendium code 12050, MET 9.3, for 40 minutes: 9.3 × 3.5 × 80 ÷ 200 = 13.02 kcal/min, and 13.02 × 40 = 521 kcal.

The calories you would have burned anyway

This is the fair criticism of every calculator built on this formula, including the one above. It returns gross energy expenditure — the total your body spent during those minutes — not the extra cost of choosing to train. Sitting still is 1 MET, so 1 MET’s worth of the answer was going to happen regardless.

Redo the runner with the net value: (9.3 − 1) × 3.5 × 80 ÷ 200 × 40 = 465 kcal. The 56 kcal difference is the resting metabolism that was already running. On a light activity the correction bites much harder: a 2.3 MET yoga session is 85 kcal gross for 30 minutes at 70 kg but only 48 above rest, so nearly half the headline number is not attributable to the yoga.

Use gross when you want to know what your body spent. Use net — subtract 1 from the MET before you calculate — when you are trying to work out how much a workout adds on top of your total daily energy expenditure, which already counts your resting metabolism.

Thirty minutes, by activity, at 155 lb (70 kg)

Activity	MET	30 min (gross)	Above rest
Yoga, Hatha	2.3	85 kcal	48 kcal
Pilates, general	2.8	103 kcal	66 kcal
House cleaning, moderate	3.3	121 kcal	85 kcal
Weight training, 8 to 15 reps	3.5	129 kcal	92 kcal
Walking, 2.8 to 3.4 mph	3.8	140 kcal	103 kcal
Bicycling, under 10 mph	4.0	147 kcal	110 kcal
Walking, 4.0 to 4.4 mph	5.5	202 kcal	165 kcal
Weight training, vigorous	6.0	221 kcal	184 kcal
Soccer, casual	7.0	257 kcal	221 kcal
Swimming, crawl, 50 yards/min	8.0	294 kcal	257 kcal
Running, 6 mph	9.3	342 kcal	305 kcal
Jumping rope	11.0	404 kcal	368 kcal

Every column scales straight with body weight: at 125 lb (57 kg) multiply by 0.81, at 200 lb (91 kg) multiply by 1.30.

Which edition these MET values are from

The values above are the 2024 Adult Compendium, published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science and hosted at pacompendium.com. It is the third update since 1993, built from a review that screened 32,173 abstracts and extracted 2,356 energy-cost values from 701 papers; it lists 1,114 activities, 912 of them with measured rather than estimated values.

Two things about this edition change answers you may have seen elsewhere:

• It covers ages 19 to 59 only. Adults 60 and over were moved into a separate Older Adult Compendium in the same 2024 revision, because resting metabolic rate is lower in that group.
• 176 MET values changed from the 2011 edition. Sleeping went from 0.95 to 1.0. Sexual activity at moderate effort went from 1.8 to 3.0. Walking at 2.8 to 3.4 mph went from 3.5 to 3.8, and running at 6 mph came down from 9.8 to 9.3. Any calculator still quoting the 2011 numbers is off by a few percent on most activities and by two thirds on a few of them.

The full activity lists are on the Compendium’s own site; the codes this site quotes are the ones its activity pages actually use. The MET values chart collects them with the Specific Activity code for each, so you can check any value against the source.

How far off can it be

The Compendium’s authors are explicit that the tool was built for population research, not for you: it “can serve as a starting point for prescribing individual activities but does not reflect precise individual EE values.” Three known sources of error:

• The 3.5 itself. Most people’s measured resting rate is below 3.5 mL/kg/min, so dividing by 3.5 understates the activity’s true MET cost. The Compendium’s own page on corrected METs reports that the standard MET underestimates measured METs 89% of the time and puts an activity in the wrong intensity band 12.2% of the time, with the worst misses in people who are overweight, older, less fit, or women.
• Body composition. In one comparison the Compendium cites, women with obesity burned about 8% to 15% more than women without obesity at the same treadmill speeds and grades.
• The activity itself. The 2024 paper singles out water sports and live team sports — surfing, scuba, boxing, football — as the categories still hardest to measure honestly.

Treat the output as an order of magnitude that is good for comparing activities, and poor for balancing a food diary. What the number is genuinely good for is planning: how much exercise per week you need, and whether what you just did counts as moderate or vigorous.

Related tools

• MET values chart — the value for an activity that is not in the menu above
• TDEE calculator — the daily total this workout sits inside
• Daily step goal calculator if you track walking in steps
• HIIT interval calculator for structuring the interval sessions listed here at 7.0 and 11.0 METs

This content is informational and does not replace advice from a physician or an exercise professional.