TDEE Calculator — Total Daily Energy Expenditure

Total daily energy expenditure is everything your body burns in 24 hours: the resting cost of staying alive, plus digestion, plus every bit of movement. It is the number a calorie target is built on. Enter your height, weight, age and activity level — the calculator uses metric units, so 180 lb is 81.6 kg and 5 ft 10 in is 178 cm.

How the number is assembled

Two steps. First, resting metabolic rate from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which needs sex, age, weight in kilograms and height in centimeters. Then a physical activity factor on top:

Activity level	What it describes	Factor
Sedentary	desk work, no training	× 1.2
Light	light exercise 1–3 days/week	× 1.375
Moderate	moderate exercise 3–5 days/week	× 1.55
Intense	hard exercise 6–7 days/week	× 1.725
Very intense	daily heavy training or physical work	× 1.9

Worked out: a man of 35, 180 lb (81.6 kg) and 5 ft 10 in (178 cm) has a resting rate of about 1,759 kcal. On the moderate factor his total is 1,759 × 1.55 = 2,726 kcal/day. That is his break-even point: eat it and the scale holds.

The other official answer, and where it disagrees

In 2023 the National Academies rebuilt the Estimated Energy Requirement equations for the US and Canada from doubly labeled water data — the method that tracks how fast labeled water leaves the body and measures real-world expenditure directly, rather than inferring it from a multiplier. Those equations do not use a factor at all. They take sex, age, height, weight and one of four activity bands, and give kilocalories per day outright. For men aged 19 and up:

Activity band	2023 DRI equation (kcal/day)
Inactive	753.07 − (10.83 × age) + (6.50 × height) + (14.10 × weight)
Low active	581.47 − (10.83 × age) + (8.30 × height) + (14.94 × weight)
Active	1,004.82 − (10.83 × age) + (6.52 × height) + (15.91 × weight)
Very active	−517.88 − (10.83 × age) + (15.61 × height) + (19.11 × weight)

Run the same 35-year-old man through them: 2,682 kcal inactive, 2,899 low active, 3,085 active, 3,441 very active. Height in cm, weight in kg.

Now compare. The multiplier method put him at 2,726 on the moderate setting, which sits between the DRI’s low active and active bands — close enough. But at the bottom of the scale the two methods pull apart hard: × 1.2 gives 2,110, while the DRI’s inactive equation gives 2,682. That is a 570-calorie gap on the same body.

The reason is that the DRI defines inactive as any measured activity level from 1.00 up to 1.53, and its equation reflects the average person in that band, not its floor. A × 1.2 multiplier is that floor. If you pick “sedentary” here, expect the official figure to come in higher than what you see above, and read what counts as sedentary before you commit to the low number.

From expenditure to a target

• Lose weight: eat under the total. The calculator’s 20% line is a common starting deficit — see the calorie calculator for weight loss for how to size it.
• Hold steady: eat the total itself. The maintenance calorie calculator is the same number framed as a goal.
• Gain muscle: eat over it. A modest surplus does the job; the calorie calculator to gain muscle explains why a big one does not.

Why the result is a range pretending to be a number

Prediction equations were fitted to groups. Applied to one person they carry real error: the 2005 review that made Mifflin-St Jeor the default found it landed within 10% of measured resting rate in roughly seven cases out of ten — which also means three in ten missed by more than that, before any activity factor multiplies the miss.

What the equation cannot see is your actual muscle mass, your thyroid, your genetics, and how much you move without calling it exercise. So use the output as a hypothesis. Eat to it for three or four weeks, weigh yourself on the same terms each time, and let the trend correct the arithmetic. If the scale is not moving the way the number predicted, the number was wrong, not your body.

The same question, by profile

• Calorie calculator for men and for women
• Teenage calorie needs and calorie needs for older adults
• Pregnancy calorie needs and breastfeeding calorie needs
• Calorie needs for athletes, where the standard equations are known to fall short
• Activity level calculator, if you are stuck between two bands

This content is informational and does not replace advice from a physician or registered dietitian.