TDEE Calculator

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is the total number of calories you burn in a day — everything from keeping you alive at rest to walking, training and digesting your food. It is the most useful single number for planning a diet, because eating around your TDEE keeps your weight steady. Everything else — losing, gaining — is just a step above or below it. Enter your details in metric or imperial units and the calculator converts them and does both steps for you.

How TDEE is calculated

TDEE starts with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) — the calories you burn at rest, from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation — and multiplies it by an activity factor:

Activity level	Factor
Sedentary (little or no exercise)	1.2
Light (1–3 days/week)	1.375
Moderate (3–5 days/week)	1.55
Active (6–7 days/week)	1.725
Very active (hard exercise or physical job)	1.9

So a person with a BMR of 1,780 kcal who trains moderately has a TDEE of about 1,780 × 1.55 = 2,759 kcal/day. If you want to see the first step on its own, the BMR calculator shows how that resting number is built.

The four parts of your daily burn

Your TDEE is not one thing — it is four, and seeing the split makes the activity multiplier make sense:

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) — the calories that keep you alive at rest. The big one, usually 60–70% of the total.
• Thermic effect of food (TEF) — the energy spent digesting and absorbing meals, around 10%. Protein costs the most to process, one reason higher-protein diets feel more filling.
• Non-exercise activity (NEAT) — everything you burn moving that isn’t deliberate exercise: walking, fidgeting, standing, chores. This varies enormously between people and is the main reason two similar bodies can have very different needs.
• Exercise activity (EAT) — the calories from actual workouts. For most people this is smaller than they expect, which is why “I trained today” rarely earns a large extra meal.

The activity factor rolls TEF, NEAT and exercise into one number on top of your BMR. That is why an honest activity level matters more than the exact BMR digits.

Choosing your activity level

This is where most people go wrong, almost always by aiming too high. If you sit between two levels, pick the lower one — it is far easier to add calories when the scale won’t move than to claw them back after weeks of feeding a workout that wasn’t really there. When in doubt, “moderate” is a safer guess than “very active” for anyone who isn’t training hard most days.

Using your TDEE for weight loss or gain

• Maintain weight: eat at your TDEE.
• Lose weight: eat below it — a 500 kcal/day deficit is about 0.5 kg (1 lb) a week.
• Gain weight or muscle: eat above it, ideally alongside resistance training.

Your TDEE is the anchor for all of it. To turn a target into meals, the calorie calculator applies the deficit or surplus for you, and the macro calculator splits it into protein, carbs and fat. Treat the multiplier as an estimate, then let two to three weeks of weight data fine-tune it.