TDEE Calculator
Calculate your TDEE — the total calories your body burns each day.
Enter your details to see your TDEE
Fill in age, sex, weight, and height, then pick the activity level that best matches you.
Log calories and morning weight each day. After a week or two, the numbers reveal your measured burn.
Log a few days to see your measured TDEE
Add calories and morning weight to at least 3 days. A week is enough for a rough read; two weeks lets the noise even out.
How to use this calculator
- 1
Pick a mode — Estimate or Tracker
Estimate gives you a quick number from your stats, no logging required. Tracker works out your TDEE from what you actually ate and how your weight responded, which takes a couple weeks. Switch between them at the top.
- 2
For Estimate: enter your stats and pick an activity level
Sex, age, weight, and height, then choose the activity level that best matches your week. The four options describe what each level actually looks like in daily life. Pick the one that fits. Full breakdown with examples is in the FAQ below.
- 3
For Tracker: log calories and morning weight each day
Tracker watches your intake against your weight trend and backs out the number your body is actually running on. A week gives a first signal; two weeks gives a confident read. Entries save automatically as you go. Your log lives on your device.
What is TDEE?
Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure is the total calories your body burns in a day. That covers workouts, but most of it is the burn you don't think about: breathing, digesting, walking around, the brain running in the background. Eat at TDEE to maintain weight, below it to lose, above it to gain — the starting line for any calorie-based plan.
The four components of TDEE
Calories burned at complete rest. Roughly 60–70% of TDEE for most people.
Calories burned from walking, standing, fidgeting, posture maintenance. Highly variable between individuals, and the component the constrained-energy model partially adjusts.
Calories burned from deliberate exercise: your gym sessions, runs, sports. Partially offset by reductions in other components when training volume rises.
Calories burned digesting food. Typically about 10% of total intake.
How is TDEE calculated?
Your TDEE is worked out one of two ways here, depending on the mode. Estimate predicts it from your body stats using a published equation. Tracker works it out from your own data: what you ate and how your weight responded. Most people start with Estimate.
1Pick your activity level
This is the one choice that shapes your number, so it's worth getting right. Pick the description that matches a typical week. The categories fold together how active your job is and how much you train, so you only choose once.
2The equation does the rest
With your level set, the calculator runs the NASEM 2023 equation built for that activity category and your sex, and returns your TDEE straight from your age, height, and weight. NASEM is the energy standard the US uses for its dietary guidelines, and its equations are built directly from real-world calorie-burn measurements.
Tracker skips prediction entirely. As you log daily calories and morning weight, it tracks your intake against your weight trend and works backward to the number your body is actually running on. A week gives a first signal; two weeks gives a confident read. It's the closest thing to measuring your TDEE directly.
How accurate is the result?
It's a calibrated estimate, not a measurement: expect your true burn to sit within a few hundred calories of it. That's why you get a range, not a single number. The fix isn't a better equation; it's your own data. Eat at the estimate and watch the scale for two weeks, or let Tracker work it out as you log.
Frequently asked questions
Methodology
The estimate runs on the energy-expenditure equations the National Academies published in 2023, the basis for the current US dietary guidelines. Most calculators still predict resting metabolism with a formula, then multiply it by a standard activity factor, a value tied to a broad activity band rather than one fit to your own expenditure.
The NASEM equations skip that step entirely. Each one is fit directly on doubly-labeled-water measurements of total daily expenditure, so the calculator predicts the number you actually want in a single step grounded in measurement. And because any equation's accuracy varies person to person, Tracker works out your own TDEE from your logged intake and weight instead of predicting it. Full detail on both is in the sections below.