TDEE Calculator

TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure, is the term used in fitness and nutrition circles for the same number our Calorie Needs calculator calls your "maintenance calories": the total calories your body burns in a day, accounting for both your baseline metabolism and your activity level. The two calculators use the exact same Mifflin-St Jeor-based calculation and will give you the same answer for the same inputs; TDEE is simply the more technical term you'll encounter in fitness apps, bodybuilding forums, and nutrition coaching, so this page exists to meet you wherever that terminology comes from.

TDEE starts with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), the calories you'd burn lying still all day, calculated from your age, sex, height, and weight. From there, an activity multiplier scales that number up to reflect how much you move: someone sedentary might only add 20% on top of BMR, while someone very active could nearly double it. The result is the number most people mean when they talk about their "maintenance calories" or "TDEE" interchangeably.

Knowing your TDEE is the starting point for most structured nutrition goals. Eating at your TDEE maintains your current weight; eating in a deficit below it, commonly 500 calories a day for roughly a pound of loss per week, leads to weight loss over time; eating in a surplus above it supports weight or muscle gain. Because TDEE is an estimate rather than a lab-measured number, it's normal to need small adjustments after a few weeks of tracking actual results against the prediction.

If you're comparing this number elsewhere, or just prefer the term "maintenance calories," our Calorie Needs calculator covers identical ground with the same inputs and formula.