TDEE Calculator: Calculate Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) represents the total number of calories your body burns in a 24-hour period. It combines BMR, NEAT, TEF, and EAT into a single daily maintenance baseline.

TDEE calculators using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation are accurate within ±10% to 15% for the general population. The largest source of error is overestimating daily physical activity.

No. Wearables often overestimate active burn by 15% to 40%. Because TDEE already factors average activity into your multiplier, eating back calories typically erases your deficit.

Your TDEE is your maintenance calorie baseline. To lose body fat, subtract 300 to 500 calories from your TDEE and eat at that daily target—this creates a deficit that forces your body to oxidize stored triglycerides. To build lean muscle, add a controlled surplus of 200 to 300 calories above your TDEE. Use our our interactive tool.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) measures the minimal caloric energy required for cellular respiration, circulation, and organ function in a resting state—essentially the calories your body burns if you lay still all day. TDEE takes your BMR and multiplies it by a Physical Activity Level (PAL) multiplier to account for digestion, occupational movement, structured exercise, and daily lifestyle exertion. Your daily calorie target must be based on TDEE, never BMR.

Yes. After age 30, resting metabolic rate declines approximately 1% to 3% per decade, primarily due to progressive sarcopenia—the natural age-related loss of skeletal muscle mass. For women, the perimenopause transition (typically ages 40 to 55) triggers an additional metabolic slowdown driven by declining estrogen, which shifts fat distribution toward visceral abdominal fat and further reduces insulin sensitivity. Women over 40 should recalculate their TDEE every 6 to 12 months and prioritize resistance training to defend their metabolically active muscle mass.

No. Most sports endocrinology studies show that wearable trackers and gym cardio machines overestimate active calorie burn by 15% to 40%. Because our TDEE calculator already factors average weekly physical activity into your activity multiplier, eating back individual workout calories on top of your TDEE typically erases your entire caloric deficit. Stick to your calculated daily TDEE-based target rather than adding back exercise numbers.

As body weight decreases, you experience a documented survival mechanism called metabolic adaptation or adaptive thermogenesis. A lighter body requires less kinetic energy to move, subconsciously reducing NEAT, while leptin and active thyroid hormone (T3) downregulate to conserve energy stores. Recalculate your TDEE every 5 to 10 pounds of weight loss. If your plateau has lasted more than two weeks, use our our interactive tool.

Select the activity tier that reflects your honest weekly average rather than your most active day. Overestimating physical activity is the single most common reason people fail to lose weight using a TDEE calculator. If you have a desk job but train 3 days per week,

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics endorses the Mifflin-St Jeor formula as the gold standard for modern healthy adults. Developed in 1990, it accounts for contemporary body composition trends far more accurately than the legacy 1919 Harris-Benedict equation, which systematically overestimates resting caloric expenditure by 5% to 15% in most adults.