TDEE Calculator
Calculate TDEE, BMR, BMI, calorie targets, macro plans, and a weekly zigzag cut plan. Free, fast, and private in your browser.
Estimated maintenance calories if your current activity stays the same.
Calories your body would burn at complete rest.
Included as a secondary screening metric, not a body-composition verdict.
Choose the standard or advanced path above.
Copy your calories and macro plan into notes, MyFitnessPal, or a coaching check-in.
Calorie targets by goal
Use maintenance as the anchor. Adjust slowly after 2 to 3 weeks if your weight trend does not match the plan.
| Goal | Calories | Typical pace |
|---|
Macro breakdowns
Competitor tools often stop at calories. These presets answer the next question: what could those calories look like?
Weekly zigzag cut plan
Two higher-calorie days can make a cut easier to follow while keeping the same weekly average as your standard cut target.
How to use this TDEE calculator
Start with the default Mifflin-St Jeor formula unless you have a body-fat estimate you trust. The output gives you your maintenance calories, practical cut and bulk targets, macro examples, and a weekly zigzag option built around the same average intake.
TDEE vs BMR
BMR estimates the calories required to keep you alive at complete rest. TDEE takes that baseline and multiplies it by an activity factor to estimate your total daily calorie burn. If two people have the same BMR but one walks 12,000 steps and trains 5 days per week, their TDEE will be higher.
How to choose an activity level
- Sedentary: mostly seated work, little structured exercise, low daily step count.
- Lightly active: desk job plus 1 to 3 lifting, running, or sport sessions each week.
- Moderately active: 3 to 5 solid training days or a job that keeps you moving.
- Very active: hard training most days, long practices, or a physically demanding job.
- Extra active: two-a-day training, endurance work, or heavy labor on top of exercise.
Most people overestimate here. If your maintenance calories feel surprisingly high, your activity setting is the first thing to audit.
How accurate are maintenance calories?
Treat any calculator output as a starting point. Hydration, stress, sleep, dieting history, body-composition estimates, and movement outside the gym can push real maintenance calories up or down. Track average body weight for 2 to 3 weeks, then adjust intake by about 100 to 200 calories if your trend does not match the goal you selected.
Methodology and sources
This page defaults to the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, a common evidence-based starting point for resting energy expenditure in healthy adults. If you enable body fat percentage, the calculator can switch to the Katch-McArdle formula, which estimates BMR from lean body mass. Activity multipliers follow the standard sedentary-to-extra-active convention used by major calorie and TDEE tools.
- Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals.
- Katch FI, McArdle WD. Nutrition, Weight Control, and Exercise.
Practical calorie-planning notes
A standard cut of about 500 calories per day is often enough for steady fat loss. More aggressive cuts can work short term, but they usually reduce training performance and are harder to sustain. For muscle gain, lean bulk targets often outperform large surpluses because they improve the odds that more of the weekly gain comes from muscle instead of body fat.
Frequently asked questions
Should I use Mifflin-St Jeor or Katch-McArdle? Use Mifflin-St Jeor unless you have a reasonably trustworthy body-fat estimate. Katch-McArdle can be useful for advanced lifters and leaner users because it is based on lean mass.
Can I use this as a maintenance calorie calculator? Yes. Your TDEE result is your maintenance-calorie estimate. The rest of the page simply translates that number into common cut, maintain, and bulk scenarios.
How much protein should I eat? There is no single perfect ratio, but higher-protein targets are often the easiest default during a cut. The macro cards above are examples you can customize in your tracking app rather than strict rules you must follow forever.