Maintenance Calorie Calculator: Find Your TDEE Free

You’ve been eating “about the same” for three weeks and the scale hasn’t moved — or it’s crept up half a kilo despite feeling like you’re doing everything right. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: “about the same” isn’t a number, and the number you actually need is your maintenance calories, not a guess.

Your maintenance calories (also called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, or TDEE) are the exact amount of energy your body burns in a day: breathing, digesting, walking to the kitchen, your workout, all of it combined. Eat above that number consistently and you gain weight. Eat below it and you lose. Eat close to it and your weight holds steady. The calculator below gives you a real starting estimate in under a minute, and the rest of this guide shows you what to actually do with the number once you have it.

What “maintenance calories” really means

Your total daily burn is made up of four pieces, and most people only think about one of them (exercise):

Basal metabolic rate (BMR) — the energy your organs burn just keeping you alive, even in a coma. This is usually 60–70% of your total burn.
The thermic effect of food — the energy it takes to digest what you eat, roughly 10% of your intake, slightly higher for protein than for fat or carbs.
Exercise activity — intentional workouts, sports, structured training.
NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) — fidgeting, standing, taking the stairs, pacing while on the phone. For a lot of people this quietly burns more than their actual workout does.

Add those four together and you get your maintenance number. It genuinely varies from under 1,400 calories a day for a smaller, sedentary, older adult to well over 3,000 for a large, very active young man — which is exactly why a one-size-fits-all “eat 1,500 calories” plan you saw on social media so often fails. It was never calculated for your body in the first place. If you want a number built around your actual output rather than someone else’s, my 4-Week Weight Loss Planner walks you through turning this calculation into a day-by-day plan instead of leaving you with just a number and no next step.

Accurate maintenance calorie calculator

Enter your gender, age, height, weight, and activity level below and it will estimate the number of calories your body needs each day to hold your current weight steady.

Maintenance Calorie Calculator

Are you looking to maintain your weight or work toward a weight loss goal? Monitoring your calorie intake against a real number, instead of a guess, is one of the most reliable levers you have.

What formula is this calculator actually using?

This tool runs on the revised Harris-Benedict equation, the same formula hospitals and dietitians used for decades to estimate basal metabolic rate from your weight, height, age, and sex. It’s a solid, well-tested estimate. Worth knowing, though: most nutrition science today leans toward the newer Mifflin-St Jeor equation as the more accurate default for otherwise healthy adults, since it tends to land closer to a person’s measured metabolic rate than the older Harris-Benedict version. The two formulas usually land within 50–100 calories of each other, which is small compared to the natural day-to-day swing in how much you actually move, but if you want the current gold-standard number, look for a calculator that specifically labels itself Mifflin-St Jeor.

How to calculate maintenance calories, step by step

Enter your gender, age, height, and current weight into the calculator above.
Pick the activity level that matches your real week, not your best week or your intended week. Be honest — this is the step most people get wrong.
Click “Calculate” to get your estimated daily maintenance calories.
Track your actual intake against that number for two weeks while weighing yourself under the same conditions each morning, then adjust — more on that below.

Here’s what that looks like with real numbers: a 34-year-old woman, 165 cm tall, 70 kg, who works a desk job and walks her dog twice a day (lightly active) comes out to roughly 1,970 calories a day to maintain her current weight. If she wants to lose about half a kilo a week, she’d eat closer to 1,500–1,600 — not 1,200, which is the number most fad plans hand out regardless of who’s reading them.

Keep in mind that any calculator, including this one, gives you an estimate, not a lab measurement. Genetics, muscle mass, thyroid function, and even how much you slept last night can shift your real number by a couple hundred calories in either direction. Use it as your starting point, then let two to three weeks of real-world data correct it.

Check out more calculators:

TDEE calculator: what the activity levels actually mean

Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure is your BMR multiplied by an activity factor. Here’s what each setting on the calculator is assuming about your week:

Sedentary (×1.2): little to no exercise, mostly sitting through the day.
Lightly active (×1.375): light exercise or sports 1–3 days a week.
Moderately active (×1.55): moderate exercise or sports 3–5 days a week.
Very active (×1.725): hard exercise or sports 6–7 days a week.
Extra active (×1.9): very hard training, or a physically demanding job on top of daily exercise.

The CDC’s own energy requirement tables use a similar approach, applying a physical activity coefficient on top of a base metabolic estimate, and note that activity typically accounts for 20–30% of total energy expenditure in most adults — which tells you something important: your workout matters, but it’s rarely the biggest lever available to you. The other 70–80% is decided by biology and by how much you move outside the gym.

If you want a second calculator built specifically around goal-setting rather than just the raw TDEE number, my TDEE Calculator for Weight Loss, Maintenance & Muscle Gain breaks the same formula down by goal.

Turning your maintenance number into an actual plan

Once you know your maintenance calories, the plan is simple math, even if sticking to it isn’t: eat below that number to lose weight, above it to gain, at it to hold steady. A moderate, sustainable deficit of 300–500 calories a day typically produces about 0.25–0.5 kg (roughly 0.5–1 lb) of weight loss per week for most people — not the 2 kg a week some detox or “reset” programs promise.

Here’s a piece of current nutrition science worth knowing: the old “3,500 calories equals one pound of fat” rule that’s repeated everywhere is now considered an oversimplification. Researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) point out that static rules like this “fail to account for slowing of metabolism as weight is lost,” which is exactly why people who stick to their diet on paper often lose less than the math predicted. Your metabolism adapts downward as you lose weight, so the deficit that worked in week one needs to be revisited by week six. A 2025 analysis published in Frontiers in Nutrition found that the size of this metabolic slowdown even varies depending on which prediction equation you use to estimate it in the first place — another reason to treat any single calculator number as a starting estimate you recheck, not a fixed constant.

In practice, that means recalculating your maintenance number every 4–6 weeks or after every 4–5 kg lost, rather than eating the exact same calorie target for months on end. If you’d rather follow a structure that already builds in these check-ins instead of tracking it yourself from scratch, that’s the exact gap my 4-Week Weight Loss Planner is built to close.

📋 Stop guessing your calorie target every week

The 4-Week Weight Loss Planner walks you through exactly how to turn your maintenance number into a day-by-day plan — including when to recalculate as your weight changes, so you’re never stuck on a stale number.

Get the Planner — $5 →

Common mistakes that throw the number off

A few habits quietly sabotage even a correctly calculated maintenance number:

Rounding down on activity level. Picking “moderately active” because you’d like to be, rather than because your last two weeks actually looked like that.
Not counting drinks, sauces, and bites off someone else’s plate. These routinely add 200–400 uncounted calories a day.
Weighing yourself inconsistently. Water retention from sodium, hormones, or a hard workout can hide or exaggerate real fat loss for days at a time.
Eating the identical number every single day. Some people do better cycling slightly higher and lower intake across the week rather than a flat daily target — if that’s you, it’s worth reading how calorie cycling actually works before assuming a flat number is the only option.
Never recalculating. Your maintenance number at 90 kg is not your maintenance number at 78 kg.

Does it matter which foods make up your calories?

Your maintenance number doesn’t care whether those calories come from grilled chicken or gummy bears — a calorie is a calorie for the purposes of the math. But what you eat absolutely changes how easy that number is to hit and stick to. Mayo Clinic notes that protein “keeps you feeling full longer, helping to reduce overall calorie intake and curb cravings,” and that higher protein intake “helps preserve lean muscle mass while you lose fat, supporting a healthier metabolism over time.” Their higher-protein plans generally land around 1.2–1.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day.

In practice, that means two people can hit the exact same 1,800-calorie target and have very different experiences of it. One builds meals around lean protein, vegetables, and fiber and feels satisfied; the other spends the number on foods that digest fast and leave them hungry by mid-afternoon. If you’re cutting calories, front-loading protein at breakfast and lunch is one of the simplest ways to make the deficit feel smaller than it is.

What to do when the scale stalls at your “right” number

You did the math, you hit your target most days, and three weeks in, nothing’s moved. Before you assume the calculator was wrong, check these first:

Water retention is masking fat loss. Sodium, your menstrual cycle, stress, and even a new strength-training routine can hold onto 1–2 kg of water for a week or more while fat is still coming off underneath it.
NEAT has quietly dropped. People often move less without noticing once they’re in a deficit — more sitting, shorter walks, fidgeting less — which eats into the exact gap the diet created.
Portions have crept up. A “cup” of rice eyeballed after a long day is rarely an actual cup. Re-measuring for a few days often reveals a 100–300 calorie gap that wasn’t there when you started.
Your maintenance number actually dropped. This is the metabolic adaptation covered above — after losing weight, your old deficit may now just be your new maintenance. Recalculate rather than cutting further right away.

If everything above checks out and the stall continues past 3–4 weeks, a short “diet break” of one to two weeks eating at your newly recalculated maintenance level, before resuming a deficit, is a well-recognized way to reduce the psychological fatigue of dieting and let hunger hormones partially reset, rather than pushing your calories lower and lower with diminishing returns.

Two metabolism myths that don’t change your number

Before you overhaul your meal timing chasing a “metabolism boost,” it’s worth knowing what the research actually shows, according to the International Food Information Council:

Eating six small meals instead of three larger ones doesn’t burn more calories overall. Digesting food does raise your metabolic rate slightly (the thermic effect of food), but “the temporary boost in our metabolic rates is directly proportional to how much and what types of foods we eat” — six small bumps and three bigger ones add up to roughly the same total. The 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee found no solid evidence linking meal frequency itself to body composition.
Eating late at night doesn’t automatically slow your metabolism or cause weight gain. What matters for your maintenance number is your total intake across the day (and, over time, the week), not the clock. If a later dinner is what makes your calorie target sustainable, it isn’t working against you.

In other words: hit your number, structure your meals in whatever pattern you’ll actually stick to, and don’t spend energy optimizing meal timing before you’ve nailed the calorie total itself.

Frequently asked questions

Is TDEE the same thing as maintenance calories?

Yes. TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) and “maintenance calories” describe the same number: what it takes to keep your weight exactly where it is.

How accurate are online calorie calculators?

Reasonably accurate as a starting point — typically within 10–15% of your real number — but never exact. They can’t see your muscle mass, thyroid function, genetics, or sleep quality, all of which shift metabolism. Treat the result as a first estimate to test and adjust, not a final answer.

Should low-calorie foods factor into hitting my number?

They make it easier to stay under your target without feeling deprived, since you can eat a larger volume of food for the same calories. A list like these low-calorie foods that keep you full is a good place to start building meals around.

Why do two people the same age, height, and weight get different numbers?

Body composition. Muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue does, so a more muscular person will have a genuinely higher BMR than a less muscular person of identical weight, even though the calculator can’t see that difference from the inputs alone. This is part of why strength training is worth keeping in your routine even during a calorie deficit — it protects the very tissue that’s driving your number upward.

Do I need to eat less as I get older?

Generally yes. Muscle mass and activity both tend to decline with age, which lowers BMR, so recalculating every few years (not just after weight changes) keeps the number honest.

Does exercise let me eat more and still lose weight?

Yes, but be cautious about how much credit you give it. Fitness trackers and gym machines routinely overestimate calories burned during a workout by a wide margin, and it’s easy to “eat back” more than you actually earned. Treat exercise as a way to raise your baseline slightly and improve body composition, not as a license to double your food intake.

I’m on Ozempic, Wegovy, or another GLP-1 medication — does maintenance calories still apply?

The underlying math still holds, but GLP-1 medications suppress appetite so strongly that many people fall well under their maintenance number without trying, which raises its own risk of losing muscle along with fat if protein intake isn’t deliberately prioritized. If that’s your situation, the calculator above is still useful for knowing where your true maintenance sits, but the day-to-day eating strategy looks different enough that it deserves its own plan rather than a generic calorie target.

If you’re pregnant, breastfeeding, managing a chronic condition, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to your doctor before deliberately eating below your maintenance number — a calculator can’t account for medical needs that override the general math above.