Find out how many calories you need daily to maintain, lose, or gain weight — based on your body and activity level.
Calculate your daily calorie needs instantly.
A calorie calculator answers one of the most common health questions: how many calories does your body actually need each day. Enter your age, height, weight, gender, and activity level, and Toolnix calculates your daily calorie target for three common goals at once—weight loss, weight maintenance, and muscle gain—using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation that dietitians widely consider the most reliable formula currently available for estimating energy needs.
The calculation happens in two distinct steps. First, the tool estimates your basal metabolic rate, which is the energy your body burns just staying alive at complete rest. Second, it multiplies that baseline figure by an activity multiplier based on how active your lifestyle actually is, ranging from sedentary desk work to intense daily training. This combined figure is called your total daily energy expenditure, and it becomes the foundation for calculating targets above or below maintenance depending on your goal.
Men: BMR = 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age + 5
Women: BMR = 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age − 161
Then multiply by activity factor (1.2 to 1.9) to get TDEE
This calculator uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which research studies have repeatedly found to be more accurate across a wider range of body types than the older Harris-Benedict formula.
Enter your age, gender, current height, and current weight to start.
Choose your activity level—from sedentary to very active—based on your typical week.
Select weight loss, maintenance, or muscle gain—then see your daily target instantly.
For weight loss, most nutrition guidelines recommend eating roughly 500 calories below your calculated maintenance level, which tends to produce a sustainable rate of loss around one pound per week without being so aggressive that it becomes hard to maintain.
For weight maintenance, the goal is simply eating at your calculated total daily energy expenditure. For muscle gain, a smaller surplus of 300 to 500 calories above maintenance is generally recommended, since a larger surplus tends to add more fat than muscle without providing additional benefit.
Your calorie needs are not fixed numbers that stay accurate forever. As your weight changes, your basal metabolic rate shifts along with it, since a lighter body generally requires fewer calories to maintain than a heavier one, and vice versa when building muscle.
Pro Tip: Recalculate every time your weight shifts by roughly 10 to 15 pounds to keep your targets accurate and prevent you from unknowingly eating well above or below what your current body actually needs.
Most people lose weight safely and sustainably by eating approximately 500 calories below their calculated maintenance level, which typically produces about one pound of loss per week.
TDEE stands for total daily energy expenditure, referring to the complete number of calories your body burns in a day once your activity level is factored in on top of your resting metabolism.
Yes, multiple nutrition studies have found it to be more accurate across a broader range of body types compared to the older Harris-Benedict formula, which is why it is now the more widely recommended standard.
Yes, a genuinely active lifestyle can raise your total daily calorie needs by several hundred calories compared to a sedentary one, which is why accurately selecting your activity level matters for a useful result.
Recalculating after every 10 to 15 pounds of weight change keeps your targets accurate, since your metabolic needs shift meaningfully as your body weight changes in either direction.
Age, height, gender, and activity level all factor into the calculation independently of weight, so two people at an identical weight can still have noticeably different calorie needs.