Maintenance Calorie Calculator
The exact number of calories that keep your weight stable. Eat this much, weigh the same. Eat less, lose. Eat more, gain. Built on the Mifflin-St Jeor formula. No signup, no email.
What to eat for each goal
A few honest tips
- Track for two weeks before adjusting. Body weight bounces day-to-day from food, water, and sleep. Use a 7-day rolling average to see the real trend.
- Aggressive cuts rarely work. Going more than 25% below maintenance is hard to sustain. A 500-calorie daily deficit is the sweet spot for most people.
- Recalculate every 5-10 lbs. Maintenance drops as your body shrinks. Re-running this calculator every few weeks keeps your numbers honest.
- Protein is the lever. Aim for ~0.8-1.0 g of protein per pound of bodyweight. It preserves muscle in a cut and adds it in a bulk.
Want a full breakdown including BMR, macros, and a 12-week trajectory chart? Use the full TDEE Calculator, same math, deeper output.
How maintenance calories are calculated
Maintenance calories is just another name for TDEE, your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. It is the calories your body burns in 24 hours from every source combined: organs at rest, walking around, exercising, even digesting your food. Eat that exact amount and your weight does not change. Eat above it and the surplus is stored. Eat below and your body breaks into stored energy to make up the gap.
The math has four moving parts: BMR (about 60-70% of total burn), the thermic effect of food or TEF (about 10%), exercise activity or EAT (5-15% for most people), and non-exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT (the most variable component, anywhere from 5% to 40% depending on lifestyle). The activity multipliers in this calculator bundle EAT and NEAT into a single factor, which is why two people with the same workout schedule can still have very different real maintenance calories, the one who fidgets, takes the stairs, and walks the dog burns hundreds more calories per day than the one who sits all day after the gym.
Step 1, Calculate BMR
First we calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate, the calories your body burns at complete rest. We use Mifflin-St Jeor, the most accurate equation for the general population:
- Men: BMR = 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age + 5
- Women: BMR = 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age − 161
If you provide body fat %, we switch to Katch-McArdle, which uses lean body mass and is more accurate for athletic populations: BMR = 370 + 21.6 × lean mass (kg).
Step 2, Multiply by activity
BMR × activity multiplier = maintenance calories. The multipliers cover everyday movement (walking, fidgeting, standing) plus structured exercise:
- Sedentary (1.2): desk job, no formal exercise
- Light (1.375): office work + 1-3 light sessions a week
- Moderate (1.55): 3-5 workouts a week
- Active (1.725): 6-7 hard sessions or manual labor
- Very Active (1.9): two-a-day training, pro athletes
The biggest source of error is overestimating activity. If you have a desk job and lift three times a week, you are almost certainly Light or Moderate, not Active.
Step 3, Adjust for your goal
Once you know maintenance, the rest is simple arithmetic:
- To lose ~1 lb/week: eat 500 calories below maintenance daily
- To lose ~0.5 lb/week: eat 250 calories below
- To gain ~0.5 lb/week (lean bulk): eat 250 calories above
- To gain ~1 lb/week: eat 500 calories above
The 500-calorie figure comes from the rough equivalence that one pound of body fat stores about 3,500 calories. The math is not perfectly clean in practice (water retention, glycogen, hormonal shifts), but over a few weeks it averages out close enough to plan around.
How to verify your real maintenance
The most reliable way to find your true maintenance is empirical, not formulaic. Pick the calculator number as your starting target. Eat that number every day for 14 days, weigh yourself daily at the same time (first thing in the morning, after the bathroom, before food and water), and average the seven most recent weights at the start and end of the window. If the average has not moved more than half a pound in either direction, you found maintenance. If you gained, drop calories by 100-150. If you lost, raise them by the same amount. Repeat until the trend flatlines.
This sounds tedious, but it gets you to a real number, not a predicted one. Once you have it dialed, the rest of nutrition planning is simple subtraction and addition. Most people spend years guessing at calories; two weeks of careful tracking ends the guessing for good.
Accuracy
Predictive calorie calculators are typically within 10% of true maintenance. Two people with identical stats can have maintenance calories that differ by 200 or more. Use the calculator number as a starting point, eat it consistently for two to three weeks, and adjust if your weight is moving in an unexpected direction.
A few things that throw the prediction off: very high or very low body fat (use Katch-McArdle), unusually high NEAT (people who fidget or pace can burn 500+ extra calories without realizing it), thyroid disorders (always worth a blood test if your weight is doing something the math cannot explain), and recent dieting history (after a long aggressive cut, maintenance can be temporarily depressed by 5-10% until you reverse-diet back up).
Sources: Mifflin MD, et al. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. Am J Clin Nutr. 1990 Feb;51(2):241-7. · Hall KD, et al. Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight. Lancet. 2011.
Frequently asked questions
What are maintenance calories?
Maintenance calories are the exact number of calories you need to eat each day to keep your weight stable. Eat that amount and your weight stays the same; eat less and you lose; eat more and you gain. It is the same number as TDEE.
How do I find my maintenance calories?
The fastest way is the calculator above, a Mifflin-St Jeor estimate based on your sex, age, height, weight, and activity. The most accurate way is to track intake and weight for two to three weeks, the calorie level where your weight does not change is your true maintenance.
How many calories below maintenance to lose 1 lb a week?
About 500 calories per day. One pound of body fat stores roughly 3,500 calories, so a 500-calorie daily deficit produces about a pound of weight loss per week. For half a pound per week, eat 250 below maintenance.
Should I recalculate as my weight changes?
Yes, every 5-10 pounds of weight change. As you lose weight your body needs fewer calories to maintain (smaller body, less mass to move). Recalculate every few weeks to keep your targets honest.
Why do other calculators give different numbers?
Different sites use different BMR formulas (Harris-Benedict, Mifflin-St Jeor, Katch-McArdle, Cunningham) and different activity multipliers. Differences of 100-300 calories are normal. Pick one calculator and stick with it for consistency.
Is maintenance the same as TDEE?
Yes. Maintenance calories and TDEE are two names for the same thing, the total calories you burn in a day. We have a deeper write-up at What is TDEE.
My weight bounces a lot day-to-day, am I doing something wrong?
Probably not. Day-to-day weight fluctuations of 2-4 pounds are normal and come from water, glycogen, sodium, and gut contents, not actual fat changes. Use a 7-day rolling average instead of single-day weights. The trend matters; the daily noise does not.
Do I count exercise calories on top of maintenance?
No. The activity multiplier in this calculator already includes your typical workouts. If you ate maintenance plus your watch's calorie burn on every gym day, you would double-count and slowly gain weight. The exception is unusual activity above your norm, a 4-hour hike or a marathon prep, where you might add 200-400 calories on the day.
Does this calculator store my data?
No. All calculations happen in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, no signup is required.