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Maintenance Calorie Calculator

Determine your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Secure, offline, and beautifully simple.

Your Daily Target

2,039kcal

Amount of calories needed to maintain your current weight.

BMR (Resting)
1,699 kcal
TDEE (Maintenance)
2,039 kcal
Disclaimer: This tool is intended for informational and educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The calculations provided form estimates based on standard clinical algorithms.

Everything You Need to Know About Maintenance Calories

Master your metabolism and achieve your ideal physique by understanding the numbers that drive your body.

What is a Maintenance Calorie Calculator?

Our free Maintenance Calorie Calculator is a highly accurate, 100% offline, privacy-first tool designed to help you discover exactly how many calories your body needs every day. Utilizing the scientifically backed Mifflin-St Jeor equation, this calculator determines your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and accounts for your lifestyle to calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).

Whether you are an athlete fine-tuning performance, a beginner starting a weight loss journey, or just looking to maintain a healthy lifestyle, understanding these numbers is the crucial first step. And because it runs entirely in your browser, your personal health data is never sent to a server.

What is a Maintenance Calorie Calculator?

A maintenance calorie calculator computes the number of calories you need to consume to maintain your current weight. This figure is essentially your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

Your body burns calories constantly, even while sleeping, just to keep your organs functioning. This baseline metabolic rate is known as your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). To find your maintenance calories, your BMR is multiplied by an activity factor (an estimation of how many additional calories you burn through daily movement and exercise).

How to Use this Tool

  1. Select your preferred measurement unit: Toggle between Metric (kg/cm) and Imperial (lbs/ft).
  2. Enter your basic details: Input your biological gender, age, weight, and height accurately. The formula requires these exact inputs for maximum precision.
  3. Determine your activity level: Be honest! Selecting an activity level that is too high is the most common reason people fail to calculate an accurate maintenance level. Sedentary means desktop work and little intentional exercise, whereas Extra Active implies physical labor paired with intense athletic training.
  4. Define your goal & pace: Choose if you want to lose weight, maintain, or gain weight. If losing or gaining, select an aggressive or mild pace to dynamically alter your caloric target.
  5. Review your results: Check your daily calorie target.

Weight Loss Strategy

By eating below your maintenance calories (a caloric deficit), your body is forced to use stored body fat for energy. A standard deficit is 500 calories below maintenance, aimed at losing about 1 lb (0.5 kg) per week.

Weight Gain Strategy

By eating above your maintenance calories (a caloric surplus), along with adequate protein and resistance training, you can build new muscle tissue.

Benefits of Using Our Output

  • Instant Results: Change any variable and see your new calorie limits adjust instantly in real-time.
  • Modern Algorithm: Utilizing the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, shown by research to be the most reliable formula for predicting resting energy expenditure in modern populations.
  • Ultimate Privacy: Runs 100% locally on your device. We don't store your weight, age, or goals.

Common Use Cases

People from all walks of life use maintenance calorie calculators to achieve their health goals:

  • Bodybuilders & Powerlifters: Setting up precision bulking (surplus) or cutting (deficit) phases to maximize muscle growth or fat loss.
  • Casual Dieters: Determining a realistic caloric limit to ensure sustainable, long-term weight loss without crash dieting.
  • Maintenance Tracking: Individuals who have recently achieved their goal weight and need to figure out exactly how much they can eat daily without rebounding.

4 Frequently Asked Questions About this Tool

How accurate is this calorie calculator?+
This tool uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which is widely considered by health professionals to be the most accurate standard formula for estimating Base Metabolic Rate. However, every body is unique. Consider this number your "starting point." Track your weight and caloric intake for two weeks. If the scale isn't moving as expected, manually adjust your target by 100-200 calories.
Should I recalculate as I lose weight?+
Yes! As you lose weight, your body requires less energy to function and move. You should recalculate your maintenance calories for every 5 to 10 pounds (2 to 5 kilograms) of weight loss to ensure you remain in a caloric deficit.
What if my activity level falls between two options?+
If you are unsure of your activity level, or if it fluctuates constantly, it is generally safer to choose the lower activity level, especially if your goal is weight loss. Overestimating calories burned through exercise is a common pitfall.
Why does this calculator ask for gender?+
Biological gender plays a role in body composition. Men generally have a larger proportion of lean muscle mass compared to women of the same height and weight, which naturally burns more calories at rest. The Mifflin-St Jeor equation accounts for these biological differences internally.

100% private: your data never leaves your browser

No registration, no tracking of your content, no server uploads. Don't just take our word for it:

  • No server, no uploads

    Your files and text are processed entirely on your device. Nothing is ever sent to us.

  • Works offline

    Once loaded, this tool keeps working with your Wi-Fi turned off. Try it.

  • Verify it yourself

    Open your browser's DevTools → Network tab. You'll see zero requests carrying your data.

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