How to Find Your Maintenance Calories

Maintenance calories are how much you can eat each day without gaining or losing weight. To find yours, start with our maintenance calorie calculator or the formula below. It works out what you burn at rest, then scales it up for how active you are. That gives you a first guess, but it can be off for you. A better way is to log what you eat for a few weeks and see what your weight does. If your weight stays level, you’ve found roughly your maintenance.

What are maintenance calories?

They’re the calories your body uses in a day. That covers keeping you alive, digesting food, and everything you do, from walking the dog to fidgeting at your desk. You’ll sometimes see it called TDEE, short for total daily energy expenditure.

If you eat about that much, your weight stays roughly the same. Eat less and you lose weight over time. Eat more and you gain.

How do you calculate maintenance calories?

Calculators usually do it in two steps.

First, they work out what you burn at rest. Many use the Mifflin-St Jeor formula, from a 1990 study that measured 498 adults:

• Women: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) - (5 × age) - 161
• Men: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) - (5 × age) + 5

If you use pounds and inches, 1 kg is 2.2 lb and 1 inch is 2.54 cm. You don’t need to do this by hand. Our maintenance calorie calculator does the same sum, in kg, lbs or stone.

Then they multiply that by a number for how active you are. Calculators don’t all use the same numbers, so results vary a little. These are the most common ones:

Activity level	Sounds like	Multiply by
Sedentary	Desk job, little to no exercise	1.2
Lightly active	Light exercise 1 to 3 days a week	1.375
Moderately active	Moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week	1.55
Very active	Hard exercise 6 to 7 days a week	1.725
Extremely active	Very hard exercise plus a physical job	1.9

These are also the numbers the Ori app and our calculator use.

Here’s an example. Take a 35-year-old woman who is 165 cm tall, weighs 70 kg and does moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week. The formula says she burns about 1,400 calories a day at rest. Multiply that by 1.55, and her maintenance comes out at about 2,150 calories a day. Putting the two together like this is a shortcut, so the answer is an estimate.

The activity level is a guess too. If she picked lightly active instead, her answer would drop by about 250 calories. It’s one reason to treat any calculator as a first guess.

There’s also a quicker rule. Harvard Health suggests multiplying your weight in pounds by 15, if you’re moderately active. It counts that as at least 30 minutes a day of things like brisk walking. If the same woman walked briskly for 30 minutes a day, that’s 154 lb × 15, or about 2,300 calories. It’s a rough rule. It grows with your weight faster than the formula does, so it can come out high for heavier people.

These formulas are for adults. If you’re under 18, ask your GP.

How accurate are maintenance calorie calculators?

They’re a useful starting point, but they can be off for you. A calculator uses two things:

What the calculator uses	Where it can go wrong
Your age, height, weight and sex	The formula is built on averages, and you might not be average.
An activity level you pick	Options like “lightly active” are vague. They also can’t capture how much you move around day to day, which varies a lot between people.

A 2005 review in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association checked the resting formulas against what people’s bodies were measured to burn. The best one, Mifflin-St Jeor (the formula above), came within 10% of the measured result more often than the others. But for some people it was still more than 10% out. The studies that tested these formulas also included few older adults or people from ethnic minority groups in the US. So the formulas may be less accurate for them.

We explain why everyday movement differs so much between people in what is NEAT.

How do I find my maintenance calories?

Try this:

1. Get a starting number from a calculator or the formula above.
2. Eat around that number for three to four weeks, and log what you eat. Cooking oil, drinks and snacks are easy to miss.
3. Weigh yourself a few times a week, at the same time of day. Then compare each week’s average, not single days.
4. If your weekly average stays flat, you’ve found roughly your maintenance.
5. If it keeps edging down, your maintenance is a bit higher. If it keeps edging up, it’s a bit lower. Change your daily amount a little and check again over the next few weeks.

Say a calculator tells Sam her maintenance is 2,200 calories. She eats around 2,200 for four weeks, and her weekly average edges down a little each week. So her maintenance is probably a bit higher than 2,200. She adds a small snack each day, and a few weeks later her weight has levelled off. That’s roughly her maintenance.

Why wait a few weeks? Your weight goes up and down every day with water, salt and food, and for many women with their period. Those swings can hide small changes. We explain more in why does your weight change so much from day to day.

Your logging doesn’t need to be perfect. Most of us miss a few things, as we found in why do I always underestimate how much I’ve eaten. The number you find is still useful, as long as you keep logging the same way.

If logging or weighing this closely feels stressful, you don’t have to. A rough idea is fine, and a GP or dietitian can help you work out what suits you.

Why do my maintenance calories change?

Because your body changes. If you lose weight, a lighter body needs less food, so your maintenance goes down. If you gain, it goes up. Your activity can change too, with a new job, a new baby or a quieter winter.

After a diet, your maintenance is usually lower than what you ate before you started. Some people work up to it slowly, which is called reverse dieting.

So check your number again once your weight has changed a fair bit. Our post on why your calorie target shouldn’t stay the same for months goes into this. A lower maintenance can also be one reason weight loss slows, as we cover in why has my weight loss stopped.

What if you’re trying to gain weight?

Use the same steps. Find your maintenance first, then eat a little more than it. If your weekly average isn’t going up after a few weeks, add a bit more and check again. If it still won’t move, see why am I not gaining weight in a calorie surplus. If you’d like an app to help, see which calorie apps help with gaining weight.

Where Ori fits

With Premium, Ori checks what you log and what your weight does each week. Then it updates your target for you, so you don’t have to do the maths. Rather not see the numbers? Stealth Health, which is free, hides calories and weight and tells you how things are going in plain words. If that sounds easier, you can try Ori here.

Related reading

• Why your calorie target shouldn’t stay the same for months
• Why has my weight loss stopped?
• What is NEAT and why does it change without you noticing?
• Why do I always underestimate how much I’ve eaten?

Sources

• Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1990.
• Harvard Health Publishing. Calorie counting made easy, 2024.
• Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C. Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults: a systematic review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2005.

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Related reading

• Reverse Dieting: What It Is and Does It Work?
• Not Gaining Weight in a Calorie Surplus?
• Why Am I Tired and Weak in a Calorie Deficit?