Maintenance Calorie Calculator

About This Calculator

What Is a Maintenance Calorie Calculator?

A maintenance calorie calculator is a simple but effective tool that helps you figure out how many calories your body needs each day just to maintain your weight. Whether you're trying to gain or lose weight, maintenance calories are the calories your body needs.

Our bodies burn calories all the time—even when we're sleeping. Your calorie needs depend on your age, height, weight, gender, and even how much you walk or exercise each day.

• Using this calorie maintenance calculator, you can:
• Easily find out your daily calorie needs
• Understand whether your current diet is meeting your body's needs

Help you maintain a healthy weight in the long term

This tool is especially useful for those who want to plan their meals or track their macros.

How to Calculate Maintenance Calories

1. To calculate maintenance calories, you first need to understand two terms:
2. BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) – the number of calories your body burns at rest

Activity Level – the amount of physical activity you do each day, which is the amount of extra calories you burn

Adding these two together gives you TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) – that is, how many calories you burn each day.

Things that come into play:

• Your age
• Are you male or female
• Weight and height
• Type of daily physical activity

If you want to calculate maintenance calories yourself, you will need to calculate BMR and multiply it by your activity multiplier. However, if you don't want to go through all this hassle, you can use our maintenance calorie calculator, which calculates this quickly and accurately.

Why Knowing Your Maintenance Calories Matters

Knowing your maintenance calories will help you stay in control of your body. It's not just for weight maintenance, but:

• It also helps you know how many fewer calories you need to eat to lose weight
• It also shows you how many extra calories you need to gain weight
• It reduces the risk of unintentionally overeating or undereating
• It makes it easier to track your macros (protein, carbs, fat)
• You can also understand whether the food you're eating is helping you meet your body goals

If you don't understand this step before losing or gaining weight, your plan can fail.

Try Our Free Maintenance Calories Calculator Tool

This maintenance calories calculator tool is very easy to use.

What inputs will be needed:

• Your age
• Gender
• Current weight
• Height

How active you are (whether you exercise or not)

What outputs will you get:

• Your maintenance calories
• Your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)

With this information, you can plan for yourself:

• How much to eat to maintain weight
• How many calories to cut to lose weight
• How many calories to increase to gain weight

You will know everything instantly.

Adjusting Calories for Weight Goals

If your goal is to lose weight, then you need to eat less than your maintenance calories—this is the calorie deficit. Usually, cutting calories by 15-20% will give good results, but it should be at a healthy level.

On the other hand, if you want to build muscle or gain weight, then you need to eat a little more calories than maintenance—this is called a calorie surplus.

Example:

• If your maintenance is 2200 calories, then you can eat between 1700–1800 calories to lose weight.
• To gain weight, you need to eat about 2500 calories.
• This way, you can tailor your diet plan to your personal goals.

Maintenance Calories vs Calorie Deficit

Many people mistake maintenance calories and calorie deficit as the same thing, but in fact they are two completely different concepts.

Maintenance Calories:

• The calories you need to maintain your current weight
• Calorie Deficit:
• Eating fewer calories than maintenance to lose weight
• Where they are used:
• If you want to maintain weight, then eat according to maintenance
• If you want to lose weight, then eat according to calorie deficit

If you want, you can use our Calorie Deficit Calculator to find out how much deficit you need according to your goals.