Calories Burned Calculator

What Is Calories Burned?

“Calories burned” is shorthand for energy expenditure: the kilocalories your body converts to heat and movement over a defined stretch of activity. Nobody outside a metabolic laboratory measures it directly. Every fitness app, treadmill console and calculator on the subject is estimating instead, and calculators like this one estimate from a table of intensity values called the Compendium of Physical Activities. Devices worn on the body work from something else — motion, heart rate and a stored profile — which is part of why a watch and a calculator rarely agree.

That shared table is why a brisk half-hour walk comes back at a familiar-looking number from one calculator to the next. It is also why the answers differ by less than people expect between sites, and by more than people expect from what the body in question really spent.

What a MET Actually Measures

One MET is the energy cost of sitting quietly, fixed by convention at 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute — about 1 kilocalorie per kilogram per hour. Every other activity is expressed as a multiple of it. An activity rated 8 METs is, by definition, eight times as costly per minute as sitting still.

The dropdown here spans 2.5 METs to 11.8. That range maps onto the intensity language public-health guidance uses, where roughly 3 to 6 METs counts as moderate and anything above 6 counts as vigorous:

The NHS offers a check that needs no numbers: at moderate intensity you can still talk but not sing; at vigorous intensity you cannot say more than a few words without pausing for breath. If the activity you picked felt easier or harder than that description, the MET attached to it is the wrong one for the session you actually did.

Note the gaps in the ladder. Nothing in this list sits between 6.0 and 8.0 METs, so a hard hike or an easy jog has to be rounded to one side or the other. That rounding is worth more calories than most people assume — at 160 lb and 30 minutes, the step from hiking at 6.0 to cycling at 8.0 is 76 kcal.

Gross Calories and Net Calories

The figure this tool returns is gross. It counts every calorie spent during the session, including the resting metabolism that would have ticked over anyway had you stayed on the sofa. Net calories — the extra your body spent because you moved — subtract that baseline, and they are the honest figure for anyone doing calorie arithmetic:

The gap widens as intensity falls and duration rises. On the running row the resting share is a tenth of the total and barely matters; on the yoga row it is two-fifths, and treating 191 kcal as calories earned would be a serious overcount.

One caveat on the subtraction itself. It removes a full 1 MET, and 1 MET is generous: Byrne and colleagues measured 769 healthy adults and found actual resting energy expenditure averaged 0.84 kcal per kilogram per hour, so the conventional 1 kcal figure overstates rest by about 20 percent. The net column is therefore a slight undercount of the true extra — small next to the ±20 percent the MET value itself carries.

What Actually Moves the Number

Three inputs, and the equation treats two of them as strictly proportional. Double your weight and the answer doubles; double the minutes and it doubles again. Only the activity choice can multiply the result several times over:

• Body weight, brisk walk, 30 minutes: 123 kcal at 120 lb, 164 at 160 lb, 205 at 200 lb, 256 at 250 lb — a straight line through every value.
• Duration, running 6 mph at 160 lb: 124 kcal for 10 minutes, 373 for 30, 747 for 60, 1,120 for 90.
• Activity, 30 minutes at 160 lb: 95 kcal for yoga, 450 for jump rope. The same half hour, the same body, 4.7 times the energy.

This is why the honest answer to “which exercise burns the most calories” is rarely the one people want. Jump rope shares the top of the per-minute table, but very few people rope for an hour; cycling at a moderate 8 METs does not top it, yet an hour of cycling returns 610 kcal at 160 lb against 450 for half an hour of rope work. Total burn is intensity multiplied by the duration you can actually sustain, and the second term usually wins.

Exercise is one slice of the day's energy budget, and typically a smaller slice than resting metabolism. To see the whole picture, including the resting burn this page keeps subtracting, use the TDEE Calculator.

How Do You Calculate Calories Burned?

One equation covers all fifteen activities. Only the MET value changes between them, which means you can reproduce every figure on this page with a phone calculator and the MET table further down.

The Calories Burned Formula

The MET equation, in the form this calculator runs:

kcal per minute = MET × 3.5 × weight in kg ÷ 200

calories burned = kcal per minute × minutes

hourly rate = kcal per minute × 60

Three terms and a constant. The MET comes from the activity you selected. Weight must be in kilograms, so a pound entry is multiplied by 0.45359237 first. The 200 is a unit conversion rather than a fudge factor, and the next subsection unpacks it.

Nothing in the equation knows about your age, sex, height, fitness, or the terrain. Two people of identical weight doing the same activity for the same time get identical answers here, which is both the equation's convenience and its main weakness.

Where the 3.5 and the 200 Come From

The 3.5 is the MET definition itself: 3.5 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram per minute. The 200 falls out of converting oxygen consumption into kilocalories.

3.5 mL O₂ per kg per min × weight in kg  →  mL of oxygen per minute
÷ 1,000                                 →  liters of oxygen per minute
× 5 kcal per liter of oxygen            →  kcal per minute

1,000 ÷ 5 = 200, so those two steps collapse into a single ÷ 200

Five kilocalories per liter of oxygen is the standard energy equivalent used across exercise physiology for a mixed diet. Fold it into the division and you get the ÷ 200 that appears in every version of this formula.

A detail worth knowing, because it explains a discrepancy readers sometimes spot: run 1 MET through this equation for an hour and you get 1.05 kcal per kilogram, not the 1.0 of the textbook shorthand. For a 73-kg body that is 76 kcal an hour of notional resting burn rather than 73. The shorthand rounds; the equation does not.

That 5 percent is baked into every number this page quotes, and into every other MET calculator you will meet, because they all use the same ÷ 200.

Step by Step

To work an estimate by hand, or to check what the tool returned:

• Find the MET value for your activity. The dropdown prints it beside each name, from 2.5 for hatha yoga up to 11.8 for jump rope and 8 mph running.
• Convert your weight to kilograms if it is not already there — pounds × 0.45359237, or divide by 2.2046 for a close-enough shortcut.
• Multiply MET × 3.5 × kilograms, then divide by 200. That is your rate in kilocalories per minute.
• Multiply by the minutes you exercised for the session total, or by 60 for the hourly rate.
• Subtract the resting share — kilograms × 0.0175 per minute — if you want the net extra rather than the gross figure.

The fifth step is the one calculators skip, this one included. It is the difference between 373 and 335 on a half-hour run, and it grows with every low-intensity minute you log.

Worked Example: Running 6 mph, 160 lb, 30 Minutes

Select “Running 6 mph (9.8 MET)”, leave the unit on Pounds, enter 160 and 30, then press Calculate.

160 lb × 0.45359237 = 72.57 kg
9.8 × 3.5 × 72.57 ÷ 200 = 12.45 kcal per minute
12.45 × 30 = 373 kcal
12.45 × 60 = 747 kcal per hour

Result panel, hero line

373 kcal

Beneath the hero the panel prints three more lines. First the arithmetic: “Running, 6 mph (10 min/mi) — 9.8 METs × 30 min at 73 kg”. Then the rate, “Rate: ≈ 747 kcal/hour (9.8× your resting burn)”. Then a standing caveat about Compendium averages. The kilogram figure in that middle line is rounded to a whole number for display — 73, not 72.57 — while the calculation itself uses the unrounded value.

It takes 9.4 of those runs to reach 3,500 kilocalories, the conventional energy content of a pound of body tissue. Counting net calories instead of gross, it takes 10.4.

Worked Example: A 45-Minute Brisk Walk at 180 lb

Heavier body, gentler activity, longer session. Choose “Walking, brisk (4.3 MET)”, Pounds, 180, 45.

180 lb × 0.45359237 = 81.65 kg
4.3 × 3.5 × 81.65 ÷ 200 = 6.14 kcal per minute
6.14 × 45 = 276 kcal
6.14 × 60 = 369 kcal per hour

Result panel, hero line

276 kcal

The panel's second line reads “Walking, brisk (3.5–4 mph) — 4.3 METs × 45 min at 82 kg”, which is where the activity's assumed pace becomes visible. The dropdown says only “brisk”; the calculation assumes 3.5 to 4 mph, roughly a 16-minute mile. The casual option beside it assumes 2.8 mph and returns 193 kcal for the same 45 minutes, so the two walking entries sit 83 kcal apart on this session.

Fifteen minutes longer than the running example, at 44 percent of its intensity, and the walk still lands within 100 kcal of the run. The equation trades the two off exactly: at 180 lb, 45 minutes at 4.3 METs and 19.7 minutes at 9.8 both return 276 kcal.

Worked Example in Kilograms: 40 Minutes of Lap Swimming

Switch the Weight Unit control to Kilograms and the conversion step disappears — the number you type goes straight into the equation. Pick “Swimming laps (5.8 MET)”, Kilograms, 70, 40.

5.8 × 3.5 × 70 ÷ 200 = 7.105 kcal per minute
7.105 × 40 = 284 kcal
7.105 × 60 = 426 kcal per hour

Result panel, hero line

284 kcal

The breakdown line confirms that no conversion happened: “Swimming laps, moderate — 5.8 METs × 40 min at 70 kg”. Entering 70 with Pounds selected instead produces 129 kcal, because 70 lb is 31.75 kg. Nothing in the result flags that as a mistake — 129 kcal reads like an ordinary answer for 40 minutes in the pool, and the kilogram figure on the breakdown line is the only tell.

Swimming is also where the Compendium's single value hides the most variation. The entry behind 5.8 METs is slow recreational freestyle; the same source rates fast, vigorous freestyle at 9.8, which would take this session to 480 kcal. Neither figure is reachable from a dropdown that offers one swimming option.

Calories Burned Chart by Activity and Weight

Every figure in the four tables below came out of this page's own calculator, so you can reproduce any of them by entering the stated activity, weight and duration.

Calories Burned in 30 Minutes

All fifteen activities at four body weights, sorted from lightest effort to hardest:

Three activities share the 8.0 MET rating and therefore share a row of numbers — cycling, circuit training and a basketball game are indistinguishable to this equation. Jump rope and 8 mph running are likewise identical twins at 11.8. Where two activities carry the same MET, the calculator has no way to tell them apart, and neither does any other tool built on the same table.

Reading across rather than down: the 220-lb column runs about 69 percent above the 130-lb column on every row, because weight enters the equation as a straight multiplier and nothing else in it varies with body size.

Calories Burned Per Hour

The hourly rate is the figure the result panel reports on its third line, and it is the fair basis for comparing activities. At 160 lb:

For any other body weight, scale these by weight ÷ 160. A 200-lb person multiplies by 1.25; a 130-lb person by 0.8125. The proportionality is exact rather than approximate, because weight appears once in the equation and nowhere else.

It is also a rate you may never spend a full hour at. The panel quotes it for every activity, jump rope at 899 kcal an hour included, which is an arithmetical extrapolation from a fifteen-minute reality for most people.

How Long It Takes to Burn 300 Calories

A useful way to feel the intensity scale. Enter these durations at 160 lb and the tool returns something close to 300 kcal — the third column is what it actually prints, since whole minutes rarely land on a round number:

Twenty minutes against ninety-four for the same 300 kilocalories: that is the argument for intensity in one line. It is also the argument against it, because the twenty-minute option is a 7.5-minute-mile pace or an unbroken twenty minutes of rope, and the ninety-four-minute one is a yoga class.

Heavier bodies reach 300 sooner and lighter bodies later, in exact proportion. At 200 lb every duration in this table shortens by a fifth; at 130 lb it stretches by about a quarter.

Calories Burned Per Mile and Per 10,000 Steps

There is no distance field on this calculator — it works in minutes only. To get a per-mile figure you convert the distance to time first, using the pace each activity's Compendium entry assumes. At 160 lb:

Running a mile costs 112 to 126 kcal for this body whichever of the three paces you pick, which is roughly the familiar hundred-calories-a-mile rule of thumb. Note that the fastest pace comes out cheapest per mile: the MET values rise more slowly than speed does across these three bands, so the quicker runner finishes before the clock can charge them.

For 10,000 steps: a 170-cm walker covers about 4.37 miles at that count, roughly 70 minutes at a brisk 3.75 mph. Entering 70 minutes of brisk walking returns 382 kcal at 160 lb and 478 kcal at 200 lb.

Stride length varies enough with height to move that mileage by half a mile either way, so convert your own step count first with the Steps to Miles Calculator.

Using the Free Calories Burned Calculator

Four controls, no account, no stored profile. Worth knowing before you start: the panel opens showing a dash rather than a worked example, because two of the four fields ship empty. Nothing is calculated until you press Calculate, and changing a value afterwards does not update the result until you press it again.

The Fifteen Activities and What They Assume

Dropdown labels are short. The result panel prints a fuller description of the same entry, and that fuller version is the one that tells you whether the option matches your session:

Whole-number METs print without a decimal in that panel line — cycling shows as “8 METs”, hiking as “6 METs” — while 4.3 and 11.8 keep theirs. The hourly-rate line adds the decimal back, so the same activity can appear as “8 METs” on one line and “8.0× your resting burn” on the next.

The list opens on Walking, casual. Calculate without touching the dropdown and that is the activity you get, and at 3.0 METs it is the second-gentlest option on the list.

What the Result Panel Shows

Four lines, always, whatever you enter. Taking the 160-lb, 30-minute run again:

• The hero readout — “373 kcal”, the session total, rounded to a whole calorie and comma-separated above a thousand.
• The arithmetic — “Running, 6 mph (10 min/mi) — 9.8 METs × 30 min at 73 kg”, naming the Compendium entry and restating every input.
• The rate — “Rate: ≈ 747 kcal/hour (9.8× your resting burn)”, displayed as a labeled row with the word Rate on the left.
• The caveat — “Compendium averages — terrain, effort, and fitness swing real burn ±20% or more; trackers guess too”, which never changes.

A Copy result button below the panel puts all four lines on your clipboard as plain text. Reset clears the form and returns the panel to its dash.

The arithmetic line is deliberately written out in full so you can audit the answer. If the kilogram figure on it is not the weight you meant, the unit toggle was on the wrong setting, and the total is out by a factor of about 2.2 in one direction or the other.

What the Fields Accept and Reject

The form itself does no validation; every guard lives in the calculation, so an out-of-range entry returns an amber “Check your inputs” notice rather than a browser warning:

• Weight must land between 30 kg and 300 kg after conversion. In pounds that is roughly 67 to 661 — 66 lb is rejected, 67 lb is accepted, 661 lb is accepted and 662 lb is not. Outside the range the message reads “Enter a valid body weight”.
• Duration must be greater than zero and no more than 600 minutes. Enter 601 and you get “Enter the duration in minutes”; enter 0 or a negative value and you get the same.
• Decimals are accepted in both fields. Half a minute of casual walking at 160 lb returns 2 kcal, and the full ten hours returns 2,286 kcal.
• A blank field produces the matching message rather than a zero — no weight reads “Enter a valid body weight”, no duration reads “Enter the duration in minutes”.

The 30-kilogram floor is the one worth flagging. It rules out most children, and children are not who the adult Compendium was built for in any case: its 2024 edition was tailored to ages 19 to 59 by stripping out data from adults aged 60 and over.

What the Calculator Does Not Ask For

Everything absent from the form is absent from the answer:

• Age, sex and height. Two 160-lb people of any age or build get the same figure for the same session.
• Body composition. Muscle is metabolically more expensive than fat, and this equation cannot see the difference.
• Distance, pace within a band, incline or terrain. Running 6 mph is one value whether the route is flat or a hill climb.
• Heart rate or perceived effort. The MET is fixed by the activity you name, not by how hard the session felt.
• Fitness level. A trained cyclist is more efficient than a beginner and therefore burns less, not more, at the same speed.

That list is less a defect than the deal the MET method offers: four inputs anyone can supply, in exchange for an answer describing an average person rather than you.

Intensity is the field doing the most work and the one you guess at. If you wore a monitor, the zone you actually spent the session in is a better guide to which MET band to pick — work it out with the Heart Rate Zone Calculator.

How to Read Your Result

There are no good or bad bands here — the output is a quantity of energy, not a score. What it needs is context, because a session total looks impressive next to nothing and modest next to a day's eating.

Putting the Number in Context

Set your result against the scale of the things it usually gets compared to:

The first two rows are why exercise alone is slow arithmetic for weight change: 9.4 half-hour runs for a pound on gross calories, 10.4 on net. Take the bottom row instead and it is 21 brisk half-hour walks, or 28 counting net only — and all four figures assume appetite and incidental daily movement stay unchanged while you train, neither of which this calculator can know.

Read the other way, the same numbers are encouraging: 150 minutes of brisk walking a week is 819 kcal at 160 lb and about 42,600 over a year, from an activity needing no equipment and no skill.

Should You Eat Back Exercise Calories?

It depends entirely on where your calorie target came from, and getting this wrong is the quietest way a careful plan stops working.

If the target came from a TDEE whose activity multiplier already includes your training, those calories are counted. Eating them back a second time double-counts them and can erase the deficit outright. If the target was built on a sedentary baseline and you log workouts separately, then eating some of them back is correct.

Some, not all. Gross figures overstate the extra by the resting share — 38 kcal on a half-hour run at 160 lb, 76 on an hour of yoga — and the MET value underneath carries its own ±20 percent. Eating back half of what the panel reports keeps you on the safe side of both errors.

To see how a session's burn translates into an actual weekly rate of loss, and how quickly the arithmetic decays as your weight falls, use the Calorie Deficit Calculator.

What the Weekly Activity Guideline Costs in Calories

Public-health guidance is written in minutes, not calories, and converting it makes the target concrete. The NHS asks adults aged 19 to 64 for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, plus muscle-strengthening work on at least two days.

The two routes were never meant to be calorie-equivalent and they are not: 75 vigorous minutes come out 114 kcal ahead of 150 moderate ones at 160 lb. The NHS treats them as delivering similar health benefits regardless, which is a reminder that the calorie total is not the point of the guideline.

Globally, 31 percent of adults do not reach that threshold at all, according to WHO. For anyone in that group the first 150 minutes are worth more than any optimization of which activity to pick.

Limits: Where a MET Estimate Breaks Down

Five specific reasons the number on your screen is not the number your body spent. None of them is a bug; they are the known boundaries of the method, and they are worth stating because most calculators on this subject do not.

These MET Values Are the Earlier Compendium Figures

The Compendium of Physical Activities was published in 1993 and has been updated three times since — in 2000, in 2011, and again in 2024. This calculator carries the 2011 values. For several activities the 2024 Adult Compendium now lists something different:

Seven of the fourteen match exactly. The rest move in both directions, so this is not a systematic bias you could correct with one factor. Brisk walking shows the size of it: swap 4.3 for 4.8 in the same equation and the 30-minute walk at 160 lb goes from the 164 kcal the tool returns to about 183. Casual walking moves further still in percentage terms, from 3.0 to 3.8.

The 2024 edition is the current reference. It holds 1,114 activities across 22 headings, 912 of them from measured indirect calorimetry rather than estimates, and it is published free at pacompendium.com if you need the exact entry for something this dropdown does not carry.

One MET Is Not Everyone's Resting Rate

The 3.5 mL/kg/min anchoring the whole scale was originally derived from the resting oxygen consumption of a single person: a 70-kg, 40-year-old man. Everything downstream of it inherits that reference body.

Byrne and colleagues measured resting metabolic rate in 769 healthy adults aged 18 to 74 and weighing 35 to 186 kg. The average came out at 2.6 mL/kg/min, meaning the conventional 3.5 overestimates real resting oxygen uptake by about 35 percent, and overstates resting energy expenditure by about 20 percent in kilocalorie terms. Body composition explained 62 percent of the variance between people; age explained 14 percent.

The practical consequence is that MET-based estimates tend to run high, and run highest for people furthest from that reference man — which, given who he was, means most women and most people carrying more fat mass.

A Fitness Tracker Is Not More Accurate

Wrist devices feel like measurement because they are strapped to you, but their calorie figures are estimates assembled from heart rate, motion and a stored profile. A different guess, not a reading.

A Stanford study put seven wrist devices — Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and Samsung Gear S2 — on 60 volunteers and compared them against indirect calorimetry during sitting, walking, running and cycling. Six of the seven kept heart-rate error under 5 percent while cycling. Not one achieved an energy-expenditure error below 20 percent. The Apple Watch was least wrong and the Samsung Gear S2 most; error was worst during walking, and higher for men, for higher body mass index, and for darker skin tones.

A tracker disagreeing with this page therefore settles nothing about which is right. Pick one source, use it consistently, and read the trend rather than the day.

The Afterburn Is Smaller Than It Sounds

Excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, or EPOC, is real: metabolism stays elevated for a while after training, and the calculator counts none of it. The marketing around it is out of proportion to its size.

A review of the EPOC literature by LaForgia, Withers and Gore concluded that even the protocols producing prolonged elevation — 50 minutes or more above 70 percent of VO₂ max, or 6 minutes above 105 percent — leave EPOC at only 6 to 15 percent of the net oxygen cost of the exercise itself. On a 335-kcal net run that is somewhere between 20 and 50 kilocalories.

That review also noted that the sessions hard enough to drive a long EPOC are ones most non-athletes will not tolerate, and concluded that exercise supports body-weight maintenance mainly through the energy spent during the session — the number this page already gives you.

Terrain, Load and Technique Are Not in the Equation

A MET value describes an activity performed on level ground at a stated pace by an average adult. Change any of those conditions and the real cost moves while the estimate does not.

• Gradient. The Compendium rates climbing hills with no load at 4 to 5 mph on a 3 to 5 percent grade at 10.0 METs, more than double the 4.3 this tool applies to brisk level walking.
• Load. Hiking with a daypack is a separate entry in the source table at 7.8 METs; this calculator carries one hiking value and no load field.
• Skill. In swimming and cycling especially, technique changes the energy cost of the same speed by more than the ±20 percent the panel warns about.
• Rest. Forty-eight minutes of basketball is not 48 minutes of play, and the equation charges the game MET for every minute you enter.
• Environment. Heat, cold and altitude all move the cost of identical work, and none of them is an input here.

The honest use of this page is comparative. It ranks activities against each other reliably and tracks whether this month contained more work than last month. It is not a measurement of what your body spent on Tuesday, and no calculator built on METs is.