Strip away the exercise, the steps, the workday — how to calculate resting calories burned for a body that simply exists? The answer is the oldest quantity in nutrition science: resting burn is BMR over 24 hours, and for any stated body it can be computed exactly from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. This article is the table form of that computation: two full grids, men and women, six ages by five weights, every cell evaluated from the equation for this page and spot-checked against the live calculator. If you have ever asked what is my resting calorie burn, your answer is in your row.

The grids: resting burn by age, sex and weight

Both tables hold height constant — 175 cm for men, 165 cm for women, the reference frames used across this site’s BMR pages — so that age and weight can be read cleanly. Height adjustments are simple: the equation prices each centimetre at 6.25 kcal/day, so add or subtract about 31 kcal/day per 5 cm from your row. Weight steps are exactly 100 kcal/day per 10 kg, by construction.

Read the young man’s row as an example of the whole system. At 20, the 60–100 kg span runs 1,599 to 1,999 kcal/day: a 40 kg difference in body mass is worth 400 kcal/day of resting burn, which is why “average” figures mislead whenever bodies differ. Down the 70 kg column, the same man at 20, 40 and 70 reads 1,699, 1,599 and 1,449 — the equation’s age term, a stately 50 kcal/day per decade when nothing else changes.

How this table was built — and how to audit any cell

Every cell is one evaluation of the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, and you can reproduce any of them with a pencil. Take the women’s table, age 40, 70 kg: weight term 10 × 70 = 700; height term 6.25 × 165 = 1,031.25; age term −5 × 40 = −200; constant −161. Sum: 1,370.25, printed as 1,370 — the exact cell in the grid. Nothing in either table came from another chart, a textbook average or a device maker’s marketing page; the tables are the equation, typeset. That is a deliberate editorial choice. An unsourced “average BMR chart” cannot be checked, and a chart that cannot be checked cannot be trusted — whereas any cell here can be audited in thirty seconds, and twelve of them were additionally run through the live hub calculator before publication, which returned the same figures.

Imperial readers can use the tables directly with two conversions the hub calculator itself uses: 175 cm is 5 feet 9 inches, 165 cm is 5 feet 5 inches, and the weight columns step in 10 kg, which is 22 lb. A 154 lb man is the 70 kg column; a 132 lb woman is the 60 kg column. If your height falls between the reference frames, the equation’s height price — 6.25 kcal/day per centimetre, about 16 per inch — moves you between the tables by a small, exact amount rather than by guesswork.

Reading your row honestly: the ±10% band

Your cell is the average resting burn of the measured population who shared your stats — which means your own true figure sits in a band around it, conventionally ±10%. For the reference man’s 1,649 kcal/day, that band runs from about 1,484 to 1,814. Inside the band, nothing is wrong with you and nothing is wrong with the table; the scatter is body composition, organ size and the ordinary biological variation no three-input equation can see. Two practical consequences follow. First, do not chase precision the quantity does not have: a plan built on your exact cell, held loosely and corrected against two or three weeks of real weight trend, beats a plan built on a laboratory fantasy of exactness. Second, if your measured resting burn (from a clinic’s indirect calorimetry) lands far outside your band, that is information — about composition, about thyroid questions for a clinician, about a mis-entered stat — and it is the band that makes the information visible.

The corners of the grids deserve one look before the averages seduce anyone. The lowest cell in either table — women, age 70, 50 kg — is 1,020 kcal/day; the highest — men, age 20, 100 kg — is 1,999. Between those corners sits essentially the whole landscape of adult resting metabolism as the equation sees it: a range of under 1,000 kcal/day separating the smallest older frame from the largest young one, with body mass doing most of the separating. Resting burn is not a personality trait. It is, to a first approximation, a receipt for how much body there is to run.

The same floor, metered by the hour

A daily figure can feel abstract; the rate underneath it is not. Divide any cell by 24 and the resting burn becomes a continuous meter you can picture — and dividing by 1,440 gives the per-minute drip that never, at any moment of sleep or stillness, switches off:

Even the smallest adult frame in these tables burns about a kilocalorie a minute at rest; the largest young frame burns nearly one and a half. That continuous drip — not exercise, not digestion — is where the majority of a sedentary day’s energy goes, and it is why the resting figure, rather than any workout statistic, is the foundation every calorie plan is built on. When a device or an article quotes your resting burn in hourly terms, it is reading from this same meter: the numbers reconcile with the grids exactly, because they are the grids, divided.

Averages, and why your row beats them

People ask for an average bmr as if it were a benchmark. The grids let us compute honest versions of it: across all thirty cells, the men’s table averages 1,674 kcal/day and the women’s 1,345 — an average basal metabolic rate for each reference frame, nothing more mystical than the mean of the printed cells. Quote an average metabolic rate without its frame, though, and you quote a number that describes nobody: the spread inside each table (over 500 kcal/day from corner to corner) is the real information. The same caution applies to the average resting metabolic rate figures in device marketing — an average over whose bodies, at what heights, is never stated. Your row is stated. Use your row.

Terminology, briefly, because the search terms collide: bmr calories and rmr calories are the same resting quantity under the two protocols of our companion article — basal (strict, overnight-fasted) and resting (relaxed, clinic-style, about 10% higher). If you are asking what is bmr calories as a line in an app, it is this daily floor, accumulated hour by hour: about 68.7 kcal per hour for the reference man, 55.0 for the reference woman. A resting calories burned calculator is any tool that returns this floor from your stats — the hub calculator is one, and the tables above are its printed form.

Metabolic age: the honest version

The grids also let us demystify the number bathroom scales love to print. A metabolic age calculator does exactly one thing: it takes your estimated BMR and finds the age row whose typical value it matches. If your BMR equals the value in the age-40 row, your “metabolic age” is 40 — regardless of your birthday. To calculate metabolic age from these tables, find your computed BMR in your weight column and read across to the row it sits in or nearest.

Understood that way, the number is harmless — but notice what moves it. Anything that raises estimated BMR lowers metabolic age: more weight, more muscle, being male in the table’s terms. A heavy, muscular 50-year-old will routinely be told he has the metabolism of a 30-year-old, and a light 25-year-old the reverse. Watch it happen with a tape measure instead of a torso: a 40-year-old man of 90 kg who is 185 cm tall — ten centimetres above this table’s frame — has a Mifflin figure of 1,861 kcal/day, which in the 175 cm table’s 90 kg column sits between the age-20 and age-30 rows. His scale would report a “metabolic age” in the mid-twenties, earned entirely by ten centimetres of height the table does not know about. The label repackages body size as youth. It measures nothing about tissue health, predicts nothing, and no clinician uses it. If your scale prints it, enjoy it as trivia; if you want a number with content, take your actual BMR from the grid — and what is resting calories if not that: the verified floor under everything else you burn.