Walking Calorie Calculator

This uses the walking-specific metabolic equation from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), which is more precise for walking than a general MET lookup because it scales continuously with your actual speed instead of bucketing you into a fixed intensity category.

Step by step: your speed in meters per minute is combined with a walking-specific oxygen-cost formula (VO2 = 0.1 × speed + 3.5, in ml/kg/min) to get your oxygen consumption, which is then converted to calories using the standard approximation that 1 liter of oxygen ≈ 5 kcal.

This equation is validated for walking speeds of roughly 50–100 m/min (about 1.9–3.7 mph) on level ground — normal-to-brisk walking pace. That range isn't an arbitrary cutoff: the formula was built around the specific oxygen cost of a walking gait, and gait mechanics change once someone speeds up enough to break into a jog — different muscles, a different stride pattern, and a different energy-cost curve that this equation was never calibrated against. That's why, rather than silently extrapolating past that point and quietly returning a wrong number, if your calculated speed falls outside that range (e.g. you were jogging, not walking), we'll flag it — for running or other activities, use our Calories Burned Calculator instead, which is also useful for comparing walking against other activities using general MET values.

Source: American College of Sports Medicine. ACSM's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription. Metabolic equation for walking.