How Many Calories Does Walking Burn?

A brisk mile costs roughly 60 to 115 calories, and body weight decides which#

How many calories does walking burn? For most adults, a brisk mile costs somewhere between 60 and 115 calories once you subtract the energy you'd have spent anyway — call it 80 for a 70 kg person. Nearly all of the spread between one walker and the next is body weight. Almost none of it is speed.

That range is deliberately less flattering than the walking-calories tables you'll find elsewhere, and the reason is worth more than the number. Every one of those tables is running the same instrument underneath: a research catalogue of activity energy costs whose own authors state plainly that it "can serve as a starting point for prescribing individual activities but does not reflect precise individual EE values"¹. The tool was built to make epidemiology comparable across studies. The internet repurposed it into a personal calorie readout, kept the gross number, and dropped the warning. Here's what's actually underneath it.

The number comes from a catalogue built for a different job#

When a website tells you that walking burns 314 calories an hour, it is almost never reporting a measurement. It is looking up a MET value — a multiple of resting metabolism — and multiplying by your weight.

Those MET values live in the Compendium of Physical Activities, which was developed "to enhance the comparability of results across studies using self-report physical activity"². That is its purpose: letting one epidemiologist's "moderate activity" mean the same thing as another's. The current edition catalogues 1,114 activity codes, of which 912 (82 percent) have measured MET values and 202 (18 percent) are estimated¹. Walking is one of the well-measured corners:

Walking pace	MET value	Per mile, in MET-hours (our arithmetic)
2.5 mph, level, firm surface	3.0	1.20
2.8-3.4 mph, moderate	3.8	~1.19
3.5-3.9 mph, brisk	4.8	~1.30
4.0-4.4 mph, very brisk	5.5	~1.31
4.5-4.9 mph, very very brisk	7.0	~1.49

MET values are the 2024 Adult Compendium's measured figures; the right-hand column is each MET divided by its pace in mph — our arithmetic, not a number the Compendium publishes. Keep an eye on it, because it says something the left column hides.

What a mile actually costs, and the deduction nobody makes#

By the MET convention, one MET is one kilocalorie per kilogram per hour, so brisk walking at 4.8 METs works out like this for a mile covered in about 17 minutes:

Body weight	Gross kcal per mile	Net of resting metabolism
55 kg (121 lb)	~75	~62
70 kg (154 lb)	~96	~79
85 kg (187 lb)	~117	~96
100 kg (220 lb)	~137	~113

Both columns are our arithmetic on the Compendium's measured MET value and on a measured resting rate discussed below. Neither paper publishes these numbers, and you should treat them as a well-founded order of magnitude rather than a result.

The gap between those two columns — about 18 percent — is the deduction essentially no walking calculator makes. The gross figure charges the walk for calories your body was going to spend regardless. You do not get credit for being alive during your walk. If you were sitting on the sofa instead, you'd still be burning the baseline; only the difference is bought by the walking.

There is also a decent measured check on all of this. When researchers put 24 people through 1,600 m of walking at 1.41 m/s and measured expenditure by indirect calorimetry rather than modelling it, a mile of walking cost 340 ± 14 kJ on a treadmill and 334 ± 14 kJ on a track — about 81 and 80 calories, gross⁴. Running the identical 1,600 m cost 481 ± 20 kJ, roughly 115 calories. Running a mile costs more than walking a mile; whether that difference is worth what people think is its own question, covered in walking versus running the same distance.

The resting number underneath every MET is wrong for most people#

Here is the crack in the foundation. The MET's whole architecture rests on the claim that resting metabolism is 3.5 ml of oxygen per kilogram per minute, or about 1 kcal per kilogram per hour. That value was originally derived from the resting oxygen consumption of a single person: a 70 kg, 40-year-old man.

When researchers measured it properly across 642 women and 127 men aged 18 to 74, weighing 35 to 186 kg, the average came out at 2.6 ± 0.4 ml O₂/kg/min and 0.84 ± 0.16 kcal/kg/h. The convention overstates actual resting oxygen consumption by an average of 35 percent, and overstates resting energy expenditure by 20 percent³. And the error is not random: body composition — fat mass and fat-free mass — accounted for 62 percent of the variance in resting oxygen consumption, while age accounted for only 14 percent. The further your body composition sits from that one man's, the further your MET is from a MET.

This is not a fringe complaint. The Compendium's own team now publishes a "corrected MET" that divides the standard value by an individually predicted resting rate from the Harris-Benedict equation, precisely because the fixed referent misclassifies intensity — most in older adults, women, people carrying more weight, and people with lower fitness. The authors of the 2024 edition put it directly: studies "consistently note differences in RMR based on age, sex, height, and body weight or body composition and recommend accounting for these factors"¹.

So when a calculator hands you a walking-calorie total, it has inherited a resting baseline built from one man in the twentieth century, applied it to you, and then declined to subtract it. The same class of problem sits under every number your total daily energy expenditure is assembled from.

Walking faster barely changes the price of a mile#

Now look back at that right-hand column. From 2.5 mph to 4.4 mph — a range spanning a stroll to a genuinely hard walk — the cost of one mile moves only from about 1.19 to about 1.31 MET-hours. Roughly ten percent. Speed changes how long the mile takes, not much what it costs.

That's not a quirk of the arithmetic; it's your body doing what bodies do. When 39 people (19 with class II obesity, 20 of normal weight, both sexes) walked a treadmill at six speeds from 0.50 to 1.75 m/s, preferred walking speed came out at 1.42 m/s and did not differ across groups — and it sat near the speed that minimised the gross energy cost per distance⁵. Your legs found the cheapest way to cover ground without consulting you. Speeding up to burn more per mile means fighting an optimisation you did not choose and cannot win by much.

The same study answers the other half. Net metabolic rate per kilogram was only about 10 percent higher in the obese subjects than the normal-weight ones, and about 10 percent higher in women than men; body composition correlated with net metabolic rate (r² = 0.43) while mass distribution did not. Per kilogram, walking costs nearly everyone nearly the same. Which is exactly why the table above scales with body weight and almost nothing else: a 100 kg walker burns roughly 80 percent more per mile than a 55 kg walker, for the unremarkable reason that they are moving 80 percent more mass down the road.

The mile is the wrong unit#

All of which makes a single walk look thin. Thirty brisk minutes nets most people something like 100 calories — real, and roughly a tenth of what an afternoon of eating can undo.

But per-session accounting is the wrong frame for walking, and it's the frame the calculators force. Walking's case has never rested on the size of one bout. It rests on being the only movement most people will actually repeat every day for decades, at no cost, with no recovery debt and no gym. The energetically interesting term in your day is not the walk you logged; it's the accumulated low-grade movement you didn't — the subject of what NEAT is and why it matters.

So take the number as an order of magnitude and stop there. Don't spend it: the case against eating exercise calories back holds for walking too, and it's laid out in does exercise burn as many calories as you think. Set your deficit from intake, where the arithmetic is less lossy — how big a calorie deficit should be and how a calorie deficit actually drives weight loss both start there. And when a page promises that walking burns exactly 314 calories an hour, remember it is quoting a catalogue that says, in its own words, it does not reflect precise individual values.

FAQ#

How many calories does walking a mile burn?#

Roughly 60 to 115 calories net for most adults, scaling with body weight: about 62 at 55 kg, 79 at 70 kg, 96 at 85 kg and 113 at 100 kg for a brisk mile. Those are our calculations from the Compendium's measured 4.8 MET value for brisk walking, minus the resting metabolism you'd have spent anyway. Direct measurement lines up: 24 people walking 1,600 m at an ordinary pace spent about 80 calories, gross.

Does walking faster burn more calories per mile?#

Barely. Per hour, yes — a brisk pace is 4.8 METs against 3.0 for a stroll. But per mile the cost only moves from about 1.20 to 1.31 MET-hours between 2.5 and 4.4 mph, because you finish sooner. Walking faster mostly buys you time, not calories. It stops being true above roughly 4.5 mph, where the cost per mile climbs sharply as ordinary walking gait breaks down.

Do heavier people burn more calories walking?#

Yes, close to proportionally, because the cost is mostly the price of moving mass. A 100 kg walker spends about 80 percent more per mile than a 55 kg walker. Per kilogram, though, the difference nearly vanishes: net metabolic rate was only about 10 percent higher in people with class II obesity than in normal-weight people across six walking speeds. Walking is not less efficient for a heavier body — there is simply more body.

Sources#

This article was researched and drafted with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy by the BurnWeek team. It is general information, not medical advice. How we research and correct our articles →