Enter your body weight and activity level to estimate your recommended daily protein intake in grams.

How to Use the Protein Calculator

Set the unit toggle to kg or lb to match how you weighed yourself, then pick an activity level from the dropdown — daily protein target and the g/kg figure behind it update together.

0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight gets cited constantly, often as if it's a universal target everyone should hit. It isn't. That number is the RDA — the Recommended Dietary Allowance set by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine — and RDAs are calibrated as a floor: the minimum intake that prevents deficiency in a generally healthy, sedentary adult. It was never meant to describe what an athlete, or anyone doing regular resistance or endurance training, actually needs to recover and adapt.

Protein (g/day) = Body Weight (kg) × g/kg for Activity Level

Sedentary:              0.8 g/kg
Recreationally Active:  1.2 g/kg
Endurance Athlete:      1.4 g/kg
Strength/Power Athlete: 1.8 g/kg

The three higher tiers come from the range commonly cited in sports nutrition research — position stands from groups like the International Society of Sports Nutrition routinely put protein needs for trained individuals somewhere between 1.2 and roughly 2.0 g/kg, scaling up with training volume and intensity. A strength athlete training for hypertrophy sits at the high end of that range; someone doing a few easy runs a week sits closer to the low end.

Why the gap matters practically: someone doing four hard gym sessions a week who eats to the sedentary 0.8 g/kg figure is very likely under-fueling recovery — not because 0.8 is wrong, but because it's answering a different question than the one they're asking. Hitting a daily gram total is also only part of the picture — spreading intake across three or four meals rather than loading it all into one tends to matter more for muscle protein synthesis than the total ever does on its own, though that's a detail this calculator, built around a daily figure, doesn't attempt to address.

Individual needs vary, and kidney health is the one place this really matters. Total calorie intake, training goals, and age all shift the right number in ways a single g/kg figure can't capture. Anyone with existing kidney disease should talk to a doctor or dietitian before increasing protein intake — impaired kidneys handle protein metabolism differently, and general athletic guidance doesn't apply the same way.