Enter your weight, pack load, and the hike — distance, pace, and how steep the trail is — to estimate the calories you'll burn.
Everything on your back — gear, water, food. Same unit as body weight. Use 0 for a day hike with no pack.
Typical hiking pace is 2–3 mph (about 3–5 km/h). Steep or loaded hikes run slower.
This is the trail's effort only — pick it for the ground, not the pack. Your pack load is counted separately in the field above, so it is never charged twice.
MET method: calories ≈ MET × (body + pack) in kg × hours, with time = distance ÷ pace. A ballpark — real burn shifts with fitness, metabolism, heat, altitude, and footing.
Compare calorie burn, trail-food strategies, and pack weights with people who've walked the miles on the HikingGear Forum — real hikers, real trips.
Hiking calorie burn comes down to how much mass you move, how far, and how hard the terrain is. This tool uses the MET (metabolic equivalent) method: calories ≈ MET × total mass in kilograms × hours. Your body weight plus pack weight is the mass you carry, so a 20 lb pack meaningfully raises the burn, while the terrain setting sets the MET — roughly 4 for flat easy trail, 6 for rolling hills, 8 and up for steep or off-trail ground. Time comes from distance ÷ pace. As a rough anchor, a 155 lb hiker covering 3 miles of moderate trail in about an hour and a half burns on the order of 500–650 calories; add a heavy pack or a steep grade and that climbs past 800.
It depends on your weight, your pack, the terrain, and how long you're out. As a rough guide most hikers burn about 400 to 700 calories an hour; a heavy pack or a steep grade pushes that higher, an easy flat stroll lower. Enter your own numbers above for a personal estimate.
Yes — the pack is extra mass you carry every step, so it scales the burn roughly in proportion to total weight. A 30 lb pack on a 150 lb hiker adds about 20% more mass and therefore about 20% more calories. This tool counts the pack once, through the pack-weight field, so choosing a steeper terrain and entering a pack weight won't double-charge it.
It's a solid ballpark, not a lab measurement. MET values are population averages, so your real burn varies with fitness, metabolism, altitude, heat, and how technical the footing is. Treat the number as a planning anchor for food and water, not a precise calorie budget.
On a day hike, no need to match them exactly — a normal meal plus trail snacks is usually fine. On multi-day trips where you're burning thousands of calories a day, deliberately fueling with calorie-dense food matters, because it's hard to carry and eat enough to fully keep up.