Your Walk Burned Fewer Calories Than Your Tracker Says

A 5 km walk shows 259 on the display. It added 186 — the other 73 you'd have burned sitting down.

Gross and net are different numbers

Almost every tracker reports gross calories — everything your body used during the walk, including the energy it would have spent simply existing over the same period.

Net is what the walk actually added. It's the only figure that counts as a deficit.

Your details

Your weight(kg)

Distance walked(km)

How long it took(min)

Net cost of walking(kcal/kg/km)

A commonly cited figure for level walking. Published values vary, so it is adjustable rather than fixed.

Resting rate(kcal/kg/h)

1 MET — 3.5 ml oxygen per kg per minute — works out to about 1.05 kcal per kg per hour.

Result

What the walk actually added

186

The NET figure. This is the one that counts as a deficit — you would have burned the rest anyway.

What you would have burned anywayResting metabolism over the same period. Sitting on the sofa would have cost this much.: 74
What a tracker will show youNet plus resting. Almost every tracker and calculator reports this figure.: 259
How much that overstates the walkThe gross figure as a percentage above the net one. This gap is the error people make eating back exercise calories.: 40
Net cost per kilometreDepends on your weight, not your speed. A heavier walker burns more over the same distance.: 37
The pace you walked: 5
That works out asGross over resting. Compare against published MET tables as a sanity check — 5 km/h walking is usually given as about 3.5.: 3.5
Net calories a minute: 3.1
Distance to net 100 kcalA useful reality check against the size of a snack.: 2.7

Open the Walking Calorie Calculator on its own page to bookmark or share it.

A 70 kg person walking 5 km in an hour:

	kcal
What the walk added	186
What you'd have burned anyway	73
What the tracker shows	259

Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions, and most displays don't say which one they're showing.

Where the resting part comes from

Resting metabolism is conventionally 1 MET — 3.5 ml of oxygen per kilogram per minute — which converts to about 1.05 kcal per kg per hour.

So an hour of anything costs a 70 kg person roughly 73 kcal. Sitting, standing, sleeping or walking.

Two methods, one answer

Worth checking, because a calorie figure is easy to assert and hard to verify:

Net cost + resting metabolism → 259 kcal gross
MET tables, at roughly 3.5 METs for 5 km/h walking → 257 kcal gross

Within 0.7% of each other. The tool also reports the MET equivalent it implies, and at the defaults that reads exactly 3.5 — the published table value.

That agreement is reassuring about the arithmetic. It's also a reminder that both are approximations built on population averages.

⚠️ Walking faster barely changes it

This surprises almost everyone.

The energy cost of walking is roughly proportional to weight × distance, and fairly insensitive to speed across normal walking paces. So walking faster mostly means burning similar energy in less time.

Watch it in the tool. Same 5 km, done in 45 minutes instead of 60:

	60 min	45 min
Net kcal	186	186
Resting	73	55
Gross	259	241

The net figure doesn't move at all. Distance is the lever, not pace.

The exceptions: hills, where climbing adds real work regardless of speed, and the top end where walking becomes inefficient and running becomes cheaper.

Weight is the other lever

The cost is roughly proportional to the mass you're moving. At 70 kg a kilometre nets about 37 kcal; at 100 kg it's 53.

Which also means the number falls as you lose weight — a small and slightly unfair feature of every energy calculation, worth knowing before you read a drop as a problem.

⚠️ The gap is the eating-back error

On the default walk, gross overstates net by 40%.

Eating back a tracker's gross figure therefore eats back calories that were never a deficit. That's one of the most common reasons a plan which looks correct on paper doesn't show up on the scales — and adding the usual optimism about portion sizes can erase a modest deficit entirely.

If a walk is part of a weight plan, use the net number.

For perspective, at 70 kg you need 2.7 km to net 100 kcal. Worth seeing once against the size of an ordinary snack.

Hills, roughly quantified

Since hills are the main exception, it's worth knowing their size — and this part is straightforward physics rather than a lookup.

Lifting 70 kg up 100 vertical metres is 70 × 9.81 × 100 = 68,670 joules, or about 16.4 kcal of mechanical work. Humans are roughly 25% efficient at converting food energy into movement, so the metabolic cost is around:

66 kcal per 100 m of climb, for a 70 kg walker

At 37 kcal per flat kilometre, that's the equivalent of about 1.8 km of level walking — from a climb you might cover in a few hundred metres of ground distance.

So a hilly 5 km route with 200 m of ascent is closer to an 8.5 km flat walk in energy terms. That's a real difference, and neither standard method above captures it.

Treat the 25% efficiency figure as approximate — it varies with gradient, pace and individual — but the order of magnitude is sound, and it explains why hilly walks feel disproportionately harder than their distance suggests.

What neither method sees

Hills, wind, surface, what you're carrying, your gait, the temperature, and how much you personally differ from a population average.

Treat the result as an estimate accurate to within a comfortable margin — not to the calorie.

And the thing the arithmetic misses entirely

Walking has well-established benefits for cardiovascular health, blood sugar, mood, sleep, joints, and simply being outside.

None of that appears anywhere in this calculation. The energy figure is genuinely the least interesting thing about a daily walk — it's just the one people ask about.