How Many Calories Do You Burn Sleeping?

The calories you burn sleeping come to about 1 kcal per kg of body weight per hour, so a 70 kg (154 lb) adult uses about 560 kcal in 8 hours. The 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities rates sleeping at 1.0 MET, the same as lying awake. The figure is an average, and your own night will land a little above or below it.

How many calories do you burn sleeping at night?

Multiply your weight in kilograms by the hours you sleep. That works because the Compendium sets 1 MET at about 1 kcal per kg per hour, and sleeping (code 07030) is rated at 1.0 MET. Its own conversion page states the rule. I worked the sum for three body weights.

Body weight	Per hour	7 hours	8 hours	9 hours
55 kg (121 lb)	55 kcal	385 kcal	440 kcal	495 kcal
70 kg (154 lb)	70 kcal	490 kcal	560 kcal	630 kcal
90 kg (198 lb)	90 kcal	630 kcal	720 kcal	810 kcal

These figures are your body’s running costs: the heart, the brain, breathing, keeping warm. They are not extra. A person who sleeps 8 hours at 70 kg uses 560 kcal doing nothing at all, and that amount is already inside any daily calorie estimate. How many calories you burn a day shows how such an estimate is built.

The table is an average, not a reading of you. The Compendium’s authors note that resting rates differ with age, sex, height and body weight or composition, and that the table does not reflect precise individual values. Two people of the same weight can differ over a night, and nobody can tell you which way you lean. Your cycle moves it a little too, as whether you burn more calories on your period shows.

One caution about a chart you may have seen. Harvard Health’s calories-burned table lists sleeping at 22 kcal per 30 minutes for a 155 lb person. That would be 352 kcal over 8 hours, and it works out to about 0.6 METs (22 ÷ 0.5 h ÷ 70.3 kg). It sits well below the Compendium’s 1.0, and the page was last reviewed in March 2021, before the Compendium’s 2024 update. I use the Compendium figure, because it is the newer table.

Do you burn fewer calories asleep than awake?

Yes, and most of the drop comes early in the night. In a Japanese study, 12 men slept in a whole-body calorimeter for about 469 minutes. Their energy expenditure fell during the first half of the night, bottomed out at a 35% decrease, and then stayed fairly steady until they woke.

A respiratory-chamber study of 18 women found average resting and sleeping rates similar. Compared with resting, the sleeping rate was higher at the start of the night and lower by morning.

Being awake costs more. Researchers at the University of Colorado kept 7 young adults in a room-sized calorimeter on a controlled diet, with 16 hours awake and 8 hours asleep as the baseline day. A night spent awake cost about 161 kcal more than a night asleep, a rise of 32%. Over a full 24 hours, missing the night raised energy use by about 134 kcal, or 7%. The gain came almost entirely from the night itself, while the daytime hours cost the same.

The authors attached a warning to that finding. They wrote that sleep deprivation should not be read as a safe or effective way to lose weight. Other studies link chronic sleep loss with impaired thinking and weight gain. The following day, energy use dropped about 5% below normal.

Do sleep trackers count calories burned asleep correctly?

Not reliably. In a Stanford test of seven wrist devices, median energy errors ran from 27.4% to 92.6%, and the typical error was highest, at 52.4%, in the sitting tasks. Sleeping wasn’t tested, so I won’t claim a sleeping figure. Sitting is the closest relative, and it had the worst error.

Use a tracker for bedtime and wake-ups. Ignore the calorie line. If the night includes something more active, that is counted separately, and how many calories sex burns gives the figure.

What should you do with your sleeping calories?

Leave them alone. They are already in your daily total, so don’t add them to a food budget and don’t subtract them from a workout. An extra hour of sleep adds about 70 kcal at 70 kg, which is no reason to sleep more or less than you need. If your calorie goal came from a calculator, the sleep hours are in it. A day with lifting in it adds its own cost on top, and how many calories weight lifting burns covers that part. The steps to calories calculator works the same way for walking, using the same Compendium file, and it separates the total from the extra a walk adds.

Sleep problems are a different question. If you snore loudly or wake often and feel tired by day, ask a doctor, because this page is about energy and can’t help with that. If you want a number for yourself, write down your weight and your usual hours tonight, and multiply. That figure holds for any ordinary night, so there is nothing to track.