Stairs Calorie Calculator

Climbing stairs is one of the most efficient calorie burns you can get without any equipment, because you are lifting your whole body weight against gravity on every step. That is also why this calculator is built around physics rather than a vague activity table. The work done going up is your mass times gravity times the height you climb, and your muscles are only about 22 percent efficient at turning food energy into that lift, so the calories you burn come out to roughly five times the actual lifting work.

A standard staircase step rises about 6.75 inches, so 200 steps takes you up roughly 34 metres, about the height of an 11-story building. Plug in your weight and the number of steps and the tool returns the calories, the floors you climbed (a flight is around 16 steps), and the burn per step so you can do quick mental math next time.

Going down is not free, but it is cheap. Descending costs roughly a third of climbing, because gravity is doing most of the work and your muscles are mainly braking. The calculator switches to that lower figure when you pick the down direction.

Two honest caveats. Real burn depends on pace, fitness, and whether you are carrying anything, so treat the number as a solid estimate, not a lab measurement. And the 22 percent efficiency figure is a population average; a trained climber may be a little more efficient, which would nudge the count down slightly.