How many calories does a mile burn?

Ask how many calories a mile burns and you'll usually hear one number: 100. It's a fair ballpark and a poor answer, because the real figure moves with your weight, with whether you walked or ran, with the hill in the middle, and with whether anyone subtracted the calories you'd have burned on the couch anyway.

So here's the per-mile figure for walking and running at your body weight, the physics of why a running mile costs more even though the distance is identical, and the three corrections that separate a useful number from a flattering one.

Calories Burned Walking a Mile vs Running a Mile

The most direct measurement comes from Wilkin's group, published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. Thirty adults of average fitness, 15 women and 15 men, walked 1,600 m at 86 m a minute (about 3.2 mph) and ran it at 160 m a minute (about 6 mph) while their oxygen use was measured. The walk cost 89 calories. The run cost 113. The group averaged about 157 lb, which works out to roughly 0.57 calories per pound per mile for walking and 0.72 for running.

Hall's team found the same pattern in 24 adults: 81 calories to walk 1,600 m at about 3.2 mph and 115 to run it at 6.3 mph, with almost identical results on an outdoor track. They also checked the standard prediction equations against those measurements, and the American College of Sports Medicine's walking and running equations both landed within about 4 percent. Scaled to body weight, the per-mile figures look like this:

Calories per mile on level ground, walking at about 3 mph and running at about 6 mph, rounded to the nearest 5. For your own weight, multiply pounds by 0.57 for a walking mile and 0.72 for a running mile. The "total" columns are what most charts and watches show. The "above rest" columns take out the calories you'd have burned anyway in the same minutes, and they're the ones that actually add to your day.

Why Running a Mile Costs More Than Walking One

The distance is identical, so the extra energy has to come from how the body moves. Walking and running are two different machines.

Walking works like an upside-down pendulum. You vault over a fairly straight stance leg, rising and slowing as you pass over it, then falling and speeding up into the next step, so the energy of your forward motion turns into height and back again on every stride. Cavagna, Thys and Zamboni (1976) measured that exchange in the Journal of Physiology and found it recovers about 65 percent of the mechanical energy at intermediate walking speeds. The muscles only have to supply the rest.

Running recovers almost nothing that way: 0 to 4 percent in the same study. Your height and your forward speed rise and fall together, so neither can refill the other, and the muscles and tendons have to absorb and return that energy on every landing. The springiness of your tendons helps. But the muscles still have to hold your whole body weight up on each contact, and they get very little time to do it.

That last point is the heart of it. Kram and Taylor (1990) showed in Nature that the cost of running is set mainly by the cost of supporting body weight and by how fast the muscles must generate that force, which tracks how long each foot stays on the ground. A running foot is down for a fraction of a second, so the force has to come quickly, and quick force is expensive force. Add the flight phase, which means launching your whole body off the ground on every stride, and you have a mile that costs more no matter how relaxed the pace.

Gross vs Net: The Calories You'd Have Burned Anyway

Every figure in the "total" columns is gross: all the energy you used during the mile, including the baseline cost of being alive. You'd have burned that baseline sitting down. Net calories subtract it, and net is the part that actually changes your energy balance.

This matters more for walking than for running. Resting metabolism runs at roughly 1 calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour, and a walking mile takes about 19 minutes while a running mile takes about 10. So the baseline makes up about a quarter of a walking mile's gross figure and only about a tenth of a running mile's. Strip it out and the gap between the gaits widens: in the table above, running goes from about 26 percent more than walking to about 50 percent more.

Another lab puts the net gap wider still. Minetti and colleagues (2002) subtracted resting oxygen use for 10 runners on a treadmill and put level walking, at its most economical speed, at 1.64 joules per kilogram per meter, against 3.40 for running: a ratio of about two to one. So the honest range is this. Above rest, a running mile costs 1.5 to 2 times what a walking mile does.

Running also leaves a longer tail. In Wilkin's study, oxygen use took 10 minutes to return to resting after the walk and 15 after the run, and including that post-exercise burn, the totals came to about 111 calories for the walk and 159 for the run. That's the one part of the gap the per-mile table leaves out.

The same baseline logic is why standing barely beats sitting, which our post on whether standing burns calories works through. It's also where calorie apps can quietly overcount. Many food-logging apps add exercise calories back into your daily budget, and if the number they add is gross, the baseline gets counted twice: once in your daily burn and again in the walk. Wrist devices bring their own error. In a 2017 test of seven wrist-worn devices against lab measurements in 60 volunteers, Shcherbina and colleagues found none estimated energy expenditure within 20 percent, and walking produced the largest errors of any activity. If you log miles against a food budget, our comparison of FitCraft and MyFitnessPal covers what a food tracker and a workout coach are each good for.

Does Pace Change How Many Calories a Mile Burns?

For running, barely. Kram and Taylor put it plainly: the energy used to run a mile is nearly the same at top speed or at a leisurely pace, and it's simply spent faster when you go faster. Minetti's lab found the same thing, with the cost of level running independent of speed. A 12-minute mile and an 8-minute mile cost about the same above rest. The quicker one just finishes sooner, and the slower one carries a few more minutes of baseline in its gross total.

Walking behaves differently. Its cost per mile follows a U-shaped curve.

• Strolling costs more per mile. You spend longer on your feet paying the baseline, and the pendulum works less well at low speeds. In Minetti's data, level walking at about 1.5 mph cost 1.85 joules per kilogram per meter above rest, 13 percent more than the cheapest pace.
• Your natural pace is close to the cheapest. Browning and colleagues (2006) found people's preferred walking speed, about 1.42 m per second or 3.2 mph, sat near the speed that minimized gross energy cost per distance, in obese and normal-weight adults alike. Left alone, you tend to pick close to the cheapest mile.
• Very fast walking gets expensive. Cavagna's pendulum model stops fitting the data above about 4.3 mph. Hreljac (1993) had 20 adults walk and run around the speed where they naturally switched gaits, about 4.6 mph, and found running only became the cheaper option above about 5 mph. Walking at the switch point already felt harder, with a perceived exertion of 13.5 against 10.0 for running at the same speed.

So a race-walked mile at 5 mph can cost as much as running the same mile. Everywhere below that, walking faster mostly buys calories per minute rather than per mile, because you cover more ground in the same time.

Body Weight, Height and What You Carry

Weight is the biggest single lever, and the relationship is close to proportional. A 240 lb walker burns about twice what a 120 lb walker does over the same mile, because there's twice as much mass to lift and move. Ludlow and Weyand (2017) tested that directly by loading walkers with extra mass equal to 18 and 31 percent of their body weight. The walking portion of their metabolic rate rose in direct proportion to the load, across the speeds and grades they tested. To the muscles, mass is mass.

Two smaller wrinkles sit on top. Browning's group found that, per kilogram, obese adults spent only about 10 percent more than normal-weight adults to walk, and women about 10 percent more than men. And height matters in a direction people rarely expect. Weyand and colleagues (2010) found the energy cost per kilogram of walking a given distance falls almost in inverse proportion to height, so a 5 ft walker spends roughly 19 percent more per pound on the same mile than a 6 ft walker. Shorter legs take more strides per mile, and each stride costs about the same per kilogram.

For running, the load rule is even cleaner. Kram and Taylor point to load-carrying experiments showing the cost of supporting an extra unit of load equals the cost of supporting the same amount of body weight, which is a physiologist's way of saying a backpack costs you what the same extra pounds on your frame would. It works in reverse too. Lose 30 lb and each walking mile costs about 17 fewer calories, which is one quiet reason walking-based weight loss slows as it succeeds.

Hills, Sand and Treadmills

Grade changes the number more than anything except body weight. In a 2025 study of the viral 12-3-30 treadmill workout, Wong and colleagues had active adults averaging about 166 lb walk for 30 minutes at 3 mph on a 12 percent incline. They burned about 308 calories covering 1.5 miles, roughly 205 calories a mile, which is more than double the 95 or so a level mile costs at that weight. Our review of the incline walking research covers what else that study found.

Steeper grades get dramatic. In Minetti's data, walking up a 20 percent grade cost 8.07 joules per kilogram per meter above rest, about five times the level figure, and a 45 percent grade cost 17.33, more than ten times. Running up those same slopes cost only a little more than walking (8.92 and 18.93), because at those grades both gaits are mostly climbing.

Downhill is cheaper, up to a point. Walking down a gentle 10 percent slope cost about half as much as walking on the level (0.81 against 1.64), and running cost fell to about half its level value on a 20 percent descent (1.73 against 3.40). Steeper than that, the cost rises again as your muscles work to brake you. So a hill loop doesn't cancel out: the climb costs far more than the descent saves.

Surface matters too. Lejeune, Willems and Heglund (1998) found walking on soft sand took 2.1 to 2.7 times the energy of walking on a hard surface at the same speed, while running on sand cost 1.6 times as much.

Treadmills sit closer to the road than their reputation suggests. Hall's volunteers used almost exactly the same energy covering 1,600 m on a treadmill and on a track, walking or running (340 against 334 kilojoules walking, 481 against 480 running). At faster running speeds air resistance starts to count, and Jones and Doust (1996) found a 1 percent treadmill incline best matched the cost of running outdoors across 6.5 to 11 mph. At the slow end of that range, a flat belt matched the road as well.

How Many Miles Does It Take to Burn 500 Calories?

At 150 lb, about 6 miles of walking or 4.5 miles of running, counting total calories. At 200 lb, about 4.5 miles walking or 3.5 running. Count only the calories above rest, which is the fairer figure if you're trying to create a deficit, and the walking distance stretches to nearly 8 miles at 150 lb and about 6 at 200 lb. Running becomes about 5 and 4.

That's the uncomfortable arithmetic behind walking for weight loss. The miles add up, but slowly, and some of what they burn tends to come back through appetite and a less active rest of the day. Our guide to walking vs running for weight loss works through that evidence and how to choose between the two.

A mile is also a handy unit for your step counter. At an ordinary pace, 10,000 steps is about 4 to 4.5 miles (here's how many miles 10,000 steps is by height and pace), so a 10,000-step day burns roughly 350 to 500 calories for most adults, gross. For activities other than walking and running, the calories burned calculator covers the rest.

Putting the Per-Mile Numbers to Work

If you only keep one thing from this, keep the multipliers: your weight in pounds times 0.57 for a walking mile and 0.72 for a running mile. Take about a quarter off the walking figure and a tenth off the running figure when you want only the calories that count.

If you want more from the miles you already walk, the levers come in this order. Add grade first: a hilly route or a steady treadmill incline raises the price of every mile. Change the surface second, since a soft beach or a loose trail costs more than pavement. Pace comes last, because a faster walk mostly buys calories per minute until you're past about 4.5 mph, and by then running is the easier way to spend the same energy.

And pick the mile you'll actually repeat. A daily two-mile walk at 150 lb comes to about 5,000 calories a month, and a harder run you only manage once a week comes to far less. The best per-mile figure is the one you'll hit again tomorrow. If your joints would rather skip both, our breakdown of how many calories swimming burns covers the pool, where skill changes the price of a mile far more than it does on land.