How Many Calories Does Hiking Burn? The Real Math

By Michael Sally · Updated August 29, 2026 · Editorial policy

Hiking sits in an unusual spot among exercises: it can be as gentle as a stroll or as demanding as a hard run, on the same trail, depending on grade and load. That makes single-number answers ("hiking burns 500 calories an hour") close to useless. The honest answer is a formula, and the formula is simple enough to do in your head.

The formula exercise science actually uses

Energy expenditure is estimated with MET values — Metabolic Equivalents of Task — from the Compendium of Physical Activities. One MET is your resting metabolic rate. The math:

Relevant Compendium values: general hiking is about 5.3 METs, hiking uphill with moderate grades runs 6–7, and backpacking with a loaded pack is rated around 7.8 METs. Climbing steep terrain with a heavy load can exceed 9.

Reference table

What moves the number most

Grade dominates. Research on graded walking shows energy cost rises steeply with incline — a 10% grade can nearly double the cost of walking the same speed on flat ground. Descents are not free either: eccentric muscle work on steep downhills still burns meaningfully more than flat walking and does more muscle damage.

Load is nearly linear. Every pound on your back is a pound your legs lift with each step. A rule of thumb from military load-carriage research: expect roughly a 1% increase in energy cost per 1% of body weight carried, rising faster above about 30% of body weight. That is one reason ultralight backpackers obsess over ounces — see hiking with a heavy pack.

Terrain and surface matter. Sand, snow, and rough talus can raise cost 20–60% over a groomed path at the same speed and grade.

Comparing hiking to other exercise

Hour for hour, moderate hiking lands between brisk walking and easy running. The full comparison — and why hiking's joint-load profile differs — is in hiking vs. walking vs. running. If your goal is fat loss specifically, the volume argument for hiking is covered in hiking for weight loss.

To turn all of this into a number for a specific route, use the calculator on our homepage — it combines distance, elevation gain, pace, body weight, and pack load in one estimate. And if you track daily steps as well as trail miles, our sister site CalculateSteps converts any distance into step counts.

Why your watch disagrees with the formula

Run the MET calculation for a hike and then compare it with what your watch reported. The two numbers will differ, often by 20 per cent or more, and the reason is that they are estimating different things from different inputs.

The MET approach works forward from physics. It takes your mass, the activity's known metabolic cost, and the duration, and multiplies. It is blind to your individual efficiency, but it captures load and grade if you choose the right MET value.

A wrist device works backward from heart rate and motion. Heart rate is a reasonable proxy for effort in steady-state aerobic work, which is why the estimates are decent on a flat trail at constant pace. It degrades in exactly the conditions that define hiking. Heart rate drifts upward over long efforts at constant workload — cardiac drift — so a device reading effort from pulse alone will overstate the back half of a long day. It rises with heat and dehydration independent of work done. And it lags real changes in effort by a minute or more, which smears the sharp transitions of climbing and descending into something flatter than reality.

Load carriage is the clearest failure. Your watch cannot see the thirty pounds on your back. Motion signature and heart rate both shift somewhat under load, but not enough for the algorithm to reconstruct the actual cost, and validation work on consumer wearables has generally found energy-expenditure errors well outside what most users assume.

The practical resolution: use the formula for planning a specific route, where you know the grade and the load in advance, and use the watch for tracking trends across weeks. Neither is a measurement. Both are estimates with different failure modes, and the useful skill is knowing which one is lying to you in which conditions.