Plateknow Enter your weight, say what you are asking protein to do, and you get a range rather than one figure — because the published guidance is a range, and a calculator that rounds it to a single number is hiding the part worth seeing.
That is the target. The hard part is the other half — knowing what you actually ate.
Download freeWhere the three bands come from
| Band | Per kg of body weight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline requirement | 0.8 g | The RDA in the Dietary Reference Intakes (Institute of Medicine, 2005) — the amount that meets the needs of nearly all healthy adults. A floor, not a recommendation to sit at. |
| Active, or over 65 | 1.2–1.6 g | The lower half of the 1.2–2.0 g/kg range in the joint position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine (2016). |
| Training for strength | 1.6–2.0 g | The upper half of that same range. Figures above 2.0 circulate widely; 2.0 is where the citation actually stops, so it is where this calculator stops. |
The FDA’s Daily Value for protein is 50 g on a 2,000-calorie reference diet — the figure every Nutrition Facts label compares itself to. It is a labelling reference for a standard diet rather than a target for a specific person, which is why a calculator working from your own weight will usually disagree with it. Above roughly 62 kg, 50 g is below even the baseline band.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030, published in January 2026, lead on high-quality protein alongside fibre-rich whole grains. That is why this is the first calculator on the site rather than the third.
Why people search for a protein calculator "in food"
One of the live autocomplete suggestions under protein calculator is protein calculator in food. Macro calculator for food and macro calculator for recipes sit in the same harvest. Those are not people looking for an equation.
They already have a rough idea of what they should be getting. What they cannot do is look at dinner and say how much of it is protein — and that is a measurement problem about the thing on the plate, which no formula on this page touches.
What the range does not tell you
- Which foods. The answer is grams of protein, not grams of chicken. Around 100 g of cooked chicken breast is roughly 30 g of protein; 100 g of cooked lentils is about 9 g. Two very different plates for the same row in a tracker.
- Whether you are getting it. This is the gap the whole page is really about, and a calculator cannot close it.
- Whether spreading it across the day matters. Genuinely contested, and a calculator that took a side would be pretending otherwise.
- Anything a clinician has told you. Kidney disease, pregnancy and several other conditions change the number, and a web page does not know about them.
Body weight or goal weight?
The published ranges are stated per kilogram of body weight, which is what this calculator uses. Some practitioners work from lean mass or a reference weight instead, and at a high body weight the two answers are far apart. That is a conversation with a dietitian rather than a setting on a web page.
Is the 50 g on the label enough?
It is a labelling reference on a 2,000-calorie diet, not a personal target. For an adult over about 62 kg it sits below even the 0.8 g/kg baseline band, which is a good illustration of what a Daily Value is for: comparing one food to another, not describing you.
Does the app read protein from a photograph?
Yes — the result card shows protein alongside calories, fat and carbohydrate, and every value has a correction control that is always visible. Where a photograph is weakest is portion size, which is the same reason protein is hard to eyeball in the first place. The app shows you how it read the plate so you can see which part to correct.
Institute of Medicine, Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids (2005) — protein RDA 0.8 g/kg. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, Dietitians of Canada and the American College of Sports Medicine, joint position on nutrition and athletic performance (2016) — 1.2 to 2.0 g/kg. FDA, Daily Value on the Nutrition and Supplement Facts labels — protein 50 g on a 2,000-calorie reference. Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030, released 7 January 2026.