Alcohol Calculator: Units, Calories and Sleep

This free alcohol calculator turns your typical week of beer, wine, spirits, cider, seltzer or cocktails into UK units, US standard drinks, grams of alcohol and approximate calories. It compares your week with official UK, US, Canadian and Australian guidance, shows what it means for sleep and training after 35, and lets you test small changes that cut units and calories.

How this alcohol calculator works

Everything starts with the amount of pure alcohol in each drink. The calculator multiplies the volume by the strength (ABV) to get millilitres of alcohol, then converts it:

• UK units: one unit is 10 ml (8 g) of pure alcohol, so units = ABV × ml ÷ 1,000. A 568 ml pint of 4.5% lager is 2.6 units.
• Grams of alcohol: millilitres of alcohol × 0.789 (the density of ethanol).
• Standard drinks: a US standard drink is 14 g of alcohol, a Canadian one 13.45 g and an Australian one 10 g. The same pint is 1.4 US, 1.5 Canadian or 2.0 Australian standard drinks.
• Calories (approximate): alcohol has about 7 kcal per gram. On top of that the calculator adds the calories from carbohydrate and sugar for each drink type, taken from USDA food composition data (about 16 kcal per 100 ml for regular beer, 7.5 for light beer, 11 for wine, 28 for cider; nothing extra for spirits). Mixed drinks add about 70 kcal for 200 ml of regular tonic, and the two cocktail options use USDA values for a whole serve. Hard seltzer is counted from its alcohol only, so sweetened ones will be a little higher. Real drinks vary by brand and recipe.
• Exercise equivalents: calories per minute = MET × 3.5 × body weight in kg ÷ 200, using the 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities values of 4.8 MET for brisk walking (3.5 to 3.9 mph) and 9.3 MET for running at 6 mph. Pizza is a 107 g slice of a 14-inch chain cheese pizza (285 kcal) and a medium glazed doughnut is 242 kcal, both from USDA data.

What the official guidelines say

• United Kingdom (Chief Medical Officers, 2016): to keep health risks low, it is safest not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis, spread over 3 or more days, with several drink-free days each week. The same advice applies to men and women.
• United States (Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030): consume less alcohol for better overall health. The new edition gives no daily or weekly number; the previous 2020–2025 edition said 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 or less for women. People who are pregnant, recovering from alcohol use disorder, unable to control their drinking, or taking medicines that interact with alcohol are advised not to drink.
• Canada (Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, 2023): a continuum of risk. 1 to 2 standard drinks a week is low risk, 3 to 6 is moderate risk and 7 or more is increasingly high risk.
• Australia (NHMRC, 2020): healthy adults should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week and no more than 4 standard drinks on any one day.

The calculator checks your Australian “any one day” figure using your average drinking day, so a single big night can be higher than it shows.

Alcohol, sleep and training after 35

Sleep. Alcohol helps you nod off faster, but a major review found it delays and reduces REM sleep and makes the second half of the night more broken. In a large real-world study of Finnish employees, an HRV-based measure of overnight recovery fell more as the dose went up: by about 9 percentage points after a low dose (up to 0.25 g per kg body weight), 24 after a moderate dose (0.25 to 0.75 g/kg) and 39 after a high dose. If you track HRV, you have probably seen this. More in our guides to sleeping better after 35 and HRV explained.

Muscle and recovery. In a controlled study, men who drank 1.5 g of alcohol per kg after a hard session of weights, intervals and cycling had 24% lower muscle protein synthesis than with protein alone, even though they also had protein. With carbohydrate instead of protein the drop was 37%. That is a big night out, but it is worth knowing if you are training to lose fat and keep muscle.

Hydration. Alcohol makes you pass more urine. Alternating with water and starting the next day’s training well hydrated helps; see hydration and electrolytes.

Weight. Drinks are easy to forget when you count calories. Add your weekly figure to your plan in the calorie calculator.

Small changes that add up

You do not need an all-or-nothing approach. Pick the one or two changes that fit your life: a couple of extra alcohol-free days, the 330 ml bottle instead of the pint, a 4% beer instead of a 5% one, or a glass of water between rounds. The cut-back planner above shows what each change is worth over a week and a year. Many people also find that a drink-free evening before a training day or a match makes the session feel noticeably easier.

Sources

1. NHS. Calculating alcohol units.
2. UK Chief Medical Officers. UK Chief Medical Officers’ Low Risk Drinking Guidelines (2016).
3. US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030.
4. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About standard drink sizes.
5. Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction. Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health (2023); Health Canada, standard drink definition.
6. National Health and Medical Research Council. Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol (2020).
7. US Department of Agriculture. FoodData Central, SR Legacy: beer, light beer, table wine, hard cider, distilled spirits, tonic water, whiskey sour, piña colada, chain cheese pizza and glazed doughnut entries.
8. Herrmann SD, et al. 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities: a third update of the energy costs of human activities. J Sport Health Sci. 2024;13(1):6–12.
9. Ebrahim IO, Shapiro CM, Williams AJ, Fenwick PB. Alcohol and sleep I: effects on normal sleep. Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 2013;37(4):539–549.
10. Pietilä J, et al. Acute effect of alcohol intake on cardiovascular autonomic regulation during the first hours of sleep in a large real-world sample of Finnish employees. JMIR Ment Health. 2018;5(1):e23.
11. Parr EB, et al. Alcohol ingestion impairs maximal post-exercise rates of myofibrillar protein synthesis following a single bout of concurrent training. PLoS One. 2014;9(2):e88384.
12. Hobson RM, Maughan RJ. Hydration status and the diuretic action of a small dose of alcohol. Alcohol Alcohol. 2010;45(4):366–373.

This calculator gives general education, not medical advice, and calorie figures are estimates. Some people should not drink at all, including during pregnancy, with certain medicines, with liver disease or some heart conditions, and when recovering from alcohol problems. If you are worried about your drinking or how it affects your health, talk to your doctor. Stopping suddenly after heavy daily drinking can be dangerous, so get medical advice first.

More free tools: Calorie calculator · Sleep calculator · Healthy food swaps · My fitness hub · All tools