Estimate your annual emissions in tonnes of CO2-equivalent per person, from the four things you can actually measure: home energy, travel, diet and waste. Every emission factor is published and sourced in the methodology table below, so you can check the maths rather than take our word for it.
No email, no lead form. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type is transmitted to us or anyone else — a promise this site’s security headers enforce in your browser, not just our copy. Carbon calculators that demand your contact details before showing a result are lead-capture forms wearing a calculator’s clothes.
Fill in what you know and leave the rest at the US average. Results update as you type, in metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person, per year.
Your household burns — of home energy shared across —. Overall you sit —
Read this comparison carefully. The national averages count everything — including the goods, services and public infrastructure behind you. This calculator covers home energy, travel, diet and waste, which is roughly 70–80% of a typical footprint, so a result below the US average is expected rather than an achievement.
This calculator covers home energy, road and air travel, diet and landfilled waste — roughly 70–80% of a typical personal footprint. The US per-capita average of 17.6 tonnes counts everything: the goods you buy, the services you use, and the public infrastructure that exists on your behalf. So a result below the national average is the expected outcome of the narrower scope, not evidence of a small footprint. Use the number to compare your own choices over time, not to declare victory.
The levers, in the order they usually matter: if electricity is your biggest slice, rooftop solar moves the emissions and the bill together — model the economics honestly in our solar payback calculator, which defaults to the 2026 rules now that the 30% federal credit has expired. Flights are the densest emissions a household controls, a single round trip outweighing months of driving. And diet is the largest lever that costs nothing to pull.
Emission factors are US national averages. Your grid, your car and your utility will differ — treat the output as a well-grounded estimate, not a measurement.
| Input | Factor | Source |
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Home energy and household waste are shared costs; diet and travel are personal. We divide the first two across the people you enter, keep the rest personal, and compare the result to per-capita national averages.
Calculators that report a household total against a per-person benchmark systematically make large households look worse than they are.
Contrails and high-altitude NOx roughly double a flight’s warming impact, but the size of the multiplier is genuinely contested science.
We ship it off by default to match EPA convention and let you switch it on, rather than quietly picking the number that makes the chart more dramatic.
We model only what you can measure from your own bills and odometer, and we say so. Full-scope footprints need spending data and input-output models — more complete, far less checkable.
A narrower number you can verify beats a wider one you have to trust.
Known limitations, stated plainly. Public-transit intensity depends heavily on how full the vehicle is and our factor uses pre-2020 load factors, so it likely understates current emissions. Diet tiers come from a UK cohort study normalised to 2,000 kcal/day and cover production only — not retail, cooking or household food waste; a US-basis average diet is around 1.7 t CO2e/year (Heller & Keoleian 2018), so use these tiers for comparing choices rather than as an absolute. Grid electricity is a national average; your eGRID subregion may be 2× higher or lower.
About 17.6 tonnes CO2e per person per year on an all-sources basis, against a global average near 6.6 tonnes. Figures near 14 tonnes are usually energy-related CO2 only, excluding other greenhouse gases.
It covers home energy, road and air travel, diet and landfilled waste, which is roughly 70 to 80% of a typical personal footprint. It excludes the goods, services and public infrastructure that national per-capita averages include, which is why a result below the US average is expected rather than an achievement.
Directionally useful, not precise. Independent comparisons find differences of a couple of tonnes CO2e per person between calculators given identical inputs, because they use different emission factors and system boundaries. Use them to compare choices and track change over time, not as an audited number.
No. It runs entirely in your browser and nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere. Sites that demand a name and phone number before showing an estimate are running lead-capture forms.
Last reviewed
Primary sources for the factors on this page: EPA eGRID2023, EPA GHG Emission Factors Hub (2025), EPA passenger-vehicle emissions, EPA WARM, CBO transportation emissions, Scarborough et al. 2014, and the U. Michigan CSS Carbon Footprint Factsheet.
Where sources disagree we have said so on the page rather than picking the flattering number. Found an error or a stale factor? We would genuinely like to know. For how this site makes money, see the disclosure on the home page — the short version is that nothing you type into this calculator is ever transmitted or sold.