What this result means
Enter your seated time for work or study, travel, meals, leisure and anything not covered elsewhere. The calculator adds each duration once and shows the total without rating it. [1]
How to calculate total sitting time
For each category, the calculator multiplies whole hours by 60, adds the minutes, then sums all five category totals. One minute is 60 seconds and one hour is 60 minutes. [1]
Count each seated episode once. If a seated journey included screen use, keep it in one sitting category here rather than adding it twice.
Treat the result as an entered estimate
WHO describes both questionnaire and wearable-device approaches to physical-activity surveillance and identifies measurement gaps for sedentary behaviour across age groups. This calculator is only a category-based entry total, not a device measurement. [2]
The calculator does not detect posture, movement, standing or overlapping activities. It cannot confirm that the total represents every day.
Sitting time is not screen time
Screen use may happen while standing or moving. Sitting can include travel, meals, reading and conversation without a screen. Count seated time here, whether or not a screen was involved.
Privacy and limitations
The calculation runs locally in your browser. Category values and results are not added to the URL or sent as analytics details. Sharing sends only the public tool link.
The result has no health category or implied target. It should not be used to diagnose a condition or choose medical, rehabilitation or exercise care.
Formula and assumptions
- Formula
- Category minutes = hours × 60 + minutes. Total sitting minutes = the sum of all five category-minute values. [1]
- Version
- Typical-day sitting-time sum, daily-sitting-duration-v1
- Rounding
- The calculation uses whole minutes and does not round. The result converts exact total minutes back to whole hours and remaining minutes.
- Worked example
- Example: 2 h 30 min of seated work, 45 min of travel, 1 h at meals, 2 h of seated leisure and 15 min of other sitting add to 390 minutes, or exactly 6 h 30 min. [1]
Who this is for — and when not to use it
Intended use
Private, neutral addition of a person's own non-overlapping seated-time estimates for one typical day.
Not intended for
No sedentary-risk category, threshold, score, target, diagnosis, exercise prescription, calorie estimate, device measurement or medical advice.
Exclusions
- Health-risk categories, thresholds, scores and comparisons with another person
- Exercise, movement-break, standing-desk, calorie, productivity or behaviour recommendations
- Medical, paediatric, pregnancy, rehabilitation, injury and treatment decisions
- Wearable inference, sensor validation, posture classification and automatic screen-time import
- Weekly, monthly or yearly projections, targets and countdowns
- Overlapping episodes or totals above the 24 hours available in one day
Evidence sources
- 1. NIST Guide to the SI, Chapter 5: Units Outside the SI — National Institute of Standards and Technology. Accessed Sep 4, 2026.
- 2. Measuring and monitoring of physical activity — World Health Organization. Accessed Sep 4, 2026.