Cohesion in the refractory metals Cr, Mo, and W is phenomenologically described in this work via a n -body energy functional with a set of physically motivated parameters that were optimized to reproduce selected experimental properties characteristic of perfect and defective crystals. The functional contains four terms accounting for the hard-core repulsion, the Thomas–Fermi kinetic energy repulsion and for contributions to the binding energy of s and d valence electrons. Lattice dynamics, molecular statics, and molecular dynamics calculations show that this model describes satisfactorily thermodynamic properties of the studied metals whereas, unlike other empirical approaches from the literature, predictions of phonon dispersion relations and of surface and point defect energetics reveal in fair good agreement with experiments. These results suggest that the present model is well adapted to large-scale simulations and whenever total energy calculations of thermodynamic properties are unfeasible.