Capacity Planning Template
A numeric check, not a task board: gross hours minus approved leave and standing overhead, planned to real capacity with a buffer deliberately held back.
Five people at forty hours looks like 200 hours on paper. Leave, standing meetings and support rotation usually take a third of that before planning even starts.
Why most capacity plans are wrong on day one
Capacity planning isn't about columns and cards the way other planning is. It's a numeric exercise first, and most versions of it are wrong before the sprint even starts, not because anyone did the math badly but because they did the wrong math.
Capacity gets calculated as headcount times a standard week. Five people at forty hours reads as 200 hours, but nobody works a full unbroken forty. Leave, recurring meetings and support rotation are real hours that a headcount number simply doesn't subtract before the plan is built.
It's checked once, at sprint start, and never again. Leave gets approved mid-sprint, someone gets pulled onto an urgent ticket, and the original number stops being true days into the sprint with nothing on the board flagging that it has changed.
Overcommitment is invisible until it's a missed date. Nothing on most plans shows a person is booked beyond their real hours while there's still time to rebalance the work; it just shows up later as work that didn't get done, discovered on the day it was due.
Every hour gets planned, with nothing held back. A plan built to exactly 100% of real capacity has no room for the interrupt work every sprint gets (a production bug, an urgent client request), so the first interruption of the sprint immediately puts something else at risk.
The structure, and why each part is there
Gross hours per person, minus approved leave and standing overhead (meetings, support rotation), equals real capacity. Recalculated each sprint, not assumed from a standard week.
Work is planned against real capacity, not headcount, so the cap reflects hours someone actually has, not hours their job title implies they should have.
A visible state the moment someone is planned beyond their real hours, caught while there's still time to move work, not discovered at the deadline it threatened.
A deliberate 10-20% left unplanned for the interrupt work every sprint gets anyway, instead of scheduling every hour and treating the first interruption as a crisis.
Logging a day's hours takes about five seconds, sitting next to the task just finished. A capacity plan checked against logged hours holds up; one checked against estimates alone drifts, and that gap is usually what separates a plan that's right on day one from one that's still right by day ten.
Delivery forecasts are calculated from the team's measured velocity as sprints complete, so next sprint's numbers come from what actually happened, not the original capacity guess.
Hours nobody has claimed yet, visible on their own rather than folded into "committed" by accident, the difference between spare capacity and capacity nobody noticed.
How to use it
- 01List gross hours per person for the period, working days multiplied by hours per day. Free for up to five people, permanently.
- 02Subtract approved leave and standing recurring commitments, support rotation, fixed meetings, anything that reliably takes a chunk of the week away from project work.
- 03Plan work up to real capacity, not gross hours, and hold back a deliberate buffer. Ten to twenty percent is a reasonable starting point for most teams to test against.
- 04Watch the over-capacity flag through the sprint, not just at the start. Leave gets approved and priorities shift after planning is technically done.
- 05Compare logged hours against planned hours at close, and use the gap to adjust next sprint's real-capacity number instead of reusing the same estimate on faith.
The numbers get more accurate the longer a team runs this. The first sprint's buffer is a guess, the tenth sprint's buffer is calibrated against ten sprints of actual interrupt work. Treat the early numbers as a starting point, not a verdict.
- Real capacity is gross hours minus leave and overhead, not headcount times a standard week
- A capacity plan that isn't rechecked mid-sprint is only accurate on the first day
- Logged hours, not estimates, are what should tune the next sprint's numbers
Common questions
Yes. All templates are included on the Free plan, which covers up to five users and two projects and does not expire. Larger teams need a paid plan for the seats, not for the template. See pricing.
No. There are no screenshots, no keystroke logging and no activity tracking. Time logging is a single daily total entered next to the task someone just finished. It feeds capacity numbers; it doesn't watch how anyone spends their day.
Capacity planning isn't a cadence. It's a check you run alongside whichever cadence you're using. It answers how many of the hours a week or a quarter's plan assumes are actually real, after leave and overhead. Run it before committing a week's tasks or a quarter's goals, and rerun it when circumstances change mid-period.
Ten to twenty percent is a reasonable starting range for most teams, but the right number depends on how much unplanned work actually lands. A team fielding frequent production incidents needs a bigger buffer than one that rarely gets interrupted. Adjust it using logged hours from past sprints rather than guessing once and leaving it fixed.
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