Sprint Capacity Calculator
Work out how much your team can really take on this sprint, after leave, public holidays and the time meetings and support eat. Free, no sign-up, and nothing you type leaves your browser.
How the calculation works
Capacity starts from the time the team actually has, not the calendar. Each person's working days in the sprint are added up, then every day of leave and every public holiday is taken away:
Available person-days = people × sprint days − leave days − (people × public holidays)
Not every hour of a working day goes to sprint work. Meetings, support, reviews and interruptions take a share, so the focused hours are:
Focused hours = available person-days × focused hours per day × (1 − time lost ÷ 100)
If you track velocity in points or finished items, the fairest starting point for the next sprint is last sprint's velocity scaled by how much capacity you have this time compared with last time:
Points to plan for = last sprint's points × (this sprint's person-days ÷ last sprint's person-days)
A worked example
Six people run a two-week sprint of 10 working days. Two of them take two days of leave each, so there are 4 leave days, and one public holiday falls inside the sprint. That gives 6 × 10 − 4 − 6 = 50 person-days.
At 6 focused hours a day with a fifth of the time going to meetings and support, that is 50 × 6 × 0.8 = 240 hours of sprint work. Last sprint the team finished 30 points with 54 person-days available, so this sprint they should plan for about 30 × 50 ÷ 54 ≈ 28 points, not the 30 they managed at full strength.
What the number can't tell you
A capacity figure is a ceiling for planning, not a promise. Three things move it in practice:
- Uneven skills. Fifty person-days of mostly front-end people won't absorb a sprint of back-end work. Check the plan against who is actually free, not just how many.
- Unplanned work. If support or production issues regularly take more than your overhead figure, raise the percentage rather than hoping the next sprint is quieter.
- New people. Someone in their first weeks adds less than a full person-day. Count them at half, or leave them out of the velocity scaling until they settle.
Use the figure to decide what not to commit to. A sprint planned at or slightly under capacity finishes; one planned over it rolls work forward and teaches everyone to distrust the plan.
Doing this every sprint without a spreadsheet
On ShipSprint's Team and Business plans, capacity planning counts approved leave and out-of-office automatically, so the number above is already there when the team plans. Per-column WIP limits then stop the board from taking on more than that capacity mid-sprint, and on Business, delivery forecasts use each team's measured velocity. The capacity planning page shows how it works, and the 14-day trial runs on the full Business plan with no card.
Questions about sprint capacity
It varies by team, so measure your own: compare the hours logged on sprint work with the hours available over two or three sprints. Many teams land somewhere between a fifth and a third, and teams that also handle support often lose more.
Either works if you're consistent. Hours are easier to explain to people outside the team; points or finished items avoid arguments about estimates. This calculator gives both: focus hours from your inputs, and a scaled velocity if you track points.
Count the days they don't work as leave. Someone on three days a week in a 10-day sprint adds 4 days to the leave total.
No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
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