Teams & projects
Story points to hours calculator
Enter story points and your team's hours per point to estimate hours and days, or flip the direction to convert a time estimate back into points.
Find your hours per point from history: divide the hours a past sprint took by the points it delivered.
How points convert to hours
Story points measure relative size, not time, so there is no universal conversion. The only honest bridge is your own team's hours per point, measured from finished work: take the hours a past sprint actually took and divide by the points it delivered. If a sprint burned 120 hours to complete 20 points, that is 6 hours per point. The calculator then multiplies: 8 points × 6 hours = 48 hours, which at 6 focused hours a day is 8 days. Switch the direction to divide instead, turning a 24-hour job into 24 ÷ 6 = 4 points.
Working hours per day is deliberately lower than a full shift because meetings, email and context switching eat into a workday. Many teams plan on 5–6 productive hours, not 8, so a point that maps to 6 hours spreads across more than one calendar day.
| Points | Hours (at 6/pt) | Days (at 6 h/day) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 h | 1 day |
| 2 | 12 h | 2 days |
| 3 | 18 h | 3 days |
| 5 | 30 h | 5 days |
| 8 | 48 h | 8 days |
| 13 | 78 h | 13 days |
When to convert, and when not to
Use this to sanity-check a forecast or explain a plan to stakeholders who think in hours, not to turn points into a timesheet. The whole point of story points is that they stay stable while hours-per-point improves as the team gets faster; if you convert every estimate to hours up front, you lose that signal and recreate the precision trap that points were meant to avoid.
Treat the hours figure as a range, not a promise. Larger stories carry more uncertainty, which is why many teams cap a single story at 8 or 13 points and split anything bigger. Recalculate your hours per point every few sprints, because a conversion based on last quarter's velocity slowly drifts out of date as the team, the codebase and the mix of work all change.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours is one story point?
There is no fixed answer. It depends entirely on your team's velocity. Measure it by dividing the hours a recent sprint took by the points it completed, and expect the figure to change over time.
Should I convert story points to hours at all?
Only for rough forecasting or to communicate with people who think in hours. Estimating in hours from the start removes the relative-sizing benefit of points and tends to invite false precision.
Why use fewer than 8 working hours per day?
Meetings, email, reviews and context switching mean few people get a full 8 hours of focused work. Planning on 5 to 6 productive hours a day gives estimates that hold up in practice.