Teams & projects
Team capacity calculator
Enter the team size, sprint length, hours per day, focus factor and total days off to get the realistic hours your team can commit to this sprint.
Days off is the total for the whole team: two people away for two days each is 4. Public holidays count for every member.
How sprint capacity is calculated
Capacity starts with the person-days available: team members × working days in the sprint, minus every day of leave, training or public holiday. Multiply by the hours each person works per day to get the available hours. Not all of that goes into sprint work, so the result is multiplied by a focus factor, the share of the day actually spent on backlog items once stand-ups, reviews, support requests, email and interruptions are taken out.
Formula: capacity = (members × sprint days − days off) × hours per day × focus factor. Example: a team of 6 in a 10-day sprint has 60 person-days. With 4 days of leave that drops to 56, and at 8 hours a day to 448 hours. A 70% focus factor leaves 313.6 hours to plan with, about 52.3 hours per person and 31.4 team hours per sprint day. Of the 480 gross hours, 32 went to leave and 134.4 to overhead.
| Focus factor | Per person, 10-day sprint, no leave | Per person with 2 days off |
|---|---|---|
| 50% | 40 h | 32 h |
| 60% | 48 h | 38.4 h |
| 70% | 56 h | 44.8 h |
| 80% | 64 h | 51.2 h |
| 90% | 72 h | 57.6 h |
The table assumes 8-hour days, so one person has 80 hours in a two-week sprint before any deductions.
Choosing a focus factor and using the number
The most reliable focus factor is your own history: divide the hours actually logged on sprint work in the last few sprints by the hours available. Teams that do not track time often start between 60% and 75% and adjust after two or three sprints. A team that also handles production support or customer escalations should go lower, or set aside a fixed support budget and plan only the rest.
Common mistakes are forgetting public holidays (they remove a day for every member), counting part-time people as full days, and treating 100% as achievable. Planning to the full capacity figure also leaves no room for surprises; many teams commit to around 80–90% of it and keep the rest as a buffer. Capacity in hours is a ceiling for planning, not a target to fill, and if the team estimates in story points the velocity of past sprints remains the better forecast; use the hours to adjust that velocity when this sprint has more or less leave than usual.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good focus factor for a Scrum team?
Many teams land between 60% and 80%. Measure it from past sprints if you can: hours spent on sprint items divided by hours available. New teams or teams with support duty are usually at the low end.
How do I account for part-time team members?
Either enter their missing days in the days-off total (a person working 3 of 5 days misses 4 days in a 10-day sprint), or set hours per day to the team average.
Should I plan the sprint to 100% of capacity?
No. Unplanned work, bugs and estimation errors always appear. Committing to roughly 80–90% of the calculated capacity keeps the sprint goal achievable.