Sprint capacity calculator
Sprint capacity is the number of hours your team can actually spend on sprint work: for each person, the working days left after holidays and time off, times their hours per day, times the share of the day that goes to sprint work. Enter your team below to get capacity in hours and a story-point commitment scaled from your past velocity.
Free, no signup. Runs in your browser; nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Team members
- 50.4 h
- 39.2 h
- 43.2 h
Past velocity
Sprint capacity
132.8 h
83% of 160 h at full strength
Suggested commitment
26 pts
Range 23–29 pts, from an average velocity of 31.7 over a 160 h baseline.
#The method
How sprint capacity is calculated
Capacity is worked out per person and then added up. Holidays are team-wide, so they come off every person's days; personal time off comes off only that person's. A focus percentage below 100 accounts for meetings, support rotations, reviews and everything else that fills a day without moving a sprint ticket. 60–80% is typical for a team with a normal meeting load.
The story-point suggestion assumes your velocity scales with available hours. It takes the average of the sprints you enter and multiplies it by this sprint's capacity divided by the capacity those sprints had. If you leave that baseline blank, it uses this same team with no holidays and no time off, which is right when your past sprints were roughly full-strength.
The range applies the same scaling to your lowest and highest past velocity. Commit near the low end if missing a sprint costs you more than leaving a little scope on the table.
- Available days, per person
days = max(0, sprint days − holidays − personal days off)Never negative: someone off for the whole sprint contributes zero, not a deficit.
- Capacity hours, per person
hours = days × hours per day × focus %Team capacity is the sum over every person.
- Suggested commitment
points = ⌊ average velocity × capacity ÷ baseline capacity ⌋Rounded down. Baseline defaults to the team's capacity with no holidays or time off.
#Questions
Frequently asked questions
- What is sprint capacity?
- Sprint capacity is the total time a team can put into sprint work during one sprint. It is calculated per person as available working days, after holidays and time off, multiplied by hours per day and by the share of each day that goes to sprint work, then summed across the team.
- What focus factor should I use?
- Start with 70% if you do not know. Then measure: compare the hours your team logged against sprint tickets with the hours they were available over the last few sprints, and use that ratio. A team with heavy support or meeting duties can sit well below 60%.
- How do I convert capacity hours into story points?
- Use your own history. Take your average velocity from recent sprints and scale it by this sprint's capacity compared with the capacity those sprints had. If a normal sprint gives 300 hours and 40 points, a sprint with 240 hours suggests about 32 points.
- Should holidays be subtracted once or for every team member?
- For every team member. A public holiday removes a day from each person who would have worked it, so a five-person team loses five person-days, not one. Subtracting it once from the team total overstates capacity.
- Does this calculator store my data?
- No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing you type is sent to a server.
#How Kavanah does it
How Kavanah plans a sprint
Kavanah's sprint planner works in hours, not just points. Each person has a weekly capacity, and the planner sets the forecast hours of the drafted sprint against the team's capacity, flagging a set that does not fit.
It forecasts at two confidence levels. Each person's p50 and p90 multipliers come from their own estimate-versus-actual history: completed tasks from the last 90 days that carry both an estimate and actual hours. With fewer than five completed samples a person inherits the team's numbers, and with no history the planner says it is uncalibrated rather than inventing a p90. It defaults to committing at p90, and it records what each sprint committed to so the hit rate is measured against that snapshot, not against points edited after the fact.
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