Sprint capacity calculator
Sprint capacity is the number of hours your team can realistically put into sprint work, after leave, ceremonies, and the ordinary interruptions of a working week. Enter each person’s available days and focus factor and this calculator shows you the hours that actually reach the backlog.
Most capacity calculators multiply people by days by hours and stop there, which is how a five-person team ends up believing it has 400 hours. This one nets out ceremony time explicitly — sprint planning, standups, review, and the retrospective are scheduled hours that were never available for stories — and then applies focus factor to what is left. On a typical two-week sprint that gap is 30 to 40% of the raw number.
Team members
Plan to about 80% of net capacity — every sprint gets unplanned work.
How it’s calculated
Net capacity = Σ ((available days × hours per day) − ceremony hours) × focus factor
- Available days
- Working days this person is actually here, after annual leave, public holidays, training and any planned time on other teams.
- Ceremony hours
- Planning, daily standups, review and retrospective for the whole sprint, per person. Roughly 6–8 hours for a two-week sprint.
- Focus factor
- The share of a remaining day that reaches sprint work, typically 0.6 to 0.8. It covers interrupts, support duty, code review and context switching — not scheduled meetings, which you have already subtracted.
Worked example: A five-person team on a two-week sprint
Ten working days, eight hours a day. Three people are fully available, one is on leave for three days, one is half-time on another team, and everyone attends the usual ceremonies (7 hours each across the sprint). Focus factor is 0.7 for everyone.
| Headline availability (5 × 10 × 8) | 400 hours |
|---|---|
| Less leave and part-time (8 days) | −64 hours |
| Gross available hours (42 days) | 336 hours |
| Less ceremonies (5 × 7) | −35 hours |
| Less focus loss (30% of what remains) | −90.3 hours |
| Net sprint capacity | 210.7 hours |
| Net capacity in working days | 26.3 days |
| Utilisation of gross time | 63% |
The team started at a headline 400 hours and finished with 211 — barely half. Nothing here is waste: leave is leave, ceremonies are how the sprint is coordinated, and focus factor is the cost of working in an organisation with other people in it. The failure mode is not the loss, it is planning against the 400.
Reference table
Net sprint capacity in hours for a two-week sprint, 8-hour days, everyone fully available, 7 ceremony hours per person. Read across for your focus factor.
| Team size | Focus 0.6 | Focus 0.7 | Focus 0.8 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 people | 131 h | 153 h | 175 h |
| 5 people | 219 h | 256 h | 292 h |
| 7 people | 307 h | 358 h | 409 h |
| 9 people | 394 h | 460 h | 526 h |
| 12 people | 526 h | 613 h | 701 h |
What focus factor should you use?
Start at 0.7 and correct with evidence. A team with no on-call rotation, few meetings outside ceremonies and a stable backlog can sustain 0.8. A team that owns production support, gets pulled into incidents, or sits in a lot of cross-team coordination is realistically at 0.6 or below. The right way to set it is backwards: take a finished sprint, divide the hours that genuinely went into sprint stories by the hours that were available after ceremonies, and use that. Almost every team that guesses guesses high.
How much time do ceremonies actually take?
For a two-week sprint with a well-run process: sprint planning around two hours, daily standups fifteen minutes each for a total of two and a half hours, sprint review one hour, and the retrospective ninety minutes. That is roughly seven hours per person, per sprint — about 9% of a fortnight. If your number is materially higher, the problem is usually meeting length rather than meeting count, and the retrospective timebox calculator is a reasonable place to start trimming.
Should you plan in hours or in story points?
Plan the commitment in points using velocity, and use capacity as the sanity check. Velocity already has an average amount of leave and interruption baked into it, so for a normal sprint it is the better predictor and it costs nothing to maintain. Capacity earns its keep when the coming sprint is not normal: a holiday week, two people onboarding, a planned migration that eats a rotation. In those sprints the historical average is actively misleading and the hours arithmetic is what saves you.
How do you convert capacity hours into story points?
Divide net capacity by your historical hours-per-point, which you can derive from your own sprint history rather than a rule of thumb. The conversion is genuinely contested and worth understanding before you lean on it — a point is a measure of relative size and uncertainty, not a bucket of hours, and the ratio drifts as a team gets better at estimating. Treat the result as an upper bound to argue with, not a commitment.
Where this number misleads you
- Planning against gross hours. The headline number ignores ceremonies and interruption and is usually 60% higher than what the team can deliver.
- Applying focus factor to meeting time. Ceremonies are already gone; multiplying them by 0.7 as well double-counts the loss and understates capacity.
- Using the same focus factor forever. It is an empirical number. Recalculate it from a finished sprint once a quarter.
- Forgetting the Scrum Master and Product Owner. If they pick up sprint work, count their availability; if they do not, leaving them in inflates the total.
- Treating capacity as a target. It is a ceiling on what is possible, not a quota to fill. Planning to 100% of capacity leaves no room for the unplanned work that arrives in every sprint.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate sprint capacity?+
For each person, multiply their available working days by hours per day, subtract their ceremony hours for the sprint, then multiply what remains by their focus factor. Add the results together. The two steps most calculators skip are subtracting ceremonies explicitly and letting focus factor vary per person — a team lead on interrupt duty and a developer with clear time do not have the same effective capacity.
What is a realistic focus factor?+
Between 0.6 and 0.8 for most teams, with 0.7 as a sensible starting point. Below 0.6 usually means production support or coordination overhead is eating the sprint and is worth raising in a retrospective. Above 0.8 is achievable but rare, and normally only for teams with no on-call duty and very few meetings outside ceremonies.
What is the difference between capacity and velocity?+
Capacity is how many hours the team has in the sprint ahead; velocity is how many story points it has historically completed. Capacity is prospective and has to be recalculated every sprint. Velocity is empirical and already includes an average amount of leave and interruption. Use velocity for a normal sprint and capacity when the coming sprint is unusual.
Should you include the Scrum Master in sprint capacity?+
Only to the extent they take on sprint backlog items. A dedicated Scrum Master who facilitates, removes impediments and does not pull stories should be excluded from the capacity total, otherwise you are planning work against hours that were never going to touch the backlog. A part-time Scrum Master who also develops should be included at their realistic development availability.
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