How to calculate sprint capacity in hours and points
In short: To calculate sprint capacity, take each person's working days in the sprint minus holidays and their days off, multiply by their hours a day and by a focus factor, and add up the team. To turn it into story points, scale your average velocity by this sprint's hours over the team's full hours: 39 points x 310 / 380 hours is 31.8, so plan 31.
Sprint capacity is the time a team really has for sprint work in the coming sprint. Knowing how to calculate sprint capacity takes the guesswork out of planning: count each person's days, turn the days into hours, take off the time that goes elsewhere, and then, if the team plans in story points, carry the result over to velocity. This guide works one real two-week sprint through every step, the one that contains Thanksgiving 2026, and shows the two places most capacity sheets go wrong. The sprint capacity calculator does the same arithmetic with your team.
How to calculate sprint capacity: the formula
For each person: capacity = (working days in the sprint - holidays - their days off) x their hours a day x focus factor. The team's sprint capacity is the sum. Count people, not the team as a block, because days off do not spread evenly: one developer at a three-day conference loses three days, not three fifths of a day each across a team of five.
The example team works a sprint from Monday, November 16 to Friday, November 27, 2026: 10 weekdays. Thanksgiving Day falls on Thursday, November 26, a federal holiday on the Office of Personnel Management's list, so the whole team has 9 working days. Priya, Marcus, Sam and Lin work 8-hour days and Jo works 6. Marcus takes Friday, November 27 off, and Sam is away for 3 days.
| Person | Days | Hours a day | Hours | Focus hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priya | 9 | 8 | 72 | 46.8 |
| Marcus | 8 | 8 | 64 | 41.6 |
| Jo | 9 | 6 | 54 | 35.1 |
| Sam | 6 | 8 | 48 | 31.2 |
| Lin | 9 | 8 | 72 | 46.8 |
| Team | 41 | 310 | 201.5 |
So the team has 41 person-days, 310 hours and 201.5 focus hours. You can open this sprint in the calculator and change any figure.
Where the focus factor comes from
The focus factor is the share of a working hour that goes to sprint work rather than email, support, interviews and meetings. Many sheets type in 70 or 80 percent and never look again. Measure it instead: divide the hours the team logged on sprint work in the last sprint by the hours it had available. This team logged 247 hours on sprint tasks in a sprint with 380 hours available, and 247 / 380 = 65 percent, the figure used above. Average two or three sprints if they vary.
The Scrum events alone take a visible slice of a short sprint. The Scrum Guide sets the Daily Scrum at 15 minutes and gives the longer events a maximum for a one-month sprint, for example:
Sprint Planning is timeboxed to a maximum of eight hours for a one-month Sprint. For shorter Sprints, the event is usually shorter.
If the team runs its two-week events at half the one-month maximums, planning 4 hours, review 2 and retrospective 1.5, and holds 9 Daily Scrums of 15 minutes (2.25 hours), each person spends 9.75 hours in events. For Priya that is 13.5 percent of her 72 hours before anything else interrupts her. A measured focus factor already includes this; a factor set by hand has to allow for it.
From hours to story points: scale the velocity
Hours do not convert into story points, because a point is a relative size each team sets for itself. Velocity and capacity meet through a proportion instead. Velocity is the points a team finished in past sprints, and it was earned at the team's normal strength. The example team finished 41, 36 and 40 points in its last three sprints, an average of 39. With nobody away, its 10-day sprint has 10 x (8 + 8 + 6 + 8 + 8) = 380 hours. This sprint has 310, which is 81.6 percent of that, so the forecast is 39 x 310 / 380 = 31.8 points. Round down and plan 31.
Two things follow. First, the focus factor drops out: whether it is 65 or 80 percent, the ratio of this sprint's hours to normal hours is the same, so the points forecast does not change. Focus hours matter when the team plans tasks in hours, not when it plans in points. Second, holidays count twice over in a short sprint. Thanksgiving alone takes the team to 342 hours and a forecast of 35.1 points; Marcus's Friday and Sam's three days take it the rest of the way to 31.8.
The ratio assumes the past sprints were at full strength. If they were short-handed too, the average undercounts what a full sprint holds, and you can scale each past sprint up by its own availability before averaging.
Common mistakes in sprint capacity planning
- Counting calendar days. A two-week sprint has 10 working days, or fewer when a federal holiday falls inside it. The working days by month pages and the business days calculator count them for any dates.
- Taking off meetings twice. Subtract event hours or use a measured focus factor, not both.
- Planning to the decimal. 31.8 points is a forecast with real error in it. The Scrum Guide calls the result of planning a forecast, and rounding down leaves room for the work nobody saw coming.
- Dropping people who are away. Keep everyone on the list with their days off, so the availability figure compares the same team sprint after sprint.
Capacity is one input to Sprint Planning, not the plan. To keep the planning meeting itself inside its time box, run it with the meeting timer, and the sprint capacity calculator gives you the hours, the focus hours and the points forecast to bring into it.
Questions people ask
Should sprint capacity be in hours or story points?
Use the unit the team estimates in. Teams that break stories into tasks with hour estimates compare the task hours with focus hours. Teams that estimate in story points use the velocity forecast, and treat the hours only as the measure of how full the sprint is compared with a normal one. Mixing the two, such as a fixed number of hours per point, tends to turn a relative estimate into a false promise of precision.
How do you calculate capacity for a part-time team member?
Use their real hours a day, not a percentage of someone else's. A developer on 6 hours a day for 9 working days has 54 hours; at a 65 percent focus factor that is 35.1 focus hours. Someone split across two teams gets only the hours they give this team, agreed before planning.
Do you subtract meetings from sprint capacity?
Either subtract them or cover them with the focus factor, but not both. If the focus factor comes from history (hours logged on sprint work divided by hours available), the meetings are already in it. If you set the factor by hand, a 15 minute Daily Scrum every working day plus planning, review and retrospective can take more than a tenth of a two-week sprint, so count them.
What if the team's velocity history is short or unusual?
With fewer than three sprints, or after the team changed, treat the forecast as a rough guide and plan a little under it. Leave out a sprint that was cut short or had half the team away, or scale each past sprint by its own availability before averaging, so one odd sprint does not pull the average down.
Esta guía también está en español: Cómo calcular la capacidad del sprint: horas y puntos.
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