Enter your sprint start date, team size, availability percentage, and sprint duration to calculate total available hours, sprint capacity in story points, and your safe planning capacity. Plug in your team's historical velocity to get a data-driven capacity forecast you can use directly in sprint planning.
Sprint Capacity
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Sprint End Date
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Total Available Hours
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Buffer (Reserved)
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Safe Planning Capacity
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Sprint Working Days
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Sprint capacity planning is the process of determining how much work your team can realistically complete in a single sprint. It factors in team size, individual availability (accounting for meetings, leave, and support tasks), working hours, and historical velocity so you commit to a realistic workload rather than over- or under-promising.
Sprint Capacity (story points) = Team Size × (Availability % / 100) × Sprint Working Days × Hours per Day × Velocity. For example, a 6-person team at 75% availability over 10 days at 8 hours/day with 0.5 story points/hour yields 180 story points of raw capacity. Subtract your buffer to get your safe planning capacity.
Most agile teams use 70–80% availability to account for daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, code reviews, ad-hoc support, and other non-feature work. If your team has unusually heavy meeting loads or cross-team obligations, 60–70% may be more realistic.
A buffer (typically 15–20% of total capacity) is held back to absorb unplanned work such as urgent bug fixes, sick days, or unexpected blockers. Planning to 100% of capacity almost always leads to spillover and reduces team morale. A 20% buffer is the most commonly recommended starting point.
Team velocity is the average number of story points your team completes per hour of focused work. To find it, divide the total story points completed in past sprints by the total available focused hours in those sprints. Using an average of the last 3–5 sprints gives a more stable baseline than relying on a single sprint.
Two-week sprints are the most common choice and provide a good balance between planning overhead and feedback frequency. One-week sprints suit fast-moving teams or early-stage products needing rapid validation. Three- or four-week sprints may work for teams with complex, slower-moving features, but they risk reduced agility.
The calculator adds the number of working days for your chosen sprint duration to the start date, automatically skipping weekends. For a 2-week sprint starting on Monday, you'll end on the Friday of the second week — 10 working days later.
Sprint capacity is the total story points your team could theoretically complete based on available hours and velocity. Safe planning capacity subtracts your buffer reserve from that total, giving you the number of story points you should actually commit to in the sprint. Committing to the safe capacity protects the team from chronic overcommitment.