Capacity planning calculator
Capacity planning compares the hours of work you've promised with the hours your team can actually book. Ten people on 8-hour days across 21 working days, minus 6 leave days and one holiday, have 1,552 hours. Book them at 80% and 1,400 hours of demand leaves you 158 hours short.
Fill in every field to see the result.
How to use it
Step 1
Enter the headcount, the contracted hours in one day and the working days in the period.
Step 2
Add the leave days already booked across the team, then company holidays. A holiday costs every person a day, so it's counted per head for you.
Step 3
Enter the demand, meaning the hours of project work the period has to deliver. Then enter your target: the share of available hours you plan to book, such as 80.
Step 4
Read the gap. A negative figure is a shortfall, and the people-needed figure shows how many heads that demand calls for at your target.
Questions people ask
What target utilisation should a capacity plan use?
Plan below 100%, because meetings, admin and sick days take hours no project plan shows. One public reference point: Deltek's Clarity A&E study, published on 12 May 2026, put staff utilisation at architecture and engineering firms just under 60%. Pick a target your team has actually hit before.
What's the difference between capacity planning and resource allocation?
Capacity planning asks whether the team has enough hours for the work in total. Resource allocation decides who works which hours on which day. Answer the first question before the second, or you'll spend a week scheduling a plan that was short from the start.
How does PeopleMuster plan capacity?
PeopleMuster shows a capacity plan across the team by day, with under, full and over bands and leave and holidays built in. Approve a leave request and that day empties on the plan straight away, because leave and capacity share one database. It's $3 per person per month, every module included.