The Monthly Project Calculator estimates how many projects can be completed from a monthly pool of work hours. It combines available people, working days, productive hours per day, and average project effort to produce a realistic capacity estimate.
Use it for service teams, freelancers, internal operations groups, or project offices that need a quick monthly throughput target. The output also shows unused capacity and the utilization required by a chosen project target, making overcommitment easier to spot before work is assigned.
1. Enter team size
Count only people who will contribute project work during the month.
2. Set working days
Remove holidays, planned leave, and other unavailable days.
3. Estimate productive time
Use focused project hours rather than total paid hours.
4. Enter average project effort
Use completed-project records when available.
5. Read whole-project capacity
The main result rounds down because a partially completed project is not counted as finished.
This is an average-effort model. It assumes work can be distributed across people without material coordination or skill constraints.
The main result is the maximum whole-project throughput supported by the entered capacity and average effort.
Complex dependencies, specialist bottlenecks, and project overlap may lower actual throughput.
Given: 4 people, 21 working days, 5.5 productive hours per day, and 45 hours per project.
Calculation: Capacity = 4 × 21 × 5.5 = 462 hours. Whole projects = floor(462 ÷ 45) = 10. Unused capacity = 462 − 450 = 12 hours.
Result: The team can plan for 10 completed projects, averaging 2.5 projects per person.
A fraction of a project represents unfinished work, so the completion estimate uses whole projects.
Subtract meetings and routine administration unless they are part of the project effort estimate.
Calculate separate scenarios for small, medium, and large projects or use a weighted average.
Not necessarily. Onboarding, coordination, and specialist roles can reduce the gain.
Use median or average actual hours from recently completed, comparable projects.