For years the answer to “can I see what one person has on their plate in Jira?” was no. You could see a team’s sprint capacity. For an individual, you were building a filter or opening a spreadsheet with that data.
In July 2026 Atlassian shipped a Capacity tab, and the answer became “partly, if you’re on Premium.”
What is individual capacity planning in Jira?
Individual capacity planning is the resource allocation question asked one person at a time: how much of their time is committed, and how much is left, over a stretch of weeks. Sprint capacity tells you whether a team can take on 40 story points. Individual capacity tells you whether Marta can take on anything at all next week, given she’s on two projects and out next Monday.
- It matters in three situations:
somebody is shared across multiple projects and no single board shows their total load;
somebody is the only person who can do a thing, so their available capacity is the real constraint;
or someone wants a date and you’d rather answer with numbers.
Individual level vs team level. Team capacity planning asks whether a group can absorb a body of work — it’s how most organizations set project priority across a portfolio, and it’s what you do before names are attached. Team level capacity management is coarse on purpose. Individual capacity planning asks whether one person has room, and it’s where plans fall apart, because a team can look fine on average while one person carries three projects.
The Capacity view does the second. Remember that — we’ll come back to it.
What shipped: the Jira Capacity view
No configuration needed. On Premium or Enterprise it sits in the space beside Timeline, Backlog, Board and List, visible to users with the right space permissions, in team-managed, company-managed and business Jira projects.
The left column is labelled Capacity by person. Each person expands into the work they’re on, one column per week, a percentage per cell. Two views read the same plan:
- People view — one row per person, with a capacity bar above them. Over 100% in a week and it turns red. Flagged, not blocked: in Atlassian’s words, “there’s no hard cap.” The same epic can sit under several team members with different percentages, and an “Add work” row suggests what to add next.
- Work view — one row per epic, project or work item, showing who’s on it and whether it’s adequately staffed. People view answers “is Marta underwater?”. Work view answers “does the migration have anyone on it?”.
How leave works, because it’s counterintuitive. Individual time off isn’t a setting that subtracts from availability. It’s a row like any other, and you put a percentage in it. For example, a week with 100% leave plus 30% of a project reads as 130% and goes red — not “nothing available” but “over capacity”. On-call, training and maintenance work the same way.
Entering the numbers feels deliberately spreadsheet-like: allocation per person, per work item, per week; percentages, hours or days switchable from the toolbar; multi-select, copy-paste, drag-to-autofill, bulk remove. There’s CSV import too, which tells you how much typing Atlassian expects.
Next to Jira Plans. If you use Jira Plans — previously Advanced Roadmaps — there’s overlap. Jira Advanced Roadmaps covers cross-project scheduling, dependencies and scenarios. The Capacity tab covers who does how much. Both are advanced planning features, both Premium. Plans is where you decide when things happen; Capacity is where you decide whether anyone can do them.
How to set up Jira capacity planning per person
- Open the Capacity tab in your space to create your first plan.
- Add your people. The roster is manual — there’s an “Add people” row at the bottom.
- Work view for a quarter, People view for this week. Same plan, different entry point.
- Put non-project time in first. Leave, on-call, maintenance. Skip it and every number after is wrong, and it’s the step everyone skips.
- Allocate the committed work, week by week.
- Read the bars, rebalance, repeat. Nobody gets stopped, so somebody has to look.
Where Jira individual capacity planning stops
- Premium and Enterprise only. Not on Free or Standard. For many customers the conversation ends here.
- Everything is anchored to a 40-hour week. The documentation calls it “a standard 40-hour workweek,” a consistent baseline across the site, and percentages are “anchored to a 40-hour work week.” One baseline for everyone — that’s the whole workload calculation. Someone on a 30-hour contract hits full load at 75% and never turns red. A contractor on 4/4/2/2/4 has no honest number. Two people at “80% allocated” aren’t in the same situation, and the view has no ability to say so.
- Public holidays are on you. Leave goes in per person, per week, by hand. No country calendar. Fine for one office, painful for multiple teams across Poland, Germany and the US.
- Allocation happens at epic level. The work rows are epics. Right altitude for quarterly allocation across workstreams, wrong one for scheduling somebody’s Tuesday.
- Team capacity isn’t here yet. Planning by team capacity sits on Atlassian’s roadmap as its own item, so for now, stay tuned. Early planning is usually at team level, and you’re not doing it here.
- No story points. Percentages, hours or days only. If your teams estimate in points, somebody converts by hand.
- Planned is not actual. Everything here is a plan; what people did lives in worklogs. Resource utilization as a measured number isn’t readable in this view.
- Somebody has to keep it fed. Managing capacity per person, per epic, per week, with a manual roster on top, is real upkeep. A capacity plan nobody updates is worse than none, because people believe it for about a month.
Jira capacity planning per person on Standard and Free
If the Capacity view isn’t available to you, you still have to manage resources somehow. None of this is elegant, and plenty of teams run on it:
- Original Estimate plus a filter per person, summed. Fine at five people, miserable at fifty.
- A Workload Pie Chart gadget with a saved filter and Original Estimate as the statistic. Rough read per assignee, no dates in it.
- Sprint capacity on a Scrum board. Team-level only, but it’ll stop an obviously impossible sprint.
- A spreadsheet. Honest about what it is. Stale by Wednesday.
We’ve covered the native options in more detail in our guide to capacity planning in Jira, and there’s a long-running thread on Atlassian Community where people compare notes.
Where Planyway adds to Jira’s capacity planning
Jira’s native capacity planning is a useful starting point, especially for teams already working with Plans. But if you need to account for individual work schedules, plan work at task level, or compare planned capacity with actual time spent, you may need additional functionality.
Planyway extends Jira’s planning capabilities with more detailed resource management features:
Jira’s native limitations | What Planyway adds |
|---|
Available on Premium and Enterprise plans | Works on all Jira plans, including Free, with a free plan for teams of up to 10 |
A standard 40-hour workweek | Individual work schedules for part-time employees and contractors |
Public holidays configured manually | Country-specific holiday schemes and vacations that automatically reduce available capacity |
Resource allocation at the epic level | Planning at task level to see who is working on what and when |
No team-level capacity view | Workload grouped by team, based on each member’s actual working schedule |
Plans and capacity shown in separate views | A shared timeline with tasks and workload, so you can see how scheduling changes affect capacity |
Planned work without integrated actual-time reporting | Two-way Jira worklog sync and planned-versus-tracked time reports |
The last two capabilities are particularly useful when you need to connect planning with execution. You can see how assigning or rescheduling work affects the team’s capacity, then compare the original plan with the time people actually log in Jira.
Here’s what resource planning looks like in Planyway:
You can try Planyway for free :)
P.S. We also have an in-depth product tour of our capacity planning features.
FAQ
Is individual capacity planning available in all Jira plans?
No. The Capacity tab is on Jira Premium and Enterprise. Free and Standard customers need native workarounds — saved filters, estimate fields, dashboard gadgets — or a Marketplace app.
How does Jira calculate individual capacity?
From a standard 40-hour workweek used as a consistent baseline across the site. You allocate each person’s time per epic per week in percentages, hours or days. There’s no per-person working-hours setting, so part-time schedules are expressed as a fraction of forty.
How do you record time off?
Leave goes in as its own row under the person, with a percentage per week like any other allocation. A week at 100% leave is fully consumed, so work allocated on top shows that person over 100%.
Does Jira stop you over-allocating someone?
No. Above 100% the bar turns red, but there’s no hard cap.
Can you plan by team capacity instead of per person?
Not yet. Planning work by team capacity sits on Atlassian’s roadmap as its own item. For now the Capacity tab is individual level only.
Is this the same as Jira Advanced Roadmaps?
No. They differ by functionality: Jira Plans handles cross-project scheduling, dependencies and scenarios; the Capacity tab handles who is allocated to what, week by week. Both are Premium, and teams managing a portfolio usually end up using both.
