Capacity
How do you account for public holidays in sprint planning?
Subtract them per person, by that person’s country, before the sprint is sized — not as a flat day off for the whole team. Each member’s available days = working days in the sprint window on their national calendar, minus their booked leave, scaled by their part-time fraction. The team’s capacity is the sum of those individual numbers, and a sprint that spans a holiday in one country but not another shrinks by exactly the people it affects.
Why the flat adjustment is wrong for everyone
In 2026, the national calendars this engine covers range from United States with 11 weekday holidays to Sweden with 7. A Prague–Berlin–London team does not lose days together; it loses them in different weeks, which is precisely when a “we all know about the holiday” plan quietly over-commits the people who are actually there.
| Country | Weekday holidays in 2026 |
|---|---|
| United States | 11 |
| Czechia | 11 |
| Canada | 10 |
| Ireland | 10 |
| France | 9 |
| Spain | 9 |
| Portugal | 9 |
| Brazil | 9 |
| United Kingdom | 8 |
| Netherlands | 8 |
| Poland | 8 |
| Germany | 7 |
| Italy | 7 |
| Sweden | 7 |
National sets only — regional holidays (a Bavarian team loses more days than a Berlin one) sit outside these counts, and each country page names what its set leaves out.
The three failure modes to design out
- Averaging the holiday away. Spreading a lost day across the sprint (“we’re at 95% this sprint”) hides that specific people are gone on specific days — reviews queued on them still stall.
- Counting the holiday but not the bridge day. A Thursday holiday reliably takes Friday with it as booked leave. The holiday is the calendar’s subtraction; the bridge day is a time-off subtraction — plan for both, from bookings, not folklore.
- Fixing the calendar but not the velocity. If velocity is computed per calendar day, every holiday-shortened sprint deflates it, and the deflated pace then under-sizes the next sprint. Velocity must divide by days people were available, or the correction leaks back in as a different error.
Do it for your team in seconds
Pick countries and headcount and the calculator subtracts every national holiday in the window, per person, statutes cited — then time off and part-time fractions on top. No account.
Related: the sprint capacity formula · working days by country and year