Story Points Calculator
Rate the three things story points actually measure — amount of work, complexity, and risk — and get a consistent Fibonacci estimate, plus a points-to-time conversion that goes through your team's velocity rather than a made-up hourly rate.
Free · No signup · Runs entirely in your browser
Story points measure three things — the amount of work, the complexity, and the risk. Rate each and this story points calculator maps the total onto the Fibonacci scale, so two people estimating the same story reach the same number for the same reasons.
How much is there simply to do?
How intricate is it once you start?
How much do you not yet know?
Mostly volume — there is simply a lot of it. Splitting this into separate stories is usually straightforward and usually worth doing.
Points are relative, not absolute: a two-point story should be twice the effort of a one-point story, and that is all they promise. The day figure above goes through your team's own velocity for exactly that reason — there is no such thing as a point being eight hours.
Most estimation pain is specification pain arriving late. If you are building largely on your own, Tekk turns what you want into specs your coding agent can execute — which makes the uncertainty score the one worth attacking.
What is being scored
Story points cover three things, and the definition is not ours. Mike Cohn — whose page on this ranks on the same search you probably arrived from — describes points as covering "the amount of work, complexity, and risk/uncertainty involved".
So those are the three ratings, each 1–5:
| Factor | The question |
|---|---|
| Amount of work | How much is there simply to do? |
| Complexity | How intricate is it once you start? |
| Risk & uncertainty | How much do you not yet know? |
A task can be enormous and trivial, or tiny and terrifying. Scoring them separately is what stops those collapsing into the same number.
The mapping
| Total score | Points |
|---|---|
| 3 | 1 |
| 4 | 2 |
| 5–6 | 3 |
| 7–8 | 5 |
| 9–10 | 8 |
| 11–12 | 13 |
| 13–15 | 21 — split it |
The bands widen deliberately. Distinguishing a 1 from a 2 is a real judgement; distinguishing a 13 from a 14 is not, and a scale that offers that precision is inviting a pointless argument.
Points are not hours
This is the part every second calculator on this subject gets wrong, and the source is unambiguous about it:
That does not mean you should say, "One story point = eight hours."
What points do promise is proportionality: "A user story that is assigned two story points should be twice as much effort as a one-point story." That is the entire contract.
The reason it matters practically: a fixed hours-per-point rate turns estimates back into commitments about time, which is the thing points were introduced to avoid. It also breaks the moment the team changes, because the rate was never a property of the work.
Converting properly
There is a legitimate way to get from points to a date, and it runs through the team's own measured velocity:
days = (points ÷ velocity) × sprint length in weeks × 5
A 5-point story, for a team completing 20 points in a two-week sprint:
5 ÷ 20 = 0.25 sprints → 0.5 weeks → 2.5 days
Change the team and the answer changes, which is correct. Velocity absorbs everything that differs between teams — seniority, codebase, meeting load — and that is precisely why it works where a universal rate does not.
Two signals worth acting on
21 points means split it. A large estimate is usually a story that has not been broken down, not a story that will take a long time. Split it into pieces you can argue about individually.
High uncertainty means run a spike. If the unknowns are driving the number, a bigger estimate does not resolve them — it books more time to discover them in. Timebox a day to answer the open question, then estimate what is left.
How it works
- 1
Rate the three factors
Amount of work, complexity, and risk or uncertainty, each from 1 to 5. Those are not arbitrary categories — they are the three things Mike Cohn's original definition covers, so this story points calculator scores what the practice was designed around.
- 2
Read the estimate off the scale
The total maps onto the modified Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. The bands widen as the numbers do, which is the point of the scale — the gap between 1 and 2 is worth arguing about, the gap between 13 and 21 is not.
- 3
Convert through velocity, never through hours
Enter what your team actually completes per sprint and the tool turns points into days. It will not offer you a fixed hours-per-point rate, because that is the one thing the practice explicitly warns against.
Frequently asked questions
- What do story points actually measure?
- Effort — which Mike Cohn's definition breaks into three parts: the amount of work, the complexity, and the risk or uncertainty involved. A task can be enormous and trivial, or tiny and terrifying, and a single-number gut estimate blurs those together. Rating them separately is what makes two people's estimates comparable.
- How many hours is a story point?
- None, and that is deliberate. The canonical guidance is explicit: "That does not mean you should say, 'One story point = eight hours.'" Points are relative — a two-point story should be twice the effort of a one-point story, and that is the whole promise. Any hours to story points calculator offering a fixed rate has removed the reason points exist.
- Is there a story points to hours calculator that works?
- Only one that goes through your team's velocity, which is what this tool does. If the team completes 20 points in a two-week sprint, a 5-point story is a quarter of a sprint, or about 2.5 days of team time. That number is specific to your team and will drift as the team changes — which is correct, and is why it is measured rather than assumed.
- Why the Fibonacci scale?
- Because the gaps grow with the numbers, which matches how confidently anyone can actually estimate. Telling a 1 from a 2 is easy; telling a 13 from a 14 is fiction. The scale stops offering precision that nobody has.
- What happens at 21 points?
- The tool tells you to split the story rather than estimate it. Above 13 the number stops carrying information — nobody reliably distinguishes 21 from 34 — so a large estimate is really a signal that the story has not been broken down yet.
- Why does it sometimes suggest a spike?
- When uncertainty is the dominant factor and it is high. A bigger estimate does not resolve unknowns; it just books more time to discover them in. Timeboxing a day to answer the open question and then re-estimating gives a smaller number and a truer one.
- Can I use this instead of planning poker?
- Use it alongside. Planning poker's value is the conversation that happens when two people show different cards, and no calculator replaces that. Where the story points calculator helps is anchoring the discussion — arguing about whether complexity is a 3 or a 4 is more productive than arguing about whether the whole thing is a 5 or an 8.
- Should the whole team agree on the ratings?
- Yes, and the disagreements are the useful part. If one person rates uncertainty 1 and another rates it 5, they know different things about the story, and the estimate matters far less than surfacing that gap before work starts.
- Do points mean the same thing across teams?
- No, and they are not supposed to. One team's 5 is another team's 8, which is why velocity is measured per team and why comparing story points between teams is meaningless. It is also why a story points to hours calculator that assumes a universal rate cannot be right for anybody.
- What velocity should I use if we are a new team?
- You cannot know it yet, so estimate in points for two or three sprints and let velocity emerge from what actually got done. Guessing a velocity up front and then converting to a date produces a commitment built on a number nobody has measured.
- Does the rubric replace judgement?
- No. A story points calculator makes judgement consistent, which is different. The ratings are still yours; what the rubric does is stop the same story getting a 3 on Tuesday and an 8 on Thursday because the mood in the room changed.
- Do you store the numbers I enter?
- No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is logged, and there is no account. Disconnect from the internet and it will still work.
- Why is this free, and what is Tekk?
- Tekk is a spec-driven development platform for people building software with AI coding agents. This calculator costs us nothing to run — and most estimation pain is specification pain arriving late, which is the problem we work on. No signup, no run limit, no upsell inside the tool.
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