When the same engineer works across several Jira projects, issue assignment alone does not tell a delivery manager how much capacity that person has next month. Assignees show who is doing what today. They do not show who is already committed in November, or whose current assignment is about to end. This article explains how to plan that: the terms, a worked example, what Jira now offers natively, and when a dedicated app is worth adding. DS Solution builds Resource Planning for Jira, which is covered near the end.
What capacity planning means in Jira
Resource capacity planning decides, ahead of time, how each person’s working time is split across projects, teams and other commitments. The question is not “what is assigned to Alex today?” but “how much of Alex’s time is committed next month, and to what?”
Capacity, allocation and availability: a worked example
Three terms keep the arithmetic honest. Take Alex, who works 5 days of 8 hours (illustrative numbers).
| Term | Meaning | Alex |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Working time available in a period, after days off | 40 h a week |
| Allocation | Share of capacity committed to a project for a date range | Project A 60% (24 h), Project B 30% (12 h) |
| Availability | Capacity minus allocations | 10% (4 h) |
Allocation should follow real working time. In a week with a public holiday Alex’s capacity is 32 hours, so the same 60% is 19.2 hours, not 24. And if Project A’s allocation ends on 15 November, Alex’s availability rises from that date, which is the moment to plan the next assignment.
Why issue assignment does not show future availability
| Issue and sprint planning | People planning | |
|---|---|---|
| Decides | Which work items to do, with estimates and assignees | Who is committed to which project, and for how long |
| Horizon | Days or weeks | Several projects over months |
The two answer different questions and work best together. Where no people-level planning exists, the second one often lives in a spreadsheet that someone keeps in sync with Jira by hand.
What Jira offers natively
Atlassian’s individual capacity planning, announced in July 2026, is available on Premium and Enterprise plans. According to Atlassian’s documentation it offers People and Work views across the whole site, allocation in percentages, hours or days, CSV import, and work at epic level or higher. If your site is on Premium or Enterprise, try it first.
Limitation. Atlassian states that capacity plans currently use a fixed 40-hour workweek and do not yet reflect custom working-day settings.
Sources: Plan individual capacity for your team and the Jira release announcement, checked 3 October 2026.
When a dedicated resource planning app becomes useful
An app is worth considering when one or more of these apply:
- your Jira plan does not include native capacity planning (Atlassian documents it for Premium and Enterprise only);
- capacity has to follow your own working days, hours per day and public holidays;
- you organise people into units with leaders and want each unit’s plan in one view.
How Resource Planning for Jira approaches it
Resource Planning for Jira is a Jira Cloud app built by DS Solution, free on the Atlassian Marketplace. According to its documentation it stores allocations as a person, a project or unit, a date range and a share of capacity, in percent or man-days, following the working days, hours and public holidays you configure. You can filter allocations and export them to CSV. Setup order matters: create an organization unit, link your Jira projects to it, then add allocations. It adds an allocation plan beside your Jira work; it does not replace issue or sprint planning.
See how Resource Planning for Jira shows allocation and upcoming availability
