Leave and Capacity Planning for Architects

Why contracted hours overstate capacity

A full-time architect on 37.5 hours a week is contracted for 1,950 hours a year, but will spend far fewer on projects. Leave, bank holidays, training and practice time typically take a quarter of the year or more, and a resource plan that ignores them is overbooked from the first week.

Capacity planning in an architecture practice starts with an honest number for each person: the hours they can realistically give to projects across the year. That number drives fee proposals, programme commitments and hiring decisions. When it is too high, the practice promises deadlines the team cannot meet and fees that assume hours nobody has.

The fix is simple arithmetic done once a year per person and kept up to date as leave is booked. The rest of this guide sets it out.

What comes off the year

Five deductions turn contracted hours into project capacity: bank holidays, annual leave, an allowance for sickness, training and non-project practice time.

Bank holidays

GOV.UK lists 8 bank holidays in England and Wales for 2027, 9 in Scotland and 10 in Northern Ireland. Practices with studios in more than one nation should plan each studio against its own calendar. Many practices also close between Christmas and New Year and ask staff to use annual leave for the days in between, which should be agreed and shown in the plan early.

Annual leave

For capacity planning, use each person's working pattern, current leave balance and booked dates from the practice's records. Bank holiday treatment and leave arrangements vary by contract and policy, so check the terms that apply to each person before turning leave into a planning assumption.

Sickness, training and practice time

Allow a modest number of days for sickness and other absence. Add training: the RIBA asks chartered members to complete at least 35 hours of CPD a year, and many practices also run internal reviews and software training. Then allow for non-project time: practice meetings, marketing and bids, mentoring, office administration and IT. Directors and associates usually carry much more of this than project staff, so set the allowance per person, not once for the whole practice.

A worked capacity calculation

Work in days first, then convert to hours. The example below is illustrative, for a full-time project architect in an English studio on 7.5 hours a day.

Weekdays

52 weeks of 5 days gives 260 weekdays, or 1,950 contracted hours.

Bank holidays

8 days in England and Wales in 2027, leaving 252 days.

Annual leave

25 days under this contract, on top of bank holidays, leaving 227 days.

Sickness allowance

3 days, leaving 224 days, which is 1,680 hours.

Training

35 hours of CPD and internal training, leaving 1,645 hours.

Practice time

10% of the 1,680 available hours, which is 168 hours, leaving 1,477 hours.

Project capacity

1,477 hours a year, about 76% of contracted hours, or an average of about 28.4 hours a week across 52 weeks.

For a team of eight people on the same assumptions, project capacity is 8 times 1,477, or 11,816 hours a year. That is the number to set against the hours budgets of live and likely projects, not the 15,600 contracted hours the same team works on paper.

Run the calculation per person, because the answers vary widely. A director with 40% practice time and a part-time associate will have very different figures from a full-time Part 2 assistant. For how capacity relates to billable targets, see our guide to the architect utilisation rate.

Holiday rules for busy stages

A clear process for requesting and approving leave helps teams plan around submissions and tender dates. Build the process around the practice's current policy and each person's contractual arrangements.

Use project dates to identify likely clashes early, then agree cover and handovers through the practice's normal leave process. For questions about entitlements, notice or restrictions, check current HR guidance and the terms that apply to the person.

1. Publish key dates early.Planning submissions, tender issue and start on site, so people book around them.
2. Limit overlaps, not leave.Set a maximum number of people off from one project team in the same week.
3. Protect the two weeks before a deadline.Ask for leave in those weeks to be agreed with the project lead first.
4. Agree shutdowns in writing.If the office closes at Christmas, say how many leave days it uses at the start of the leave year.
5. Watch unused balances.Review balances each quarter so leave is not all taken in the last month of the leave year.
6. Cover handovers.Before two weeks off, the project lead names who picks up queries and site issues.

Building leave into the resource plan

The resource plan should show capacity net of leave week by week, so a person on holiday shows as unavailable rather than as free time that someone fills.

Then compare the plan with timesheets. If someone's non-project time is running at 20% when the plan assumed 10%, correct the plan rather than the person. Our guide to resource planning for architecture practices covers allocation in more depth, and timesheets by RIBA stage covers the codes that make the comparison possible.

Questions practices ask

Short answers to the leave and capacity questions UK practices ask most often.

How many working hours does a full-time architect have for projects in a year?

On a 37.5-hour week, contracted hours are 1,950 a year. After 8 bank holidays, 25 days' leave, a small sickness allowance, CPD and around 10% practice time, an illustrative project architect has about 1,450 to 1,500 project hours. Directors and associates usually have far fewer.

How many bank holidays are there in the UK?

It depends on the nation. GOV.UK lists 8 bank holidays in England and Wales for 2027, 9 in Scotland and 10 in Northern Ireland. Plan each studio against its own calendar.

How should bank holidays be handled in a capacity plan?

Load the calendar that applies to each studio and check how bank holidays are treated under the relevant employment terms and practice policy. Do not count the same day twice as both a bank holiday and annual leave.

How should leave around project deadlines be planned?

Use the practice's leave process to flag potential clashes early, agree cover and document handovers. Check current HR guidance and the terms that apply to the person for questions about leave requests or restrictions.

Should CPD be counted as non-billable time?

Yes. Give training and CPD its own timesheet code so it is visible and can be planned. The RIBA asks chartered members to complete at least 35 hours of CPD a year.

Where Avoice fits

Avoice shows each person's capacity, allocation and utilisation in the same place as the projects and timesheets that use it.

In Avoice People and Staffing, the practice sees capacity, utilisation and allocation by project for every person. Timesheets split billable and non-billable time, so the assumptions in the plan can be checked against what the team actually recorded, and hours roll up against fee stages so the effect of a stretched team on fees is visible early.

To see your own team's capacity laid out against live projects, book a demo.