# Availability and utilization: which number you are actually looking at

**Category:** [Resource Planning](https://help.totalctrl.app/hc/totalctrl/totalctrl-help-center/en-US/categories/resource-planning)
**Updated:** 2026-08-19

## The definitions, in one place

- **Capacity** — contracted hours in a week, from the person's profile or the workspace default.

- **Leave** — *approved* time off overlapping that week.

- **Available** — capacity less leave. **This is the denominator.**

- **Allocated** — committed hours a week from overlapping allocations.

- **Utilization** — billable hours logged ÷ available hours.

## Why available, and not raw capacity

Somebody on holiday all week has not become 0% utilized. They were not there. Dividing by capacity charges people for time you already agreed they would not be working, and the effect is worst for exactly the people who took the leave they were owed.

Firms genuinely disagree about this, so it is configurable in **Capacity & settings** — the basis is either *available* (the default) or *capacity*. What is not configurable is the label: every screen and every API response **names the basis it used**, because “utilization” on its own means at least three different things and nothing in the number itself tells you which one you have.

## Pending leave does not reduce availability

Only **approved** time off comes out of the denominator. A request is a question, not a fact, and planning around an answer nobody has given hides capacity that may well still be there — then hides it again in reverse when the request is declined.

Leave that people book for themselves lands as *pending*; a planner's entry is approved as it is saved.

## A week fully on leave reports nothing, not zero

When available hours are zero, utilization and allocation percentages are **blank** — there is nothing to divide by, so the question does not apply that week. It is never shown as 0%.

“0%” is a claim about somebody's performance. “—” is the truth: they were away.

## Over a range, hours are summed and then divided

A range total is **sum of billable hours ÷ sum of available hours**. It is deliberately *not* the average of the weekly percentages, which would weight a one-day week the same as a full one.

Two weeks, one of them mostly public holiday:

- Week 1 — 40 available, 32 billable: 80%.

- Week 2 — 8 available, 2 billable: 25%.

Averaging the percentages gives 52.5%. Summing first gives 34 ÷ 48 = **70.8%**, which is what actually happened. The single quiet week would otherwise drag a good fortnight down by eighteen points.

## Utilization counts billable hours, not busy hours

The ratio uses the billable subset of logged time. Total logged hours are shown alongside it, so a week full of internal work reads as what it is — worked, not billed — instead of disappearing.

## Targets, and people who are not meant to bill

A person's profile carries **billable role** and an optional **target utilization**. A designer at 80% and a support engineer at 10% can both be exactly right; averaging them into one workspace number produces something nobody can act on.

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## Related Articles

- [Capacity, working patterns and time off](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-capacity-and-leave)
- [Who can see and change what, including contractors](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-access)
- [Resource Planning from the API or an agent](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-api)
- [What Resource Planning is, and what it deliberately does not do](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-overview)
- [Allocations: hours a week, soft bookings and overlaps](https://help.totalctrl.app/en-US/articles/resource-planning-allocations)

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