Sprint Burndown Calculator
Ideal vs actual progress, pace check, and projected finish date.
Sprint status vs ideal pace
Estimates for planning only, not financial advice.
A burndown chart answers one daily question: at our current pace, do we finish the sprint on time? You enter total story points, sprint length, days elapsed, and points completed. The calculator draws the ideal line (even pace to zero), plots where you actually are, and projects your finish date from your real pace. In the example below, a team 4 days into a 10-day, 100-point sprint with 30 points done is 10 points behind ideal and trending to finish about 3 days late.
How to Use This Calculator
Start with the sprint totals: story points committed and working days in the sprint. Each day, update days elapsed and cumulative points completed. If product added scope mid-sprint, log it in the scope-added field so the chart stays honest instead of quietly punishing the team for work that was never in the plan. The status line tells you ahead or behind, the projection tells you the likely finish day, and the pace row shows what daily rate you need from here to land on time.
Enter total story points and sprint days at sprint planning. The ideal burn rate is total divided by days.
Update days elapsed and cumulative completed points daily, right after standup. Count only fully done work, not work in progress.
Read the status and projected finish. If behind, check the required pace: the points-per-day you need from now on. If that number is far above your demonstrated pace, de-scope now rather than hoping.
The Burndown Math
Nothing here is exotic; the value is in doing it daily instead of discovering the shortfall on the last day. The projection assumes your pace so far continues, which is usually optimistic, because teams rarely accelerate into the hardest remaining work. Treat the projected finish as the best case. The required-pace number is the more useful one: it converts "we are behind" into "we need 12 points a day, and we have averaged 7.5," which is a concrete conversation about scope.
Worked Example
A team commits to 100 points over a 10-day sprint: ideal burn is 10 points a day. After day 4 they have completed 30 points. Ideal remaining is 60; actual remaining is 70, so they are 10 points behind. Their pace is 7.5 points a day, which projects 13.3 total days to finish the 100 points, about 3.3 days late. To still land on day 10, they need 70 points over 6 days, or 11.7 points a day, well above their demonstrated pace. The honest moves: cut roughly 25 to 30 points of scope, swarm blockers, or formally extend with stakeholder agreement.
Reading the Shape of Your Chart
The numbers tell you where you stand; the shape tells you why. A flat first week then a cliff means stories are too large or "done" is back-loaded; split work so something finishes every day or two. An early dive followed by a flatline means the easy work went first and the hard items are deferred; order by risk, not comfort. A staircase with long flat stretches and sudden drops means batching and big-bang integration; smaller stories and continuous integration smooth it out. None of these are people problems. They are process shapes, and the chart is the diagnostic.
| Chart shape | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Flat start, cliff at the end | Oversized stories, late "done" | Split stories to 1 to 3 day slices |
| Early dive, then flat | Easy work first, risk deferred | Order by risk and dependency |
| Staircase with long flats | Batching, big-bang integration | Smaller batches, integrate daily |
| Line jumps upward mid-sprint | Scope added | Log it, re-baseline visibly |
Burndown Mistakes Teams Keep Making
Counting started work as progress is the most common: the chart should move only when work meets the definition of done. Re-estimating remaining work downward mid-sprint to make the line look better is the second; it trades a pretty chart for a missed commitment. The third is treating the ideal line as a performance target for individuals rather than a team planning aid, which is how you get gaming instead of honesty. And if your estimates feed project budgets too, our present value calculator and payback period calculator translate sprint capacity into the financial language stakeholders plan with.
Estimates for planning only, not financial advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a burndown chart?
A burndown chart plots remaining work against time in a sprint. The x-axis is sprint days, the y-axis is story points or tasks left. An ideal line runs diagonally from total scope to zero, and your actual line shows daily progress against it. When the actual line sits above the ideal line, the sprint is behind; below it, ahead. It is the fastest daily health check an agile team has.
How do you calculate the ideal burndown line?
Divide total story points by sprint days. A 100-point sprint over 10 days has an ideal burn of 10 points per day: 90 remaining after day 1, 80 after day 2, and so on to zero on the final day. The ideal line assumes perfectly even progress, which never happens, but it gives every deviation a meaning. This calculator draws it automatically from your totals.
What is sprint velocity and how is it different?
Velocity is how many points a team completes per sprint, averaged over several sprints, and it is used for future planning. Burndown is within one sprint, tracking whether this sprint will finish on time. Velocity answers "how much can we commit to next sprint"; burndown answers "are we on track right now." This tool computes your current-sprint pace and projects the finish date from it.
My actual line is above the ideal line. What should I do?
First check whether scope grew: added stories push the line up without the team slowing down. If scope is stable and you are genuinely behind, options are to de-scope the lowest-value stories, swarm the blocked work, or split a large story so part of it can ship. What you should not do is silently extend the sprint; that teaches stakeholders that commitments are decorative.
Should the chart ever go up?
Yes, when scope is added mid-sprint the remaining-work line jumps up, and that is honest data. The bad version is scope added without the chart moving, which hides the real picture. Good teams re-baseline visibly: note the added points, extend the ideal line if the sprint truly must absorb them, or move the work to the backlog. An upward jump with a note beats a flat line with a secret.
How do story points relate to hours?
They do not, by design. Story points measure relative size and complexity, not time; a 5-point story is roughly five times the effort of a 1-point story for this team. Converting points to hours defeats the purpose, because the same story takes different people different hours. Track points on the burndown and let velocity translate them into sprint capacity over time.
What is a good burndown shape?
A healthy chart wobbles around the ideal line and converges near zero by the last day or two. A flat line for the first week followed by a cliff means stories are too big or nothing is truly "done" until the end; break work smaller. A line that dives early then flatlines suggests front-loaded easy work with hard items deferred. The shape diagnoses process problems, not people problems.
How do I handle carryover work from the last sprint?
Add unfinished stories back to the new sprint's total scope at their full remaining estimate, not their original size. Carryover silently shrinks velocity if you count the points as new completion when they finish. Most teams track a separate carryover percentage; anything above 15 to 20 percent two sprints running means commitments are too aggressive or estimates too optimistic.
Can I use a burndown for non-software projects?
Yes. Replace story points with any countable unit of work: tasks, tickets, chapters, rooms painted. The math only needs a total, a timebox, and daily completed counts. Marketing campaigns, event planning, and content calendars all burn down the same way. The ideal line still means "even pace to zero," which is a universal planning concept.
What is the difference between a burndown and a burnup chart?
A burndown shows work remaining shrinking toward zero; a burnup shows work completed rising toward the total, often with a second line for total scope. Burnup charts handle growing scope more gracefully, because added work raises the scope line instead of distorting the remaining line. For fixed-scope sprints, burndown is simpler and the standard. For epics with shifting scope, burnup tells the truth better.