Consulting Capacity Calculator | Retainer

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Consulting Capacity Calculator

See your available billable hours, your current utilization rate, and how much room you actually have before saying yes to the next client.

Your week
hrs

All the hours you actually work in a normal week, including admin and BD.

hrs

Admin, business development, proposals, and delivery overhead that isn't billed to a client.

hrs

Sum of committed hours per week across every active engagement and retainer.

%

The share of available capacity you want booked, leaving room for scope overruns and BD.

Your capacity
Available billable hours / week 0
Committed hours / week 0
Remaining capacity / week 0
Current utilization 0%
Status

How this works

Know your room before you say yes.

What is consultant capacity and utilization?

Capacity is the number of hours per week you have available for billable client work, after subtracting time for admin, business development, and delivery overhead from your total working hours. Utilization is the percentage of that available capacity currently committed to clients — the higher it is, the less room you have for new work.

What utilization rate should I target as a consultant?

Most independent consultants target 70–85% utilization, not 100%. Leaving 15–30% of available capacity unbooked creates room for scope overruns, urgent client requests, and new business development — without it, a single busy week can push delivery quality down across every active engagement.

How do I know if I'm overcommitted?

If your committed hours exceed your available billable capacity, or your utilization is consistently above 90%, you're overcommitted. Symptoms show up before the math does: no time for BD, slipping response times, and engagements that used to feel comfortable starting to feel tight.

How much of my time should be billable versus non-billable?

Most consultants can only bill 50–70% of a standard work week once admin, business development, proposal writing, and delivery overhead (status updates, internal prep) are accounted for. The rest is real, necessary work — but it's not billable, and it has to be subtracted before calculating true available capacity.

See your real capacity, automatically.

Retainer tracks committed hours against every engagement so you always know how much room you actually have.

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