Story Points vs Hours: What’s the Difference?

What is a story point? 

Story points are a metric used in Agile and Scrum methodologies to estimate the effort required for completing tasks or user stories. They represent a combination of the work’s complexity, the effort involved, and potential risks, rather than specific time. This method enables teams to make more objective estimates and manage their workload more efficiently, leading to improved planning and project management.

By utilizing story points, teams can better grasp the relative effort needed to tackle various pieces of work within a project. Teams give points based on various factors, including prior experience and combined skill set. This relative estimation method enables teams to overcome emotional attachments to specified timeframes and empowers them to make well-informed decisions regarding a task’s difficulty and feasibility. This article explores the advantages of story points vs hours and how they contribute to enhanced project management and the right allocation of a dedicated software development team.  

Story points vs hours in the age of AI

In 2025, the distinction between story points and hours (is being reshaped by intelligent automation. While story points traditionally prevent the “padding” inherent in hourly estimates, modern AI tools are rendering manual estimation less critical by using historical data to predict timelines with superior accuracy. 

The role of AI in IT project design has evolved from simple task automation to “Agentic Agile,” where AI agents autonomously manage workflows, detect risks, and even generate code. This allows teams to shift focus from administrative tracking to high-level strategy and innovation. According to Digital.ai’s 18th State of Agile Report (2025), 84% of organizations have integrated AI into their pipelines, marking the “Fourth Wave” of software delivery where AI acts not merely as a tool, but as an orchestrator of the entire development lifecycle. 

How are story points calculated?

The calculation of story points is a collaborative effort that involves an entire team, who collectively discuss and evaluate the tasks in the product backlog. Once a team reaches a consensus on the appropriate story point value for each task through open discussions and sharing insights, they learn how to best leverage their expertise and knowledge, resulting in a more accurate and reliable estimation. 

Using story points makes it possible to evaluate tasks in relation to each other, rather than just based on time alone. The team establishes a reference scale, often called the “Fibonacci sequence” (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on), to assign story points to different tasks. This relative scale helps compare tasks and provides transparency on the required effort. Calculating story points emphasizes collaboration, transparency and open communication among team members, while fostering a collective view of the work ahead. 

How to use story points to estimate a project?

Using story points for project estimation requires a team-oriented approach and an appreciation for relative analysis. To estimate a project using story points, a team collectively assesses each task or backlog item – taking into account its workload and uncertainty. Over time, as a team gains experience and completes more tasks, they build a valuable team productivity metric called “velocity,” which represents the average number of story points a team can meet within a given sprint or time frame. The expected number of story points can vary based on a team’s velocity and complexity of tasks, making it a valuable metric for project estimation. 

Velocity is a key performance indicator and reflects a team’s productivity and capacity to complete work over time. As a team progresses, they gain insights into their achievable productivity and how much work they can do within a certain period. This knowledge helps a team create more accurate and reliable plans for future sprints and projects. While estimating using story points offers numerous advantages, it’s crucial to acknowledge that the value of story points can vary between teams. Each team’s understanding of the factors, such as work and risk, might differ slightly, leading to variations in the assigned story point values. Therefore, it’s crital to consider these differences when comparing estimates between teams. 

Benefits of using story points over hours

For a long time, people have relied on time-based methods, such as estimating in hours or days, to determine how much effort a project will require. However, story points offer several compelling benefits over time-based estimates and are revolutionizing how teams plan and execute their projects.  

Using story points provides several benefits over traditional time-based estimates: 

• Non-project-related tasks like emails and meetings should be accounted for in story points, preventing potential inaccuracies in estimates. 
• Story points eliminate emotional attachments to specified timelines and lead to more objective estimations. 
• Each team can estimate work on their scale, making manipulating velocity for political purposes impossible. 
• Assigning story points becomes quicker and requires less debate once a team agrees on their relative effort. 
• Story points reward team members and encourage a focus on delivering value instead of merely spending time.
• Story points are a relative measure that avoids the limitations and pitfalls of equating points to specific hours. 
• They allow teams to focus on the effort required to complete the work, which promote more accurate estimations.  
• Story points provide flexibility and adaptability – enabling teams to adjust estimates based on changing circumstances. 
• Teams can create reliable plans based on relative effort, fostering improved project management and resource allocation. 

By leveraging story points, teams can achieve more accurate and objective estimations, break free from the rigidity of fixed timelines, and focus on delivering value efficiently. Using story points over hours empowers teams with accurate estimations, objective decision-making, and a focus on delivering value, making it an essential tool in Scrum methodologies, Agile project management, and resource allocation. 

What’s the relationship between story points and hours in Agile estimation?

In Agile project management, the debate over story points vs. hours often sparks team curiosity and discussion. It is often asked: How do story points intertwine with hours in estimating project tasks? Essentially, they map the story points to hours to determine the required time for each task. Teams rely on the story points to hours conversion for accurate project planning. For a sprint, they calculate the story points to hours ratio to set achievable goals. As mentioned above, they assign story points to different user stories using the Fibonacci sequence. During planning, they practice story-pointing Fibonacci to rate the task’s complexity.  

How many hours are 3 story points? The number of hours corresponding to three story points can vary from one team to another. There is no fixed conversion rate between story points and hours, as story points are a relative measure of complexity and effort, while hours are a specific unit of time. A team determines how many story points to assign to each task based on their past work and estimated tasks’ characteristics.  

How many hours is 1 story point? Similar to the previous question, the number of hours for one story point is not a universally fixed value. It can differ significantly between teams. Story points represent the relative effort required to complete a task, while hours are a specific time measurement. A team should consider their velocity and experience with similar tasks to determine the appropriate hours mapping to story points. 

Should you use story points or hours? A team’s preferences and the Agile framework determine whether to use story points or hours for estimation. Story points are often favored in Scrum and other Agile methodologies because they provide a more abstract, relative measurement without being tied to fixed time units. Story points enable teams to prioritize tasks more effectively and facilitate better planning. 

How many hours is 1 story point in Jira? Teams utilizing Agile project management software, such as Jira, measure relative effort through story points, which are not directly tied to specific hours. Jira does not provide a standard conversion rate of story points to hours because it promotes using story points as a relative estimation unit. However, some teams may establish their conversion rate based on their velocity and historical data. 

What problems can occur when using story points and hours in Agile estimation? 

Several problems can occur when utilizing story points and hours in Agile estimation. Let’s focus on the most crucial ones:  

• There may be inconsistencies in the team’s understanding and application of both metrics, resulting in confusion and miscommunication. 
• Focusing too much on the time aspect (hours) rather than the relative complexity or effort (story points) can undermine the purpose of using story points for estimation. 
• Teams may mistakenly equate story points with hours while missing the true purpose of story point abstraction. 
• Mixing different metrics can hinder accurate progress tracking and comparisons across tasks or sprints. 
• Using both metrics might lead to unnecessary overhead in managing and maintaining two separate estimation systems. 

The use of story points in Agile: Best practices

Adapting story points for remote and hybrid environments necessitates a shift from synchronous consensus to asynchronous precision. Best practices include:

• Adopt Asynchronous Estimation: Use tools like “Async Poker” or Jira integrations to let team members vote on story points within a defined window, rather than during a live call. This accommodates varying time zones and prevents “meeting fatigue” while ensuring introverted remote members aren’t drowned out by vocal on-site participants.
• Establish “Golden” Reference Stories: Maintain a digital repository of past stories that serve as the absolute baseline (e.g., “The Login API update is our standard 3-point story”). This creates a universal language that prevents “point drift” between co-located and remote squads.
• Explicit “Definition of Ready” (DoR): In distributed teams, you cannot rely on hallway conversations to clarify vague requirements. Enforce a strict DoR that requires tickets to have complete acceptance criteria before estimation begins, to minimize ambiguity and rework.
• Decouple Points from “Office Hours”: Remote efficiency varies widely by home setup and schedule. Strictly define points by complexity and risk, not time. A complex 5-point task is constant, even if a senior dev completes it in 4 hours at home versus 6 hours in the office.
• Digital-first calibration: Use digital whiteboards (e.g., Miro, Mural) for “Estimation Retrospectives” where the team reviews the accuracy of past sprint estimates to realign their mental models and correct any location-based bias.

Integrating Jira with modern AI

Integrating Jira with modern AI and automation tools transforms estimation from a guessing game into a data-driven science. Atlassian Intelligence and plugins like Story Point Automator now analyze historical team velocity and ticket complexity to auto-suggest accurate story points, minimizing the bias often found in manual planning and guessing.

For effective team management, “Agentic Agile” workflows connect coding with coordination. Integrations with GitHub or GitLab automatically update Jira tickets, such as moving them to “In Review” when a Pull Request is opened. Additionally, Slack bots enable users to create and update issues via conversational prompts without leaving their chat window. This ecosystem reduces context switching and ensures that capacity planning relies on real-time engineering metrics rather than manual reporting, allowing Project Managers to focus on removing blockers rather than chasing status updates.

Conclusion 

In summary, understanding the debate of story points vs hours is extremely valuable for correct project estimation in Scrum and Agile. Story points empower teams to make informed decisions and prioritize tasks effectively. Teams can avoid mistakes in Agile software development and encourage collaboration, transparency, and shared agreement among their members, which ultimately lead to more accurate and realistic planning.  

While story points offer numerous benefits, they should be used with caution, since misuse can impact judgment, detailed timelines and resource allocation. Instead, teams should leverage story points to get a clear view of the size of the work and facilitate successful project execution. An exemplary software team can embrace story points for more accurate project estimation. By implementing story points as a relative estimation method, teams can transcend the limitations of time-based estimates and achieve enhanced productivity and planning in their Agile projects. 

Discover our case studies and learn how we assisted various companies in their projects:

Accelerating product delivery for a cloud communications vendor

Building and maintaining a customer experience management (CEM) platform

Developing a comprehensive platform for medical review officers 

FAQ

How many hours are 3 story points?

There is no universal conversion. Story points measure relative complexity, risk, and effort, not fixed time. For one team, 3 points might roughly equal a day’s work; for another, it might take 6 hours. Equating points directly to hours undermines the agile principle of relative estimation. 

Is 1 story ooint equal to 1 day? 

No. Story points measure complexity, not time. While some teams loosely map 1 point to 1 “ideal day,” this is often discouraged because it fails to account for individual developer speed. A senior developer might finish a 1-point task in 2 hours while a junior takes 8, yet the complexity remains the same.  

Using time-based vs point-based estimates in project management  

Time-based estimates focus on duration (hours/days), making them intuitive but prone to optimism bias and errors due to varying skill levels. They suit predictable, short-term tasks. Point-based estimates measure relative complexity and risk, decoupling effort from specific dates. This allows Agile teams to track “velocity,” providing more reliable long-term planning by accounting for the unknown variables that inevitably delay software projects.

Story points vs ideal days in Scrum? 

Story Points measure relative complexity, risk, and effort, abstracting away time to focus on the problem’s size. This allows teams to track “velocity” regardless of individual speed. Ideal Days estimates time assuming zero interruptions. While Ideal Days are easier for stakeholders to understand, they are often inaccurate because they fail to account for meetings, delays, and real-world friction.