The honest answer about points and hours
There is no per-story conversion rate from story points to hours - by design. Points measure relative effort against a team's own history, not clock time, and the same story can honestly be a 3 on one team and an 8 on another. Any tool offering "1 point = 4 hours" is selling back the false precision that story points exist to remove.
What does work - and what this converter actually does - is converting a body of work to calendar time through the team's own delivery rate:
sprints needed = points ÷ average velocity → duration = sprints × sprint length
That's legitimate because velocity already encodes everything a fake hourly rate ignores: your team's real interruptions, review overhead, meeting load, and definition of done.
Why you get a range, not a number
Velocity swings sprint to sprint - roughly ±25% is normal for an established team. The converter shows the range that variance implies, because the range is the honest forecast: "6 to 10 weeks" survives contact with reality in a way "7.6 weeks" never does. When a stakeholder needs one number, give the top of the range and explain why - the full argument lives in story points vs hours.
Three ways this still goes wrong:
- Converting single stories. One story's calendar time depends on what else is in flight; the math only holds in aggregate. For sprint-level plans, use capacity instead.
- Using aspirational velocity. Use the rolling average of your last three or four sprints, not your best sprint ever.
- Forgetting the estimates underneath. The conversion is only as good as the points going in - which is why they should come from a real team estimation session, not one person's spreadsheet.