Capacity Planning Statistics: Key Insights to Know in 2025

There’s a fine art to balancing your workforce’s capacity with current and future customer demand.

When you get capacity planning right, it creates avenues for sustainable business growth, improved talent development and retention, and maximized project profitability.

But done poorly, capacity management can quickly create all sorts of problems. From workload imbalance to under- and over-resource utilization, poor employee engagement, and blown project budgets, it stunts future growth and puts your organization on a path of decline.

Hard to believe? Let’s take a look at capacity planning statistics to review what fresh-from-the-oven research reveals about the current state of capacity planning, its benefits, and the role it plays in organizational growth.

The state of capacity planning
Stats that show the benefits of capacity planning
Capacity planning challenges statistics
Problems caused by a lack of capacity planning
Capacity planning strategy & tech statistics

The state of capacity planning: 90% think it’s a pressing need but only two-thirds do it

90% of leaders consider capacity building a pressing to-do that needs addressing now or soon per a McKinsey report. The same report also found only 5% of the surveyed folks think they’re all set to prioritize capacity building.

Gartner confirms the same. Strategic workforce planning is among the top three organizational priorities for HR leaders in 2025, next only to leadership and organizational culture development.

But the current state of resource planning? Strewn with challenges and processes that not many leaders are satisfied with.

In a poll on one of our recent webinars on forecasting best practices for resource management, for example, we found:

Only two-thirds of organizations do capacity forecasting regularly
13% feel their process is inaccurate and 75% say their process is moderately accurate.
No one agrees their capacity forecasting process is very accurate.

Finding yourself in a similar boat? Here’s a comprehensive guide to strategic capacity planning.

Capacity planning statistics: data showing the benefits

Concerns like overworked employees and reduced capacity utilization prompting poor employee retention are setting the need for investing in capacity building. For instance:

Deloitte found talent supply-demand gap in the US has increased by 1.5 million compared to pre-pandemic levels — pushing for successful capacity planning.

According to Gallup, only 23% of employees are engaged. 52% are not engaged, whereas 15% are actively disengaged. Again, a defined capacity planning process based on an efficient resource allocation strategy (that assigns work to employees based on their skills, interests, and availability) can solve this.

McKinsey notes lack of an effective workforce planning strategy can lead to a loss of 20-30% of productivity during transition caused by talent shortages or unexpected employee exits. In turn, this can potentially lead to a 10-15% loss in annual revenue.

Between 20-30% of important roles in companies aren’t filled by the most role-appropriate people, hindering capacity optimization and productivity. This is yet another reason why you need to plan, manage, and optimize your workforce.

Here’s more on the benefits of capacity planning ➡️

Capacity planning challenges: So what are the culprits according to the latest data?

From lack of data to use for good capacity planning to not having the strategic processes to use, research shows there are a handful of factors stopping leaders from effectively planning their workforce:

1. Lack of strategic processes

Only 15% of companies do strategic workforce planning according to a Gartner survey of 1,400 HR leaders in 60+ countries and major industries. In turn, this makes it challenging for resource leaders to align their staff with long-term business objectives.

Per the data we shared above, Runn also found the same. Not many have strategic processes in place. Those who do, say their processes aren’t accurate enough.

2. Lack of data collection

It seems a leading reason behind the lack of a strategic capacity-building process is a lack of enough historical data or not knowing how to use the collected data.

In this vein, an old but trusty Gartner report surveying HR leaders reveals:

Only 33% of companies effectively use data for workforce/capacity planning.
Only 32% note they’re effective at deciding which data to use for capacity planning.
Only 31% think they’re effective in communicating the planning data to the business.

Fresh data from ActivTrak polls also goes on to reveal that 27% of the organizations that don’t collect activity data for capacity planning are unsure where to begin. 22% also point out that the cultural implications of tracking activity data are a concern.

3. Inability to demonstrate ROI

For companies that have toes dipped in the capacity planning waters, proving their program’s worth is another challenge that hinders them from further investment.

In fact, 66% of resource leaders confirm their workforce planning process is limited to headcount planning and they find it hard to show ROI for their strategic planning work.

The result? Organizations end up investing less and less in demand and utilization planning despite realizing its worth.

4. Not enough resources and stakeholder support

Without a plan to prove ROI, leadership support and resource investment into workforce planning naturally go down. A lack of (stakeholder) awareness about how capacity building can shockproof your organization is a potential reason why resource leaders struggle.

Either way, McKinsey's research found all these factors are leading reasons behind stalled progress into capacity optimization:

46% say lack of time prevents them from focusing on capacity building
20% blame insufficient support from senior leadership as the reason
20% agree lack of training and development resources is the problem

Lack of capacity planning: stats on the problems it breeds

Directly or indirectly, lack of capacity planning encourages several challenges including:

Disengaged employees and increased project risks. Without carefully allocating the right people to the right projects, you risk jeopardizing project quality, increase resource risks, and end up grappling with disengaged employees.

Under-optimized capacity utilization. By not correctly evaluating existing capacity and supply and poorly forecasting future demand, you rely on a few employees while leaving others on the bench. This leads to utilization problems, which further employee disengagement — fueled by heavy workload, burnout, and lack of enough interesting projects to work on.

Poor talent retention and hiring decisions. With employees either over- or under-used and not having enough relevant skill development and learning opportunities, you’ll eventually see retention problems. Without accurate capacity planning, your hiring process also suffers due to a lack of understanding of the roles you need to fill.

Data confirms it all:

Low employee engagement causes a $8.9 trillion loss in global GDP.

Underutilization disengages 20% of employees, up 61% since 2021. The same report notes workload imbalance costs companies millions of dollars.

On the flip side, 7% of employees risk burnout due to overutilization (thankfully, down slightly since 2021). Owing to this overutilization though, 4% of surveyed employees worked on their weekends.

Only one-third of employees are engaged and one-half is putting in minimum effort.

HR professionals in Europe report 66% employee engagement. This makes the state of employee engagement similar in Europe, only slightly better than in the US (where it stands at 47%).

46% of resource leaders say they lack clarity on which roles are the most critical in their organization.

Moving forward: Capacity planning strategy & tech statistics

We now know that there’s research backing the many benefits of capacity management and the losses it can save organizations from.

But the way forward is strategy-led, powered by data collection and analysis — not random acts of workplace planning.

To get started, you’ll want to centralize your data analysis and resource capacity planning and management. Lattice reports highest-performing teams are 2.6 times more likely to invest in performance management software than the lowest-performing teams — confirming capacity planning software is indispensable to efficient workforce optimization.

With that, we’ll leave you with essential resources to help you get the ball rolling:

▶️ The Beginner's Guide to Capacity Planning for 2025 & Beyond

▶️ Strategic Capacity Planning - And How to Improve It

▶️ The Beginner's Guide to Workforce Optimization