Man-Day (MD)

One Person, One Day, Eight Hours

The math is dead simple. One man-day (MD) equals one person working a standard full day — usually 8 hours. A typical working month has about 20 business days, so one person-month is roughly 20 MD or 160 hours. A five-person team? That's 100 MD per month of raw capacity.

You'll see man-days everywhere in agency work: project estimates, budget proposals, contract scoping. "This rebrand will take 45 man-days" is shorthand the whole team understands — clients included. It's also the basis for break-even analysis: if your blended daily cost is €400 and you charge €600/day, you know your margin per MD.

Where Man-Days Fall Short

Here's the problem: man-days treat all hours as interchangeable. They're not. Eight hours from a senior art director and eight hours from a junior designer are the same "1 MD" on paper, but wildly different in output, cost, and hourly rate. A project estimated at 30 MD could cost €12,000 or €24,000 depending on who actually does the work.

Man-days also hide part-time complexity. If someone's allocated 50% to your project, that's 0.5 MD/day — easy to lose track of when you're juggling ten projects and three people have time off next week.

WrkSched reports in both hours and man-days, so you can toggle between the granular view and the big-picture one. The profitability dashboard breaks costs down by actual people assigned, not abstract MD units, giving you the real number — not the averaged-out fiction.