Find your average handle time and daily capacity.
Enter your talk, hold and wrap-up time to get AHT in minutes and seconds, the share each part takes, and how many contacts one person can handle in a day.Free, no sign-up · Updated November 11, 2026Short answer
Average handle time (AHT) is the average time it takes to handle one contact: talk or chat time, plus hold time, plus wrap-up time, divided by the contacts handled. Time a customer spends waiting in the queue is not part of it.Your average handle time
How average handle time is calculated
Add up everything the team spent handling contacts in a period, then divide by the number of contacts handled in that period. The AHT formula has three parts:
AHT = (talk or chat time + hold time + wrap-up time) ÷ contacts handled
A worked example: in one week a team handles 220 contacts, with 900 minutes of talk or chat time, 150 minutes on hold and 300 minutes of wrap-up. That is 1,350 minutes divided by 220, or 6.14 minutes, which is an AHT of 6:08. If your reports already show an average for each part, add them instead: 4:30 of talk, 0:40 of hold and 1:00 of wrap-up is an AHT of 6:10.
What counts as handle time
- Talk or chat time: the time an agent is actively working with the customer.
- Hold time: the time the customer waits while the agent looks something up or checks with a colleague.
- Wrap-up time: the notes, tags and follow-up tasks done after the conversation ends.
Queue wait, the time before anyone picks up, is not handle time. It belongs with speed measures such as time to first response. Breaks, meetings and training are not handle time either.
Handle time for chat and email
On chat and email, count active time only. An email thread can stay open for two days while the customer replies, but its handle time is the minutes spent reading, checking the order and writing. An agent with three chats open is not spending the full length of each chat on each customer. If your helpdesk reports only how long a conversation stayed open, that is resolution time, not handle time.
From AHT to capacity
Capacity is productive time divided by AHT. A person with 6.5 productive hours a day and an AHT of 6:00 can handle 65 contacts: 23,400 seconds divided by 360. Productive hours are the hours actually spent on contacts, which is less than the length of the shift.
That is the job AHT is good at. It is a planning number, not a target: it tells you how many people a queue needs. Set as a goal for each person, it teaches the team to rush and to close conversations that are not solved, and those customers write in again.
Frequently asked questions
Add total talk or chat time, hold time and wrap-up time, then divide by the number of contacts handled. If 220 contacts took 1,350 minutes in total, the AHT is 6 minutes 8 seconds.
Talk or chat time, hold time and the wrap-up work after the conversation, such as notes and tags. Time the customer spends waiting in a queue is not included.
Use the same formula with active time only: the minutes an agent spends reading, looking things up and writing. Leave out the time a conversation sits open waiting for the customer.
There is no single good number. Handle time depends on the channel and on how hard the questions are, so compare your AHT with your own past months, split by topic. A drop is good news only if satisfaction and repeat contacts hold steady.
Divide productive time by AHT. With 6.5 productive hours and an AHT of 6 minutes, one person can handle 65 contacts a day.
Yes. The math is the same for any channel: enter that channel’s talk or chat time, hold time, wrap-up time and contact count. Work out each channel on its own, because a blended AHT hides the difference between them.
The drafting, yes. Copilot in Aide drafts a reply from the conversation and your knowledge, rewrites what a teammate typed, and summarizes the conversation into an internal note. It works in Aide’s inbox and inside Zendesk, Gorgias and Front, and your teammate decides what is sent.
Drafts and summaries, written for your team
Copilot is on every Aide plan, and what it writes counts as AI replies. Free includes 150 a month. Replies your team writes are never billed.