Level resources on the Gantt

All plans Project Owner or Manager

Level Resources looks at one project’s schedule, adds up each person’s assigned hours week by week, and lists the weeks where that comes to more than the hours they have. For each of those weeks it suggests moving some of that person’s tasks later, and you choose which moves to apply. It is on every plan and uses no AI.

Before you start

Leveling reads tasks that have an assignee, a start date and a due date. Milestones, Done tasks, and tasks with no assignee or no dates are left out.

An estimate makes the hours exact. A task with no estimate counts as its working days times the length of the project calendar’s working day, which is 8 hours unless the calendar says otherwise.

Open Level Resources

Open the project and go to Tasks, then the Gantt view.
Select Level Resources in the toolbar above the chart. Once the panel has loaded, a number on the button counts the people who are over-allocated in this schedule.

The button shows for the project’s owner and managers, and for people whose organization role can see every project (Portfolio Managers and up, unless your organization changed that).
The Resource Leveling panel opens above the chart. No over-allocations found means every assigned person fits their hours in every week of this schedule.

Read the panel

The top line counts the over-allocated people and the suggested moves.

Over-allocations by week has one row per person and week: the person, the Monday the week starts, a bar, and the hours scheduled against the hours available, with the overage in red, for example 52h / 40h (+12h).

Suggested Task Moves lists each proposed move: the task, its priority, its current dates and the suggested ones, the person, and how many working days it moves.

How the hours are counted

A task’s hours are spread evenly over its working days, and only the working days that fall inside a week count toward that week.
The hours a person has are the hours set for them that week on the Capacity Planner. A week with nothing set counts as 40 hours. Booked time off is not taken off that figure here.
Only this project’s tasks are counted. Work the same person has in other projects is not added, so someone can look free here and still be full across your projects. The Capacity Planner reads every project.

Setting a person’s weekly hours is part of the Capacity Planner, which is on the Pro plan and up. On Free and Starter, where weekly hours cannot be set, weeks count as 40 hours.

How moves are chosen

Only Medium and Low priority tasks are moved. Critical and High tasks stay where they are, and the panel says so beside the Apply button.
A task with a scheduling constraint other than As Soon As Possible or Start No Earlier Than, such as Must Start On, still counts toward the hours but is never moved, so leveling never overrides a date somebody pinned.
For each over-allocated week, every Medium and Low task that person has in that week is suggested, moved to start on the first working day after that week and kept to the same number of working days. Within a week, Medium tasks are listed before Low ones.
The list is not trimmed to the overage, so you may need only some of the moves. Pick the ones that clear the week.
Each task is suggested once, even when it falls in several over-allocated weeks.

Apply moves

Tick the moves you want, or tick Select all. Clear selection unticks them again.
Select Apply Selected. The button counts how many you picked.
The tasks take the suggested dates, a message says how many were rescheduled, and the panel checks the schedule again.

If the schedule changed after the panel opened, a ticked task that is no longer suggested is skipped rather than moved.

What applying a move does

The task keeps its length. It moves to the suggested dates with the same number of working days, and its duration stays in step.
It gets a Start No Earlier Than at its new start. You can see it in the task’s Scheduling constraint. It is what keeps the move: a later Recalculate, or a change earlier in the task’s chain, cannot pull the task back before that date. To let it move earlier again, change or clear the constraint in the task.
The tasks that depend on it move after it. Once the moves are written, the schedule reflows from them, so a finish-to-start successor starts after the moved task ends. With Automatic scheduling off, the successors follow on the next Recalculate, as they do for any other edit.
Who a task is assigned to never changes. Leveling moves dates only.

Leveling chooses its moves by hours, not by links. The links are honoured when a move is applied, through the reflow above. See Link task dependencies.

Check again after applying

A move can land work in the following week and put that week over. Read the panel again after applying, before you close it.

AI insight on the Business plan

On the Business plan and up, the panel also shows an AI Insight card that summarizes the over-allocations, and a short note under some of the suggested moves. It applies nothing; the moves are still yours to pick.

Level Resources and Suggest schedule

The same toolbar has Suggest schedule, which asks the AI for start and finish dates that meet a deadline and checks each proposal against the links and the working calendar. Its Level resources option keeps people inside their weekly hours. Suggest schedule is on the Business plan and up; see Plan on the Gantt chart.

The Level Resources button described on this page is the one without AI. It is on every plan, chooses its moves by hours, and reflows the links once you apply them.

Level Resources, the Capacity Planner and Forecast

	Level Resources	Capacity Planner	Forecast
Reads	One project’s tasks	Every project	Every project, the weeks ahead
Changes dates	Yes, the moves you apply	No	No
Plan	Every plan	Pro and up	Pro and up

Use the Capacity Planner to see who is over-committed across everything, and Level Resources to move work inside one schedule.

Try it on a file first

The free Resource Leveler runs the same analysis on an uploaded Microsoft Project .mpp or Project XML file, with no account.

FAQs

Does it level across several projects? No. It reads one schedule at a time. A clash between projects shows on the Capacity Planner, and which project gives way is your call.

Why is someone over-allocated here but not on the Capacity Planner? The two count differently. The Capacity Planner subtracts booked time off, and a week with no hours set there follows your working calendar, so a holiday week has fewer hours. Here, a week with nothing set counts as 40.

Why is someone over-allocated on the Capacity Planner but not here? Here only this project’s tasks count. Their other projects are what fills the week.

Why wasn’t a task suggested? It is Critical or High priority, Done, a milestone, or has no assignee or no dates; it has a scheduling constraint other than As Soon As Possible or Start No Earlier Than; or it was already suggested for an earlier week.

Why does a moved task now show a Start No Earlier Than? Leveling sets it so the move holds. Without it, the next Recalculate would put a task that waits on another one straight back after it, undoing the leveling. Clear it in the task if you want the task to move earlier again.

Can it move work to someone else? No. It changes dates only.

Plan team capacity, weekly hours across every project
Forecast billable capacity, the weeks ahead
Record time off, how leave comes off the hours a person has
Plan on the Gantt chart, the Gantt, Recalculate and Suggest schedule
Link task dependencies, the links an applied move reflows

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