personentage

Personentage is a unit of labor used in project planning and cost estimation, primarily in German-speaking contexts. It denotes the amount of work performed by one person for one standard workday. In English, the equivalent term is typically "person-days" or "man-days." The concept is used to quantify the total labor effort required to complete a task or project by multiplying the number of workers by the number of days they are committed, assuming full-time, standard hours for the workday.

Calculation and example: If a project requires three workers for five days, the total labor requirement is 15 personentage. If two workers complete a task in seven days, it equals 14 personentage. In practice, planners may adjust for part-time work, holidays, and productivity differences; some use an "effective" personentage to account for such factors.

Usage and limitations: Personentage provides a simple, scalable measure of labor input that supports capacity planning, budgeting, and scheduling. However, it abstracts away variations in skill, productivity, and task complexity, and can be misleading if not paired with hourly rates or more detailed effort estimates. It is generally recommended to specify assumptions about working hours per day and a baseline productivity factor when reporting personentage figures.

See also: man-hours, person-hours, workload, effort estimation. The term is common in German-language documents and contracts, where it serves as a practical, if approximate, unit for describing labor requirements.