A crew hour (ch) is a unit of effort equal to one crew working for one hour.
Crew hours are used in estimating and planning to express how long an activity will take for a given crew, and to calculate its cost. The estimator divides the quantity of work by the crew’s output per hour to find the number of crew hours needed, and multiplies the crew hours by the hourly cost of the crew to give the labour (and any crew plant) cost. In the UK the same idea is often described as a gang hour. Crew hours differ from labour hours or man hours, which count the hours of each individual operative.
- A crew of four working for one hour equals one crew hour but four labour hours.
- Crew hours feed directly into programme durations.
Related terms: crew, gang rate, labour hour, output.
