RICE Score Calculator
RICE answers the question ICE cannot: is a big idea worth its cost? Enter how many people it reaches, how much it moves them, how sure you are, and how much work it takes — and get one number that ranks impact per person-month.
RICE score = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort. Created by Intercom to prioritize their own roadmap, RICE measures total expected impact per unit of work. Reach is people per period, Impact is a 0.25–3 multiplier, Confidence is a percentage that discounts your estimate, and Effort is person-months. Score every idea the same way and build the highest scores first.
RICE Score Calculator inputs and result
| Impact value | What it means |
|---|
How to use this calculator
- Estimate Reach over a fixed periodCount how many people the idea touches in a set window — customers per quarter, signups per month, sessions per week. Use the same period for every idea so the scores compare. A real number beats a feeling here.
- Pick an Impact value from the scaleRICE uses a fixed scale, not free numbers: 3 for massive, 2 high, 1 medium, 0.5 low, 0.25 minimal. The discrete steps keep teams from inventing precision they do not have.
- Set Confidence as a percentageDiscount your estimate by how much evidence you have. Intercom anchors 100% to a high-confidence, well-supported bet, 80% to medium, and 50% to a hunch. This is the axis that punishes wishful thinking.
- Estimate Effort in person-monthsAdd up the work across product, design and engineering. Effort is the denominator, so an honest estimate is what keeps big expensive ideas from looking as good as cheap ones.
- Read the score and rank the backlogThe tool returns impact per person-month. Score every idea the same way, sort high to low, and build from the top. Export the CSV to share your ranked roadmap.
RGM Expert Says
RICE is the framework we hand a team the moment ICE starts to mislead them. The tell is when a quick copy tweak and a quarter-long platform project post the same priority score — that means effort and reach are missing from the math. RICE puts both back in: it asks how many people an idea reaches and divides the whole thing by the work it takes, so the roadmap stops rewarding whatever is merely cheap and easy.
The Confidence percentage is where we spend our facilitation energy. Teams love a high-Reach, high-Impact idea and will quietly assume it works. We make them defend the number: a 100% means you have real data or a shipped analogue, an 80% means a solid argument, and anything you cannot justify drops to 50% or below. A moonshot with thin evidence gets discounted hard, which is exactly what should happen before it eats a quarter of engineering.
The trap with RICE is false precision. The output looks like a hard number, but it is built on estimates, so we treat it as a sorting tool, not a forecast. We round aggressively, re-score after every shipped experiment teaches us something about Confidence, and we never let a 7-point gap between two ideas override a strong strategic reason to build one first. The score informs the decision; it does not make it.
How it works
RICE multiplies the three things that make an idea valuable, then divides by the one thing that makes it costly. Confidence enters as a percentage, so it scales the whole numerator down toward your level of certainty.
- Reach — how many people or events the idea affects per period.
- Impact — Intercom's fixed scale: 3, 2, 1, 0.5 or 0.25 per person reached.
- Confidence — a percentage (100/80/50) that discounts your estimate.
- Effort — total person-months of work; the denominator.
The fixed Impact scale (3 / 2 / 1 / 0.5 / 0.25) and the Confidence anchors (100% / 80% / 50%) are Intercom's, from the post that introduced RICE in 2016. The discrete steps are deliberate — they stop teams from arguing over whether something is a 2.3 or a 2.4.
Why RICE fixes what ICE misses
ICE compares ideas on Impact, Confidence and Ease, but it has no sense of scale or cost. A change that helps ten people and one that helps ten thousand can score the same, and a one-day fix can tie a six-month build. RICE closes both gaps by adding Reach and replacing the fuzzy ‘Ease’ with hard Effort in the denominator. The result is impact per unit of work — a ratio you can rank a whole roadmap by.
The Confidence percentage is RICE’s honesty mechanism. Because it multiplies the entire numerator, a high-Reach, high-Impact idea you are only half-sure of gets cut in half. That is the point: it forces you to separate a bet with evidence behind it from one carried by enthusiasm, before either consumes a quarter of your team.
RICE is still an estimate dressed as a number, so treat it as a ranking, not a promise. Round generously, re-score as experiments teach you more, and let strategy override a small scoring gap. Used that way, RICE turns a contested roadmap into a defensible, ordered list — which is exactly what it was built at Intercom to do.
Intercom's RICE scales
RICE has no universal ‘good score’ — the number is relative to your own backlog. What is fixed are the input scales Intercom defined, reproduced here so your scores are comparable to how the framework was designed.
| Axis | Allowed values | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Impact | 3 / 2 / 1 / 0.5 / 0.25 | Massive / high / medium / low / minimal per person |
| Confidence | 100% / 80% / 50% | High / medium / low evidence |
| Reach | Any count per period | People or events affected |
| Effort | Person-months | Total work across the team |
What product leaders say about RICE
RICE forces us to estimate reach, impact, confidence and effort consistently, so we can compare very different ideas on a single scale instead of arguing about gut feel.
The best prioritization model is the one your team will actually use every cycle; RICE works because the inputs are quick to estimate and hard to fudge.