Where the "250 Hours a Year" Power Apps Number Actually Comes From

Forrester's Power Apps-specific Total Economic Impact study includes a figure that gets quoted a lot: up to 250 hours saved per user per year. It's a real number, but it comes with a qualifier worth keeping — it's for high-impact use cases, not an average across every user in an organisation.

That distinction matches what I actually see in practice. The time savings aren't evenly spread. A canvas app that replaces a paper form or a chain of emails for someone doing that specific task daily can save real hours every week. A model-driven app that gives a sales or ops team one place to see their data instead of five doesn't save the same amount for everyone who touches it — but for the people running that process constantly, the effect is closest to what the 250-hour figure describes.

So when I scope a Power Apps project, the question I'm actually trying to answer isn't "how many hours will this save on average" — it's "who is doing this task often enough, and painfully enough, that fixing it changes their week." Build for that person first, and the return follows.

Source: Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Power Apps (2024), composite organisation, high-impact use cases only. Read the full study