There is no correct number of hours in a story point, and a team that settles on one has quietly gone back to estimating in time. That is the honest answer. The useful answer is that this is almost always a forecasting question wearing a disguise — and forecasting has a real method that does not need a conversion at all.
A story point measures relative size: effort, complexity and uncertainty rolled into one number. A 5 is meant to be roughly five times the size of a 1 for your team, this quarter, with the people you currently have. It is not five times any fixed amount of clock time, and the same 5 in another team's backlog may take a completely different number of days.
The reason a fixed ratio breaks is that uncertainty is the part you cannot convert. A 1-point story is well understood, so the spread of durations it could actually take is narrow. A 13 is large partly because nobody is sure what is inside it, so its spread is wide. Multiplying both by the same hours-per-point number throws away precisely the information the bigger card was carrying, and hands a stakeholder a figure that looks more precise than anything the team said.
Velocity is points completed per sprint, measured rather than assumed. It answers the question the conversion was reaching for, and it gets more accurate over time instead of less.
Say a team finished 8, 13 and 9 points over its last three sprints. Average velocity is 10 points a sprint, with an observed range of 8 to 13. A 40-point backlog is therefore about four sprints — and reported honestly, three to five.
That forecast is built entirely from what this team actually did. It needs no hours-per-point number, it accounts for the team's real capacity including meetings and support work, and it sharpens every sprint as the sample grows. A conversion table does the opposite: it hides a change in velocity instead of measuring it, so it drifts further from reality the longer it is used.
If you must give a boundary figure — a contract, a budget line, an external commitment — derive it from your own velocity and state it as a range, not a rate. "Our last six sprints ran 8 to 13 points, so this 40-point scope is three to five sprints" is defensible, because every number in it was measured. "One point is six hours" is not, because that number was chosen.
Keep the conversion at the boundary and out of the estimation session. The moment the team starts sizing cards by mentally multiplying to hours, the ceremony has stopped measuring relative size and the wide-gap scale has no purpose left.
There is no fixed answer, and that is by design. Story points measure relative size rather than duration, so the number of hours in a point differs between teams and drifts within one team as it learns the domain. If you need a duration, use your team's measured velocity — points completed per sprint — rather than an hours-per-point rate.
Nobody can tell you without knowing the team, and any tool that answers with a number is guessing. A 5 means roughly five times the size of your team's 1-point reference story. To turn that into time, divide the sprint's points by the sprint length using your own recent velocity, and quote the result as a range.
You do not convert them item by item. You forecast in aggregate: take the points the team actually completed in recent sprints, average them, and divide the remaining scope by that velocity. A team averaging 10 points a sprint will take about four sprints to clear 40 points — a forecast built from measurement rather than from a chosen ratio.
Because the conversion discards the uncertainty the scale exists to express. A 1 is well understood and a 13 is not, so their ranges of possible durations are nothing alike. Applying one multiplier to both produces a precise-looking number with none of the precision, and it re-creates the time estimates story points were adopted to get away from.
Pull work until the points add up to roughly your recent average velocity, then stop. A team that has completed 8, 13 and 9 points in three sprints plans around 10 and treats anything above 13 as optimistic. No hours are involved at any step, and the plan is anchored to what the team has actually delivered.
Indirectly and in aggregate, never per item. Effort is one of the three things a point rolls up, alongside complexity and uncertainty, so a bigger number does correlate with more time. But the correlation only becomes useful once you have several sprints of completed points to average, and it holds for a batch of stories rather than for any single card.