Little's law states that, under steady state conditions, the average number of items in a queuing system equals the average rate at which the items arrive multiplied by the average time that an item spends in the system. Algebraically, this can expressed as
 |
where 
denotes the average number of items
in the queuing system, 
is the average number of items arriving per unit time, and 
is the average waiting time for an item within the system.
Due to its use of general language and its natural conditions with practically no extraneous assumptions, Little's law can be used to asymptotically
describe conditions across a vast array of scenarios. For example, Little's law suggests
that the average number of students attending a two-year college 
which averages 6,000 first-year student admissions per year
is simply 
.
