How much office space do you need per employee?

The honest answer is that it depends on how your team works — but you can get to a usable number in about a minute, and you need one before you sign a lease or brief a fit-out.

Start with the workstation, not the floor

Most space-planning goes wrong because it starts from the building. A landlord quotes a gross area, someone divides it by headcount, and the number looks fine until the desks arrive and the room is full.

Work the other way round. Decide what a single seat needs, multiply by the team you expect to have at the end of the lease, then add the enclosed space your work actually requires. Our own per-seat figures, which include circulation around the desk, are:

So a team of 40 on a bench system needs roughly 200 m² of open plan. The same 40 people in executive singles would need more than double that — which is exactly the decision worth making deliberately rather than discovering after the lease is signed.

What the per-seat figure does not include

Circulation around the desk is included above. These are not, and they are where floors most often run short:

• Meeting rooms. Usually under-provided. Teams specify one boardroom and no small rooms, then spend the year taking calls at their desks.
• Focus space. An open plan with nowhere private is a false economy. An acoustic booth takes about a square metre and needs no construction, which is often cheaper than building a room.
• Reception and waiting. The first room a client sees.
• Kitchen, storage, server and comms. Small individually, significant together.

Three mistakes that make a floor feel full

1. Planning for today’s headcount

Furniture outlives org charts. Plan the layout for the team you expect at the end of the lease and phase the purchase — a system that tiles predictably lets you add seats without re-planning anything.

2. Mixing systems that don’t share a logic

Desks bought in three batches from three suppliers rarely line up. The gaps between them are wasted floor you paid rent on. One material language and one square-metre logic across the range avoids it.

3. Ignoring the column grid

Real floors have columns, cores and fire routes. A per-seat figure gets you a budget and a shortlist; it does not survive contact with a real floor plate. That is what a site visit is for.

From estimate to specification

A per-seat number is a first pass. Turning it into something you can build from means a layout drawn against your actual plan, finishes and quantities, and a price. We do all of that in-house — we design the systems, manufacture them in our own factory in Cairo, and deliver and install them ourselves across Egypt.

Common questions