Office Space Planner: How Much Area Does Your Team Need?

What it calculates

The planner answers the first question in any office move: how big a floor should we be looking at? It takes the people and rooms you need and returns four figures:

• the number of workstations, after cabins and any hybrid sharing;
• the carpet area the team needs, including circulation;
• the chargeable area you are likely to lease once the building's loading is added;
• the carpet area for each person, a quick check against typical office density.

It also shows where the area goes, so you can see whether meeting rooms, cabins or desks are driving the total.

Inputs

Total headcount is everyone who needs a place in the office, including people in cabins.

People in private cabins are taken out of the open-plan count and given a cabin each.

Open-plan staff in office on a peak day sets how many desks are provided. Keep it at 100% for one desk each. Lower it if the team works hybrid and not everyone is in on the same day.

Small meeting rooms and boardrooms are counted separately because they differ a lot in size.

The assumptions panel holds the area given to each type of space, the circulation allowance and the building loading. Every one of them can be changed.

Method

The planner builds the area up from the spaces, then adds circulation, then adds loading:

1. Workstations = open-plan staff × peak attendance, rounded up.
2. Net area = workstations + cabins + meeting rooms + reception, pantry, IT and storage.
3. Carpet area = net area × (1 + circulation allowance).
4. Chargeable area = carpet area × (1 + loading).

The pantry allowance is applied to the whole headcount, since everyone uses it. The reception, IT and storage figures are fixed areas you can edit.

Assumptions

These are planning allowances, not standards. A sales team on compact desks needs less; a leadership floor with large cabins needs far more. Change them to suit how your team works.

Loading varies from building to building and is a lease term, so the 30% default is only a placeholder until the landlord gives you the real figure.

Limitations

• It does not draw a layout. Columns, the core, the shape of the floor and the window line all affect how much of the carpet area is usable. A deep or irregular floor can need noticeably more area for the same team.
• It assumes washrooms are in the core. If your tenancy has its own washrooms, add them.
• It does not check fire escape. More people on a floor means a higher occupant load, which affects exit widths and travel distances under NBC 2016 Part 4. That is a check for the fire consultant on the actual building.
• It does not allow for growth. If the team will grow during the lease, enter the headcount you expect at the end of it, or the peak in between.

Worked example

A team of 50, with 4 people in cabins, everyone in the office on the busiest day, two small meeting rooms and one boardroom, using the default assumptions:

That is about 93 sq ft of carpet area for each person. In practice this team would be looking at floors of roughly 6,000 sq ft chargeable, and would ask each landlord for the carpet area before shortlisting.

If the same team moves to hybrid working with 70% of open-plan staff in on the busiest day, the workstations drop to 33 and the carpet area falls to 3,919 sq ft, about 16% less.

How engineers use it

A designer uses a calculation like this at the briefing stage, before any building has been chosen. It turns a conversation about headcount into an area brief, and it makes the trade-offs visible: dropping one cabin or one boardroom has a direct, measurable effect on the floor size and therefore on rent.

Once a building is shortlisted, the brief becomes a test fit: a quick layout on the real floor plate. The test fit confirms whether the room list fits, where the cabins can sit against the window line, and whether the core position wastes area. It also feeds the next calculations: cooling load is sized on the carpet area, and lighting is designed room by room.

When a professional design must replace it

Use the planner to decide how big a floor to look for and to compare buildings. Replace it with a designer's test fit before you sign a lease, and with a full layout before you order furniture or start any work. The test fit is also where fire escape, accessible routes and the building's own fit-out rules are checked against the real floor.