Office Space Requirements: How Much Office Space Do I Need?

What factors impact how much office space you need? 

There are several factors that determine your total space requirement, and they rarely operate in isolation. Modern workplaces aren’t planned around a fixed number of desks but around how people actually use the environment.

For some organisations, that means prioritising collaboration and shared spaces; for others, it means allowing more room for confidentiality, equipment or specialist tasks.

Your space need will be shaped by:

• Office layout: The mix of work settings — desks, meeting rooms, collaboration areas, social spaces and support zones — and how they fit together.
• Hybrid working patterns: Peak attendance levels determine desk demand, while hybrid collaboration often increases the need for small and medium meeting rooms.
• Sector-specific requirements: Privacy, acoustics, equipment, client space and storage can all increase per‑person space needs.
• Workplace culture: Whether teams work independently or closely together, how mobile they are, and how much informal interaction is encouraged.

With these variables in mind, the first step is understanding the benchmark space allocation per person before layering on the additional spaces your business requires.

What types of spaces do you need to account for? 

Once you’ve established a baseline for workstation space, the next step is understanding all the other areas that contribute to your total footprint. An office isn’t just desks, and that’s been emphasised to a much greater extent in recent times. Your calculation also needs to factor in the collection of settings that support different types of work throughout the day.

Most workplaces include a mix of focus spaces, meeting rooms, collaboration areas and social zones. Each carries its own space requirement, and together they shape how your office functions.

Below are the typical UK space standards for commonly used areas. These standards aren’t rigid rules, but they provide a helpful baseline when building an initial space budget. The exact mix you choose will depend on how your teams collaborate, the level of privacy you need and the ways people move through the office.

A balanced workplace combines these settings to support focus, teamwork and social connection, and ultimately creates an environment where people can work at their best.

Accounting for circulation space 

Circulation space is the area people use to move through the office, including corridors, walkways around desks, routes to meeting rooms and access to shared amenities. It’s a crucial part of ensuring your workplace feels comfortable and easy to navigate.

Most offices allocate 15–25% of their total floor area to circulation. Lower‑density workplaces with wider walkways and more enclosed rooms typically sit at the higher end of this range, while open‑plan environments may require less.

Including circulation in your plans early on helps avoid overcrowded layouts and ensures your teams can move freely without disrupting others.

Does hybrid working mean you need less office space? 

Hybrid working has changed how often people come into the office — but it hasn’t created a simple equation where fewer people automatically means less space. In reality, the impact of hybrid working is more nuanced.

Most businesses do reduce their overall desk numbers once they understand their true peak attendance. If only 50–70% of your team is typically in the office at the same time, you don’t need a one-to-one desk ratio.

But hybrid patterns also increase demand for:

• Small and medium meeting rooms (for hybrid calls)
• Project and collaboration zones
• Touchdown spaces for employees who come in for a few hours
• Social and community areas that bring teams together

So while hybrid working may lower your workstation requirement, it often raises space needs elsewhere. The businesses that benefit most from hybrid working aren’t shrinking their offices dramatically — they’re reshaping them.

Trainline (55,000 sq ft in Holborn) and Withers and Rogers (8,300 sq ft in London Bridge) redesigned their London offices with hybrid working in mind, incorporating hot desks, quiet zones, and interactive workspaces to support a flexible workforce and refresh their ways of working.

The key question isn’t “Do we need less space?” but “Do we need a different mix of spaces?”

The impact of growth plans

When you are initially deciding on what the right amount of office for your business is, you should be planning for now but also for the future. Moving to a new office may bring new operational or strategic goals to your organisation and looking at things on a mid to long-term basis may help save money or prevent another move in the future.

Depending on your plans for growth, it may be an option to take an office that is larger than you need with a view to ‘right-sizing’ in the future. This means that you can secure a property that you like and look to grow into it when you’re ready. You can also contract or expand as you need it which gives you far more control over your workplace.

Taking extra space may seem like an easy way to overspend on your office but while you are not using the space, it doesn’t need to remain unoccupied. Companies that take on more space than they need can sublet their extra space and charge rent to another company that occupies the space on a short-term lease. This is a good way of covering the rental costs until you are ready to take the space back on.