Office space planning is a drawing problem only after it is an arithmetic problem, and most of the disappointment with a new floor comes from doing the drawing first. Planning office space starts from a headcount and three decisions the organisation owns: how many desks per ten people the attendance supports, how much area each desk position gets, and how much meeting, support and circulation space the floor needs around the desks. From those the desks, the floor and the square feet per person follow, and the layout is what fits inside the answer. This guide walks the arithmetic, names what office space planning tools have to work, and says plainly that the office space planning guidelines people search for are, in the end, the organisation's own figures.
Desks from the ratio, area from the desks
120 people at 7 desks per 10 is 84 desk positions; at 10 per 10 it is 120. The ratio is the biggest lever in the whole plan and it is the attendance's decision, not the designer's: measure the average and the busiest day first and the space utilization worksheet returns the ratio the floor can run. Then 84 desks at 60 square feet each is 5,040 square feet of desk area, and the area per desk is the second decision, the workstation plus its share of the aisle, set by the organisation or its designer.
The shared space and the circulation
Add 1,800 square feet of meeting and collaboration space and 1,500 of support, reception, kitchen, storage, print and plant, and the net area is 8,340 square feet. Add 25% for circulation, the corridors and the space between things, and the floor is 10,425 square feet: 86.9 square feet per person at that headcount. Change the ratio to a desk each and the same allowances give 118.1. The office space per person worksheet on this site works all of it from your six inputs with no account.
Office space planning guidelines: whose figures they are
Searches for office space planning guidelines want a number per person from an authority, and the honest answer is that the number is the organisation's. The one external reference on this hub is the U.S. General Services Administration's design requirement of 150 usable square feet per person for federal office space, which binds federal agencies and nobody else and is quoted here as a reference point rather than a standard. Your desk ratio, your area per desk and your circulation allowance are the guidelines; the worksheet works what they imply.
What office space planning software has to work, and what the plans are
An office space planning tool worth the name takes the headcount and the three decisions and returns the desks, the floor and the square feet per person, then holds the inventory the answer sits on so the plan can be checked against the attendance a year later. Office space plans are that arithmetic per team, stacked: a team of 36 at 7 per 10 is 26 desks, and the sum across teams is the floor. HardFM's worksheets work the figures free; HardFM Pro keeps the inventory and the counts the plan was made from.
Questions people ask about office space planning
How do I start planning office space?
With the attendance, not the floor plan. Measure the average and busiest day, work the desk ratio the attendance supports, then work the desks, the area and the shared space from the headcount and your own allowances. The office space per person worksheet does the second half free from six inputs.
Are there official office space planning guidelines?
For federal agencies, the U.S. General Services Administration sets a design requirement of 150 usable square feet per person; it binds federal offices and nobody else. For everyone else the figures are the organisation's own, and the worksheet publishes no standard of its own.
What should office space planning software keep?
The inventory the plan sits on, the allocation of desks to teams, and the attendance counts the plan was sized from, so it can be checked later. HardFM Pro keeps those for $24 a month for the whole team; the planning arithmetic is free on the page.