How Much Office Space Per Person? We Measured 1,515 Workspaces

Most advice about office size comes from American planning guides, which assume corner offices and a lot of corridor. Useless here.

So we measured our own. Every workspace on Dexwork that publishes both its floor area and its seat count: 1,515 buildings across eleven cities. Divide one by the other and you get what Indian operators actually allow per person, lobby and pantry included.

The numbers

Sq ft per seat	Where it sits	What it feels like
42	Bottom quarter	Bench desks, narrow aisles, you hear every call
50	The median	A normal 4 ft desk with room to push your chair back
60	Top quarter	Wider desks, more breakout space, a quieter floor

So the working rule is fifty square feet a person, and if someone is offering you less than forty two, go and sit in it before you believe the seat count.

What that means for your team

People	Tight	Comfortable
5	210 sq ft	250 to 300 sq ft
10	420 sq ft	500 to 600 sq ft
20	840 sq ft	1,000 to 1,200 sq ft
50	2,100 sq ft	2,500 to 3,000 sq ft

These are carpet area, the floor you actually walk on. Which brings us to the part that catches people.

The loading trap

Indian landlords quote super built-up area: your share of the lobby, lift, corridor and staircase, added on top. The gap is called loading and it runs 25% to 35%.

Want 1,000 sq ft of carpet for twenty people? At 30% loading you will be billed for about 1,430 sq ft. At ₹90 per sq ft that is ₹1,28,700 a month, not ₹90,000. The difference is ₹4.6 lakh a year for space you cannot put a desk in.

Always ask for carpet area in writing. A vague answer is an answer.

Not sure how many seats you need?

No brokerage
Free visits
We negotiate

Get my shortlist →

Add for the things that are not desks

If you are taking your own space rather than seats, the desks are only part of it:

A four person meeting room: 80 to 100 sq ft
A phone booth: 15 sq ft, and the thing teams most regret skipping
Pantry counter: 40 sq ft, it does not need to be a cafeteria
Storage: one cupboard, more than you think

Roughly, add 20% to 25% on top of your desk area for all of that.

Two ways people get this wrong

Sizing for the team they hope to have. Twenty desks for twelve people means paying to heat eight empty chairs for a year. Take what you need for the next six months and negotiate the right to expand instead.

Trusting a seat count instead of a tape measure. An operator calling a 1,800 sq ft floor a 45 seater is telling you it is 40 sq ft a head. That may be fine for a quiet team and miserable for a sales floor. The number tells you which.