Working out how much floor you actually need — before you fit out space you are not using, or give up space you will.
Your floor area and your headcount against the British Council for Offices density recommendation. It will tell you whether you are over-spaced, under-spaced, or paying rent on floor that is empty on your busiest day.
The property management consultancy team at Fraser Bond delivers a highly professional and tailored commercial property management service, focussed on responsible property management. Our clients include developers, investors and occupiers in the public and private sectors — served from each of our UK regional and London offices.
Hybrid working broke the relationship between headcount and floor area, and most occupiers have not re-measured since. Some are paying rent on floor that is empty even at the mid-week peak. Others cut too hard in 2021 and are now at a density the British Council for Offices specifically warns about. Both are expensive, in different currencies. The first costs rent, the second costs output, and only one of them shows up in the accounts.
A layout that needs less floor is worth nothing if the lease gives you no way to shed it, and a break clause is worth nothing if you have not worked out what you would move into. The two questions have to be answered in the same room.
What you have, what you use, and what the gap is worth.
Explore →How many people the floor takes at a density you would defend.
Explore →Once the right amount of space is settled, building it out.
Explore →Break, sublet, assign or regear — what the lease actually allows.
Explore →Measuring real attendance rather than arguing about it.
Explore →If a move or a fit-out follows, how it should be contracted.
Explore →The usual sequence is backwards: decide to move, find a building, then work out how much space is needed — by which time the answer has to fit the building. Measuring first costs a fraction of a lease and occasionally removes the need for one altogether.
The British Council for Offices recommends 10 to 12 square metres per person and warns that below 8 square metres per person you are more likely to affect comfort, wellbeing and performance. It recommends measuring per person rather than per desk, and planning for mid-week occupancy peaks rather than averages.
The direction has. The UK average was 14.8 square metres per desk in 2001 and 9.6 square metres by 2018, a long squeeze that hybrid working then interrupted. The current recommendation is a range rather than a single figure precisely because attendance varies through the week.
Because the floor has to work on that day. An average attendance figure will tell you a space is comfortable when it is in fact unusable on a Tuesday. Sizing to the average is the most common way a space review produces an answer everyone later disagrees with.
That depends on the lease, not the layout. A break clause, a sublet, an assignment or a regear are the usual routes and each has conditions attached. Knowing you have surplus floor is only useful alongside knowing what the lease permits.
Yes, and the office benchmarks do not transfer cleanly. A studio has equipment, acoustics, storage and circulation requirements that make a density figure close to meaningless on its own, so we work from the activities rather than a sq m per head rule.
The check on this page is the whole calculation, run in your browser, and it will tell you that you are correctly sized if you are. There is no version of this where the answer is always that you need us.
The check gives you the density and the gap for free. A test fit tells you what the floor would actually take, and the lease tells you what you can do about it.