Planning an office layout: how many meeting rooms, what size, and how much space

Updated 6 November 2026 · By the Office Partitions team

Short answer: Plan meeting rooms around how your team actually meets: most meetings involve two to six people, so a mix of small rooms and phone booths is usually more useful than one large boardroom. As a rough guide, allow around 2 to 2.5 square metres per person seated in a meeting room. UK workplace rules require at least 11 cubic metres of space per person in a workroom, and new rooms must not compromise escape routes.

Start with how the team works

Before drawing walls, look at how the space is actually used. Count how many people are typically in the office on a busy day, how often meetings happen and how many people are in them, how many video calls are taken from desks, and who genuinely needs a private office. Many businesses find their existing large meeting room sits mostly empty while people struggle to find somewhere quiet for a call.

Typical and peak occupancy across the week
Number and size of meetings, including video calls
Roles that need privacy for confidential conversations
Storage, comms, print and kitchen requirements
Likely growth or change over the lease term

Typical room sizes

Space	Typical capacity	Rough floor area guide
Phone or focus booth	1 person	1.5 to 3 square metres
Small meeting room or huddle space	2 to 4 people	6 to 10 square metres
Medium meeting room	6 to 8 people	12 to 20 square metres
Large meeting room or boardroom	10 to 16 people	25 to 40 square metres
Private office, one person	1 person with a small meeting table	9 to 15 square metres

These are rough planning guides. Furniture, screens, circulation space and door positions all affect the final size, so a layout should be tested with furniture drawn in.

UK workplace rules that affect layout

The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 and their Approved Code of Practice set baseline requirements for offices. Workrooms should have enough floor area, height and unoccupied space, with a minimum of 11 cubic metres per person, ignoring any height above 3.0 metres. Rooms also need suitable lighting, a reasonable temperature and adequate ventilation, and transparent partitions and doors must be of safety material and marked so they can be seen.

At least 11 cubic metres per person in workrooms
Adequate fresh air in enclosed rooms
Suitable lighting, including in rooms without windows
Safety glass and manifestation on glazed partitions and doors
Clear routes for moving around and escaping safely

Fire escape and accessibility

New rooms change how people escape in a fire. An inner room, where the only way out is through another room, is restricted under Building Regulations guidance and usually needs a vision panel, a fire alarm or other measures in the access room. Travel distances to exits, corridor widths and the number of exits from larger rooms also apply. This is why layouts affecting escape routes often need building control approval.

Accessibility matters too. Approved Document M expects doors on accessible routes to have enough clear opening width, commonly around 800mm or more in new buildings, with space beside the leading edge of the door and manageable opening forces. Plan at least one accessible meeting room and check turning space inside rooms.

Light, air and services

Enclosing rooms affects the rest of the floor. Solid rooms along a window wall block daylight from the open area behind them, which is why many layouts put solid storage and comms rooms in the core and glazed meeting rooms on the perimeter. Each enclosed room typically needs its own light switching, supply and extract air or a route for air to return, fire detection, and power and data at the right positions.

Approved Document F suggests outdoor air rates of around 10 litres per second per person for offices. Meeting rooms with several people and a closed door can become stuffy quickly if the air conditioning was designed for an open floor, so check with a building services engineer before finalising room positions.

Leaving room to change

Teams change faster than leases. Demountable partitions, a consistent module size and glazed systems that can be reconfigured make it easier to adjust the layout later. Avoid building every room to the maximum size you might need. A handful of flexible rooms that work for different group sizes is often more useful and keeps the open floor usable.

A useful test is to draw the layout with furniture and walk through a typical day: where people take a call, where a client is met, where a team of five has a quick discussion, and where someone goes to concentrate. Gaps show up quickly. Leaving a little open space that can be enclosed later is often cheaper than taking walls down when the layout turns out to be wrong.