How much office space does your team need in Bengaluru?
Planning ranges for 10 to 200 people in Bengaluru (Bangalore), worked layouts and a planner. Square feet only, never prices.
The short answer
Published planning figures for a whole office in India run at about 70–100 sq ft per person (Colliers, 2024; Furnello, 2026). Flexible-office operators run far denser: about 44–45 sq ft per seat across Smartworks’ centres and IndiQube’s Bengaluru centres (their 2026 investor presentations; our calculation). Planned room by room with standard desks, a 50-person team needs about 2,800–3,150 sq ft of carpet area. That is about 3,750–4,850 sq ft of chargeable area in a Grade A building.
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How much space per person do offices in India plan for?
Planning figures for one company’s whole office allow far more space per person than operators average across their centres. The gap comes from what each figure measures.
Market data, not Nestoo figures. Sources: Smartworks, IndiQube, CBRE, Colliers, Furnello, Bureau of Indian Standards (2024–2026).
| Source and date | Figure | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Smartworks, March 2026 | About 44 sq ft per seat (10.1 million sq ft ÷ 231,000 seats) | Operational super built-up area per operational seat, all centres; our calculation |
| IndiQube, 30 June 2026 | About 45 sq ft per seat (6.68 million sq ft ÷ 148,000 seats) | Area under management per seat, 76 Bengaluru centres; our calculation |
| CBRE, Q1 2025 values | 60 sq ft per seat | Leasable area per seat in a modelled managed-office centre |
| Smartworks blog, 1 October 2026 | 80–100 sq ft per seat | Where “most workplace planners begin” for one team of 100 or more |
| Colliers, 2024 page | 70–100 sq ft per employee for a regional office; 70–120 for a regional headquarters | Contractors included; area basis not stated |
| Furnello, August 2026 | 70–100 sq ft per employee | Overall average, including each person’s share of walkways, meeting rooms and cafeteria |
| National Building Construction Standards, 30 April 2026 | One person per 7.1 m² (about 76 sq ft) of net floor area | The fewest occupants a floor’s fire exits are designed for; not a space standard |
Four things explain the spread:
- Shared rooms. An operator’s reception, cafeteria and meeting rooms serve many companies, so each seat carries only a small share of them.
- Seats, not people. Operators divide by every seat they can let. Planning figures divide by the people who will use the office, including those in cabins.
- One team or many. Smartworks’ own blog post on offices for 100 or more people in Bengaluru starts at 80–100 sq ft per seat, about twice its portfolio average.
- Area basis and desk size. Chargeable area can exceed carpet area by a third to a half (which area you are being quoted). A 5–6 × 2.5 ft workstation takes up to twice the floor of a 4 × 2 ft one (Furnello).
The building-standards figure is easy to mistake for a minimum space per person. It only sets the fewest people a floor’s fire exits must be designed for, and the office building checklist covers exits with the building’s other checks.
How much space do 10 to 200 people need?
In a typical layout, 10 employees need about 850–950 sq ft of carpet area, 50 employees 2,800–3,150 sq ft and 200 employees 11,500–12,900 sq ft. Small teams need more space per person, because a meeting room, a phone booth and a pantry don’t shrink with the team.
| Team | Rooms in the plan | Dense layout, carpet sq ft | Typical layout, carpet sq ft | Typical layout, chargeable sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 people | 9 desks, 1 cabin, 1 small meeting room, 1 phone booth | 600–700 | 850–950 | 1,150–1,450 |
| 20 people | 19 desks, 1 cabin, 1 small meeting room, 1 phone booth | 800–1,000 | 1,150–1,350 | 1,550–2,050 |
| 30 people | 28 desks, 2 cabins, 1 small and 1 mid-size meeting room, 1 phone booth | 1,400–1,600 | 1,850–2,100 | 2,500–3,200 |
| 50 people | 47 desks, 3 cabins, 2 small and 1 mid-size meeting room, 1 phone booth | 2,100–2,450 | 2,800–3,150 | 3,750–4,850 |
| 100 people | 95 desks, 5 cabins, 4 small and 2 mid-size meeting rooms, 1 boardroom, 3 phone booths | 4,450–5,100 | 5,800–6,500 | 7,800–10,000 |
| 200 people | 190 desks, 10 cabins, 8 small and 4 mid-size meeting rooms, 2 boardrooms, 5 phone booths | 8,800–10,000 | 11,500–12,900 | 15,400–19,800 |
Every plan also has a pantry. Per person, the typical layout needs about 90 sq ft of carpet area at 10 people but about 60 sq ft from 50 people up. These are planning ranges, not a quote.
Carpet area is the floor inside your office that you can furnish. Chargeable area adds your share of the building’s common areas, and rent is charged on it (which area you are being quoted).
How the table is worked out
Planning allowances from published guides, not Nestoo standards. Sources: Furnello, SimplySetup, Vantage Space, Colliers (2024–2026).
The method adds up desks and rooms, adds aisles, then converts the result to the area offers are quoted on. Allowances from furniture makers and planning tools are examples, not norms.
- Who to plan for. Rooms are sized for the team you expect in 12–24 months. Desks are for the people in on your busiest day (everyone, in this table), less those in cabins.
- Desks. Furnello’s approximate space per person is 20–25 sq ft for a compact 4 × 2 ft workstation, used for the dense layout. For a 5 × 2 ft workstation, used for the typical layout, it is 25–30 sq ft.
- Cabins. One for every 20 people, at 100 sq ft each (SimplySetup; Furnello puts a cabin at 80–120 sq ft).
- Meeting rooms and booths (SimplySetup). A 4–6 seat room of 120 sq ft for every 25 people, and an 8–10 seat room of 200 sq ft for every 50. A 12–15 seat boardroom of 300 sq ft for every full 100 people, and a 25 sq ft phone booth for every 40, at least one. We also always include at least one small meeting room.
- Pantry. 80 sq ft, plus café seating at 3 sq ft per person (at least 120 sq ft) in the typical layout. The dense layout assumes the building has a food court, as SimplySetup allows.
- Aisles and corridors. Add 20% (dense) or 30% (typical) to the total of steps 2 to 5. Vantage Space puts typical office circulation at 20–35%, counted either as a share of the whole floor or, as here, as an allowance added on top. The result is carpet area.
- Chargeable area. Divide carpet area by 0.75 for the low end and 0.65 for the high end, the efficiency range Colliers gives for Grade A buildings in Bengaluru.
Extras come from SimplySetup and are added before step 6: a reception of 150 sq ft, and a server room or a store room of 60 sq ft each. A breakout area takes 4 sq ft per person, at least 150 sq ft, and for a wellness or mother’s room we allow one cabin.
Other room counts are rounded to the nearest whole room, halves up, and areas outwards to the nearest 50 sq ft (100 sq ft from 5,000 up). SimplySetup gives its room sizes as chargeable figures; we use them as each room’s own floor area, which errs on the generous side. As a check, from 50 people up the typical layout comes to about 75–100 sq ft of chargeable area per person. That sits inside Colliers’ whole-office range and SimplySetup’s own all-in estimate of 70–110 sq ft.
Know your headcount?
Work out your own team’s space
Take the headcount you expect in 12–24 months and count desks for your busiest day. Add the rooms you need, then aisles, and convert the total to the area you’ll be quoted on.
A worked example on the method above:
- The team: 40 people now and 60 expected within 18 months, in the office about three days a week. Access-card records show the busiest day brings in four in five of the team, and two people will sit in cabins.
- The plan: rooms sized for 60 people, and desks for 48 of them (four in five). Less the two in cabins, that is 46 desks, plus two cabins, two small meeting rooms and one mid-size room, two phone booths, and a pantry with café seating.
- The result: about 2,700–3,050 sq ft of carpet area in a typical layout, or 3,600–4,700 sq ft of chargeable area in a Grade A building.
Planning allowances from published guides, not Nestoo standards. Sources: Furnello, SimplySetup, Vantage Space, Colliers (2024–2026).
The arithmetic: 46 desks at 25–30 sq ft come to 1,150–1,380 sq ft. Cabins add 200, meeting rooms 440, booths 50, and the pantry with café seating 260, for 2,100–2,330 sq ft in all. Aisles at 30% bring that to about 2,700–3,050 sq ft of carpet area, and dividing by 0.65–0.75 gives the chargeable range. Desks for all 60 people would have added about 390–470 sq ft of carpet area.
What do layouts look like for 12, 30, 60 and 120 people?
At 12 people, an office is one open room of desks with a cabin and a meeting room off it. By 120 people, it is a floor of team zones with meeting rooms spread through it.
12 people
30 people
60 people
120 people
- 12 people: 11 desks, one cabin, one small meeting room and a phone booth, in about 900–1,050 sq ft of carpet area (650–750 in a dense layout). The desks sit in two clusters, with the pantry by the door. At this size the fixed rooms take a large share of the floor.
- 30 people: 28 desks, two cabins, a small and a mid-size meeting room and a phone booth, in about 1,850–2,100 sq ft (1,400–1,600 dense). The larger meeting room sits by the entrance, so visitors don’t walk through the desks.
- 60 people: 57 desks, three cabins, two small and one mid-size meeting room and two phone booths, in about 3,200–3,600 sq ft (2,400–2,800 dense). Desks form two team zones, with the booths between them so calls stay out of the open area.
- 120 people: 114 desks, six cabins, five small and two mid-size meeting rooms, a boardroom and three phone booths, in about 6,800–7,600 sq ft (5,200–5,900 dense). The boardroom sits by the entrance, where a reception could go, and the other rooms spread through the floor.
Illustration only. Your layout is planned around your requirements and the building we find. The areas assume an open, rectangular floor, so a real building’s columns, cores and windows will change the fit. How built-to-suit works explains how an office is designed and fitted out around one team.
How much room should you leave for growth?
Size the rooms for the headcount in your hiring plan two years out, and the desks for the nearer number. Agree in writing how more space would be added if you outgrow even that.
Survey data, not Nestoo figures. Source: CBRE, India Office Occupier Survey 2026 (August 2026).
Growth is the normal case. In CBRE’s 2026 India Office Occupier Survey, 77% of occupiers expected their India office portfolio to grow over the next two years. About 30% expected it to grow by more than 30%.
A headroom method in four steps:
- Take two numbers from your hiring plan: the headcount in 12 months and in 24 months.
- Size the hard-to-add rooms for the larger number. Meeting rooms and cabins need walls, a pantry needs plumbing and a server room needs cooling, so they are hard to add later.
- Size desks for the smaller number, and decide where the rest will go. On this guide’s typical layout each extra desk takes about 33–39 sq ft of carpet area, aisles included, so 20 more desks need about 650–780 sq ft. Keep that much open floor as a breakout area until you need it, or agree how space will be added later.
- Ask any provider how expansion works: whether space can be added in the same building, with how much notice, and whether the terms for it are agreed now or later.
Do hybrid teams need less space?
Only if your busiest day is well below full attendance. Desks can follow attendance, but meeting rooms, booths and quiet space must cope with the days everyone is in.
Survey and research data, not Nestoo figures. Sources: CBRE (September 2025 and August 2026), JLL (February 2026).
Indian occupiers are not planning for empty offices. In CBRE’s 2025 India Office Occupier Survey, 94% of occupiers preferred at least three office days a week. In its 2026 survey of over 200 executives, 77% reported office utilisation above 50%. The setting most often due to grow was small enclosed rooms for video calls (52% of occupiers), while space per seat and desk-sharing ratios were to stay steady. Quiet space matters as much as desks: JLL’s India GCC Guide 2026 notes that 47% of employee time goes on individual focus work.
- Plan desks for your busiest day, taken from your own access-card or booking records over four to six weeks. We found no reliable published desk-sharing ratio for Bengaluru: the ratios we found are unexplained market averages or planning-tool defaults (planning for desk sharing).
- Keep rooms at full size, and add focus space. Whole-team days fill the meeting rooms, and phone booths and small rooms do more for a hybrid team than spare desks.
Carpet, built-up or super built-up: which area are you being quoted?
Office rent in Bengaluru is charged on super built-up area, which adds a share of the building’s common areas to your own floor (Colliers, 2024). Convert every offer to carpet area before you compare.
- Carpet area is the floor inside your office’s walls that you can furnish.
- Built-up area is carpet area plus the area taken up by walls.
- Super built-up area, also called chargeable, leasable or rentable area, adds your share of common areas such as the lobby, lifts, stairs, corridors and toilets. The extra over carpet area, as a percentage, is called loading.
Market data, not Nestoo figures. Source: Colliers, Global Occupier Guide: Bangalore (page updated July 2024).
Colliers puts the efficiency of Grade A buildings in Bengaluru at 65–75%: the share of the chargeable area you can actually use. So an offer of 5,000 sq ft of chargeable area leaves about 3,250–3,750 sq ft to plan in. Working the other way, a plan that needs 3,000 sq ft of carpet area calls for about 4,000–4,600 sq ft of chargeable area.
Ask which basis each figure uses, and compare offers on carpet area or on a test-fit plan, a draft layout of your team on that floor. If a quote is per seat, ask what area and which rooms it assumes. In your own requirements, write “about 3,000 sq ft of carpet area” rather than “3,000 sq ft”. Area is one of what shapes the cost of an office, and fit-out is priced per sq ft too, so the same question applies to what a fit-out costs.
What does your number mean for a shared or an entire office?
Your room list matters as much as your area. A plan of mostly desks and cabins suits a shared office; a team that needs every room to itself fits an entire office.
Nestoo Worksphere builds and runs both, around your team and in the locality you choose, for teams of about 16 people or more:
- A shared office. Managed Office Space is your own lockable office inside a shared, managed office. Reception, meeting rooms and the cafeteria are shared with a few other companies, so your own area holds mainly desks, cabins and any rooms you want to yourselves.
- An entire office. Private Office Space is an entire office for your company alone. Every room in your plan sits inside it, so the full area applies.
Before you ask for quotes, write down your headcount now and in 12–24 months, and the number in on your busiest day. Add your cabins and meeting rooms by size, any extras such as a server room, and the area basis of any figure you give. The next question is where, and choosing a location covers it for Bengaluru.
Have your numbers?
Frequently asked questions
How big should a meeting room or a cabin be?
As starting sizes, a cabin takes about 80–120 sq ft, depending on whether it seats visitors (Furnello, 2026). SimplySetup’s planning tool allows 120 sq ft for a 4–6 seat meeting room and 200 sq ft for 8–10 seats, in chargeable area. It gives a 12–15 seat boardroom 300 sq ft and a phone booth 25 sq ft. Treat these as examples, not rules: a test-fit plan on the actual floor decides the final rooms.
How many meeting rooms does a 30-person team need?
One starting ratio, from SimplySetup’s planning tool, is a 4–6 seat room for every 25 people and an 8–10 seat room for every 50. Rounded, that gives a 30-person team one of each, plus a phone booth for calls. Then adjust for how you work: add a room if you host clients or interview often, and add booths if much of the day goes on calls. In a shared office, ask how the shared rooms are booked.
Does a server room or a reception change how much space we need?
Yes, and both are easier to plan in from the start than to add later. SimplySetup’s planning tool allows about 150 sq ft for a reception and waiting area and 60 sq ft for a server or IT room. With aisles, the pair adds about 270 sq ft of carpet area to a 30-person office in this guide’s typical layout, or 13–15%. In a shared office the reception is shared, so you would plan only the server room, which must be secured and cooled.
Should we plan for desk sharing?
Only with real attendance data. Plan desks for your busiest day, not your average one, and keep meeting rooms and support spaces sized for the whole team. Planning tools build in ratios such as 70% of desks for a team in three or four days a week (SimplySetup), but that is an assumption, not a measurement. Count access-card or booking records over four to six weeks and plan for the highest day.
Sources
- Smartworks, Earnings Presentation, Q4 and FY26 (30 April 2026; data as of March 2026) files.smartworksoffice.com
- IndiQube Spaces, Investor Presentation Q1 FY27 (August 2026; data as on 30 June 2026) indiqube.com
- CBRE South Asia, Industry Report on Flexible Workspaces Segment in India (25 June 2025; values as of Q1 2025) indiqube.com
- Smartworks, Best Managed Office Space in Bangalore for a 100+ Seat Team (blog, 1 October 2026) smartworksoffice.com
- Colliers, Global Occupier Guide: Bangalore (page updated July 2024) globaloccupier.colliers.com
- Furnello, Office Workstation Size Guide (India) (4 August 2026) furnello.com
- Bureau of Indian Standards, Gazette of India notification establishing the National Building Construction Standards 2026 (30 April 2026) egazette.gov.in
- National Building Construction Standards 2026, Part F, clause 4.3 and Table 2: Occupant Load (unofficial copy on the Internet Archive) archive.org
- SimplySetup, Office Space Calculator India (undated page, first published 7 September 2026; checked 27 October 2026) simplysetup.com
- Vantage Space, Circulation Factor (glossary entry, undated; checked 27 October 2026) vantagespace.com
- CBRE, India Office Occupier Survey 2026 (20 August 2026; responses April to June 2026) mktgdocs.cbre.com
- CBRE, Three in four occupiers plan to expand their office portfolios in India over next two years (press release, 20 August 2026) cbre.co.in
- CBRE, 2025 India Office Occupier Survey (9 September 2025) cbre.co.in
- JLL, India GCC Guide 2026 (17 February 2026) jll.com