How to Measure Desk Utilisation Before You Redesign

Most office redesigns are planned around the wrong number. The brief usually starts with headcount (“we have 120 people, so we need 120 desks”) or with a gut feeling that the office “feels empty on Fridays”. Neither tells you how many desks are actually in use, when, or by whom. That is what desk utilisation measures, and it is the single most useful figure you can bring to a redesign conversation.

This guide covers how to measure desk utilisation properly: the difference between utilisation and occupancy, the formulas worth using, the four main counting methods (including desk occupancy sensors), how to run a short study, and how to turn the results into an answer to the question every facilities manager eventually gets asked: how many desks do we need?

These two terms get used interchangeably, but they measure different things, and mixing them up leads to bad decisions.

Your office occupancy rate tells you how many people are in the building compared with how many could be. It is usually drawn from access control or badge data, and it is the figure behind most headlines about hybrid working. Remit Consulting’s weekly ReTurn Report, for example, found in February 2026 that average UK office occupancy had stabilised above 40%, with a late January high of 44.1%. Pre-pandemic, the same research put typical occupancy at 60% to 80%.

Desk utilisation is narrower and more useful for design. It tells you what proportion of your desks are actually being used at a given time. Someone who badges in at 8.45am and then spends the whole day in meeting rooms, the canteen and a client’s site counts towards occupancy but barely touches a desk. That gap is why a building can feel busy while half the workstations sit empty.

There is one more distinction worth making before you start counting. A desk can be in active use (someone is sitting at it) or passive use (a coat on the chair, a laptop open, nobody there). Passive use matters because it blocks the desk for everyone else, so record it separately rather than ignoring it or lumping it in with active use.

The core calculation is simple:

Desk utilisation (%) = desks in use ÷ total desks available × 100

The mistake is stopping there. A single utilisation figure hides almost everything you need to know, so work out three numbers from the same data.

Average utilisation is the mean across every observation in your study period. It is good for spotting overall waste, and it is the number finance teams like, but it is the wrong number to design around.

Peak utilisation is the highest figure you recorded, usually mid morning on your busiest day. This is the number your new layout has to cope with, because an office that works on an average Tuesday but fails every Wednesday is an office people complain about.

Desk-to-headcount ratio is the number of desks divided by the number of people who might need one. It is the figure that lets you compare your current setup with the one you are planning.

Here is how that looks in practice. Imagine an office with 110 desks and 124 staff. Over a two-week study, someone walks the floor four times a day and records each desk as active, passive or empty. Across all 40 rounds, an average of 51 desks are in use, giving average utilisation of 46%. The busiest single round, 11.30am on the second Wednesday, finds 79 desks in use, a peak of 72%. Of those 79, nine are passive: bags and jackets, no people.

Headcount says the business needs more desks. The average says it could lose more than half of them. The peak says something far more sensible, and we will come back to what that is below.

There is no single right method. The best choice depends on your budget, how long you want to measure for, and how much detail the redesign needs.

Walk-round observation is the oldest method and still one of the most reliable for a one-off study. A named person (or an external surveyor) walks a fixed route at set times and records the status of every desk on a floor plan or spreadsheet. It captures active and passive use, it costs nothing but time, and it produces exactly the kind of desk-by-desk picture a designer can work with. Its weakness is that it only captures moments, so the number and timing of rounds matters. Four rounds a day, spread between mid morning and mid afternoon, is a reasonable minimum.

Desk booking data is tempting if you already use a booking system, but treat it with care. A booking shows that someone intended to use a desk, not that they did. No-shows, people who sit somewhere other than their booked desk and people who never book at all all distort the picture. Booking data is best used alongside another method, not instead of one.

Badge, access control and Wi-Fi data is cheap because you almost certainly collect it already. It is excellent for understanding attendance patterns: which days are busy, how many people come in, and how that is changing over time. What it cannot tell you is where people sit or whether they sit at all, so on its own it measures your office occupancy rate rather than your desk utilisation.

Desk occupancy sensors measure continuously and in detail, which is why they have become the default recommendation from workplace technology vendors. They deserve a closer look.

Desk occupancy sensors fall into two broad families. Under-desk sensors, usually passive infrared (PIR), detect heat and movement at an individual workstation. Ceiling-mounted sensors use optical or thermal detection to cover a group of desks or a zone. Under-desk units are cheaper per device and simple to fit, but they can miss someone sitting very still and they cannot see passive use such as a bag left on a chair. Ceiling units cover more ground and can pick up more nuance, but they cost more and need more thought around installation and data handling.

The real question is not which sensor to buy, but whether you need continuous data at all. If your aim is to gather evidence for a single redesign, a well-run observation study over two to four weeks will usually give you enough to plan with confidence. Sensors earn their keep when you want to keep measuring after the new layout goes in, for example to adjust desk numbers as hybrid patterns shift, or to prove the redesign is working.

Whichever route you take, remember that occupancy data is information about your employees. The Information Commissioner’s Office has published guidance on monitoring workers, and the principles are sensible even for anonymous sensor data: tell people what you are measuring and why, collect no more than you need, and make clear the data is about space, not individual performance. Studies that are explained openly get far better cooperation than ones staff discover by accident.

A useful study does not need to be complicated, but it does need to be planned. The steps below work whether you are counting by hand or using technology.

Start by fixing the scope and the floor plan. Number every desk, and include meeting rooms, breakout areas and quiet rooms if you can. Knowing that desks are 46% used is helpful; knowing that the four small meeting rooms are booked solid while the boardroom sits empty is often more useful still.

Next, choose a representative period. Two weeks is the minimum, four is better. Avoid school holidays, bank holiday weeks, the run-up to Christmas and any week with a big one-off event such as a company conference, all of which will skew the results.

Then set your observation times and stick to them. If you are observing by hand, use the same times every day and the same route every round. Record each desk as active, passive or empty, and note the team or department it belongs to.

Tell people what is happening. A short note explaining that you are measuring how space is used ahead of a redesign, and that nobody is being tracked individually, will stop people changing their behaviour or feeling watched.

Finally, add a short staff survey alongside the numbers. Utilisation data tells you what people do; a survey tells you why. If people avoid a bank of desks because it is cold, noisy or too far from their team, the fix is design, not fewer desks. Poor layouts have a habit of hiding in utilisation data, which is something we explored in our article on whether bad office design is quietly holding your team back.

Once the data is in, resist the urge to lead with the average. It is the most quoted figure and the least useful for planning a layout.

Look first at your peak utilisation and when it happens. In most hybrid offices there is a clear pattern, with Tuesday to Thursday busy and Monday and Friday quiet. Your new layout must work on the busiest day, so the peak sets the minimum number of desks you can safely provide.

Then break the peak down by team. Different departments often peak on different days, and that is an opportunity. If sales are in on Tuesdays and finance on Thursdays, a shared “neighbourhood” of desks can serve both, which is far more efficient than giving each team enough desks for its own peak.

Look hard at passive use too. A high share of passive occupancy usually points to a culture of claiming desks “just in case”, and it often disappears once clear desk policies and good office furniture, such as lockers, are in place.

Finally, compare desks with everything else. If desk utilisation is low but meeting rooms are overbooked and people are taking calls in corridors, the answer is not simply fewer desks. It is a different mix of space.

Go back to the example office. It has 110 desks, 124 staff and a peak of 79 desks in use. Planning to the peak alone would be too tight, because you will always have busier weeks than the ones you measured, new starters and the occasional all-hands day. A common approach is to add a buffer of around 10% to 20% on top of the recorded peak.

With a 15% buffer, the office needs roughly 91 desks (79 × 1.15). That releases about 19 desks’ worth of floor space, gives a desk-to-headcount ratio of around 0.73, and still leaves comfortable headroom on the busiest day. If the business expects to grow, or if you plan to reduce passive use with a clear desk policy, adjust the buffer rather than the peak.

It is worth being clear about what this calculation is and is not. It tells you how many workstations the redesign should provide. It does not, on its own, tell you how much floor area the business needs overall, which also depends on meeting space, storage, circulation and the type of work being done. That is a separate exercise, and the utilisation data you have gathered is one of its most important inputs.

The point of measuring desk utilisation is rarely just to remove desks. It is to put the space they occupied to better use. In the example above, 19 desks is enough room for a mix of focus booths, a couple of small meeting rooms and a proper collaboration area, the exact spaces that hybrid teams tend to be short of when they come in.

This is where the data starts to shape the design. Small, bookable rooms built with glass office partitions keep the floor feeling open while giving people somewhere to take calls. A rethink of the open plan office can create quieter zones for the focused work that many people now come in to do. And because fewer, better desks get used more intensively, investing in good workplace ergonomics for the ones you keep makes more sense than ever.

The numbers also make budgeting easier. Knowing your real desk requirement lets you get a more accurate picture of office fit out costs, and it avoids paying to fit out space you do not need. If you are working through the wider project, our office refurbishment checklist shows where a utilisation study fits among the other planning steps.

The most frequent mistake is measuring for too short a time. A single week, especially one with a bank holiday or heavy sickness, can easily under or overstate demand by a wide margin.

The second is relying on one data source. Badge data without desk counts overstates demand, and booking data without a check on actual use can be wildly optimistic. Two sources that broadly agree are far more convincing, to you and to the board, than one.

The third is ignoring what people say. Utilisation figures describe behaviour in the current office, and some of that behaviour is a reaction to the current office’s flaws. A short survey or a few conversations with team leads will stop you designing those flaws into the new space.

The last is treating the study as a way to cut desks rather than improve the workplace. Staff who think measurement is a cost-cutting exercise will resist it. Framed as a way to give people the spaces they are actually missing, it tends to win support.

A good desk utilisation study gives you evidence rather than opinion: how many desks you really need, when the pressure points are, and which types of space are missing. What it does not give you is the layout itself.

That is where space planning comes in. At Advanced Commercial Interiors, we use survey data, CAD plans and 3D visuals to turn figures like peak utilisation and desk ratios into a floor plan that works on your busiest day and does not waste space on the quietest. Whether the result is a light-touch reconfiguration or a full office refurbishment, starting from real numbers makes every decision after that easier.

If you have utilisation data (or want help deciding how to collect it) and you are planning a redesign, book a free consultation with our space planning team, or browse our case studies to see how other businesses have reshaped their offices.