The short answer: measure attendance for a few weeks, take your busiest regular day, add a 10 to 15% buffer, and keep permanently-assigned desks out of the shared pool. For most hybrid teams that lands between 50% and 70% of headcount. A 100-person team with a 60-person peak day needs about 66 shared desks plus whatever seats are fixed, and almost certainly not 100.
The rest of this post is how to get to your number without guessing, and the two mistakes that produce the wrong one.
Step by step: sizing the office
- Measure real attendance for two to four weeks. However you can: booking data if you already have a tool, calendar patterns, or someone literally counting heads at 11am. Don’t survey people about their intentions; measure what they do. Intentions run about a day a week higher than reality, in our experience.
- Find your busiest regular day. Not the average. Averages are where desk math goes to die, because nobody works at the office on an average day; they work there on Tuesday. If your counts are Mon 35, Tue 55, Wed 60, Thu 50, Fri 20, your number is 60.
- Throw out the outliers. The quarterly all-hands doesn’t count as a regular day. Renting desks year-round for an event that happens four times a year is the most expensive way to host a party; book a venue those days instead.
- Add a 10 to 15% buffer. Growth, new hires, the week two teams overlap on a deadline. On a 60-person peak that’s roughly 66 to 69 desks.
- Take fixed desks out of the pool. People with three-monitor setups, medical equipment, or lab hardware keep an assigned seat. If 8 of your 60-peak people are fixed, you need 8 assigned desks plus a shared pool sized for the remaining peak (52 + buffer, call it 58).
- Recheck with real data after a month. Whatever you computed is still a guess. Once people book desks through a tool, the occupancy report tells you the true number, and it’s usually a little lower than the guess.
The worked example: 110 people, 60 desks
Our office had 110 people and 60 desks, a setup we’ve written about at length. Attendance averaged two to three days a week and the busy days peaked around 45 to 50 people. Sixty desks covered it with room to spare on normal days and the occasional tight Tuesday in the popular zone. The ratio worked out to roughly one desk per 1.8 people, but we never actually chose that number; it fell out of deciding to stop worrying about seating, and the attendance data said 60 was enough. If the shared-desk model itself is new to you, the hot desking guide covers the basics.
The two mistakes that produce the wrong number
Sizing for headcount. The reflex under a return-to-office push is “80 people, so 80 desks.” If attendance is hybrid, that buys peak capacity you hit a few days a year, and the hybrid part isn’t a phase: Stanford’s SWAA survey (June 2026 update) has US work-from-home steady at about a quarter of paid workdays for three years running, with information-sector jobs above two days a week. Rent is one of the biggest line items an office has; this mistake is the expensive one.
Sizing for the mandate you’re about to create. If leadership mandates the same three days for everyone, your peak becomes your headcount on those days and no clever ratio survives it. Decide the attendance policy first, then size the office. Doing it in the other order means buying furniture for a policy that doesn’t exist yet.
After you pick your desk count
The number you picked will be slightly wrong, and that’s fine if you can see it being wrong. Whatever tool your team books desks with should show you occupancy by day and zone, so month two corrects month zero. That feedback loop matters more than nailing the estimate.
That loop is most of why Desked exists: the office that taught us this math needed the booking layer to make the 60 desks feel like enough. If you’re doing this exercise ahead of a lease decision, the pricing is flat per desk, so being right about needing fewer desks makes the software cheaper too, which still feels like the correct direction for the incentives.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash