As the world adjusts to the new era of hybrid work, many organizations are trying to navigate the changing landscape of in-office work with data. With flexible schedules becoming the norm, it can be challenging to determine the most popular days and times that employees are mostly likely to work in the office without a reliable way to track occupancy.
According to the 2025 Workplace Occupancy & Utilization Index (7th Edition), The Space Crunch: Why the Office Feels Full Before It Is, which analyzed 200M+ square feet of workplace activity across 200+ enterprises in 50 countries, clear patterns are emerging. While trends vary by company, industry, and location, having a general understanding of when offices tend to be most occupied can help organizations make better decisions about scheduling meetings, planning collaborative work, and designing hybrid work policies.
The days of 1-to-1 employee-to-seat ratios are over. It’s time to optimize layouts for flexible, hybrid work — improving employee experience while reducing costs and wasted resources.
By using occupancy and space utilization data aggregated over time, organizations can think strategically about their offices and design seat strategies that actually work.
Table of Contents
What is Employee-to-Seat Ratio?
The employee-to-seat ratio measures how many employees share a workstation.
Why Employee-to-Seat Ratio Matters in 2025
What is Occupancy Intelligence?
Employees aren’t just adapting their schedules for hybrid and flexible work — the way they use the office is evolving. Collaborative spaces have become more popular, private phone booths and pods are in higher demand, and social lounges, wellness areas, and training spaces are now part of the modern workplace mix.
With so many unique spaces to consider, how can companies calculate how much office space they need per person?
That’s where Occupancy Intelligence, powered by Meridian, comes in. It provides a true understanding of how and when offices are used — enabling leaders to avoid tradeoffs between cost and experience in a world where occupancy is increasingly dynamic.
What is Decision Intelligence?
While Occupancy Intelligence shows how space is being used today, Decision Intelligence looks forward with capabilities like:
Decision Intelligence empowers leaders to stress-test employee-to-seat ratios and rebalance space across locations before costly issues arise.
What is the Right Ratio of Employees to Desks in an Office Space?
Ratio-based seating is the practice of maximizing office efficiency by determining the ideal number of desks, offices, or workspaces for employees.
Traditional office design assumed a 1:1 assigned desk per employee. But the rise of hybrid work, activity-based working, and communal office spaces has made the “right” employee-to-seat ratio far less straightforward.
According to the 2025 Occupancy Intelligence Index, companies now target 1.4 to 1.8 employees per seat, with peak utilization still below 80%.
The takeaway: right-sizing isn’t about eliminating desks — it’s about aligning supply with demand.
6 Best Practices for Understanding the Right Ratio of Employees to Workspaces
1. Survey employees to capture their office space needs
Before changing seat ratios, gather input on how employees prefer to work. Do they value assigned seating, or are they comfortable with a hot desking model? Do they need storage at the office, or do they travel light? Pair these qualitative insights with utilization data to avoid designing in a vacuum.
2. Pilot office design changes gradually
Don’t overhaul your entire office at once. Test new ratios with a single team, department, or floor. Use occupancy sensors to measure capacity usage and active time usage in the pilot space before expanding.
3. Stay flexible as employees experience office changes
Workplace behaviors shift — sometimes quickly. Keep seat ratios flexible so you can scale space up or down if hybrid policies change or office attendance increases. Continuous monitoring ensures you’re not locked into outdated assumptions.
4. Plan for peaks, not just averages
Ratios should account for breaking points, not just day-to-day averages. Structure your office to handle occasional surges — company all-hands, big training days, or team offsites — without causing space shortages that frustrate employees.
5. Offer a variety of office space types
A good ratio isn’t just about desk count. Blend focus rooms, collaborative areas, hybrid-ready meeting rooms, and social spaces. Data shows that organizations offering a diverse mix of space types score higher on employee satisfaction and utilization.
6. Leverage office occupancy sensor technology
Occupancy sensors, like the VergeSense Infinity Area Sensor, paired with the Meridian platform give leaders visibility into how every seat and space is actually used.
By capturing metrics such as person count, active occupancy, and passive occupancy, sensors reveal underutilized areas and help identify where space is being wasted. Layered with Predictive Planning, workplace teams can then simulate multiple future scenarios, ensuring their employee-to-seat ratios hold up as work patterns evolve.
How to Calculate Your Employee-to-Seat Ratio
There is no hard and fast formula for defining the perfect employee-to-seat ratio for your organization. However, there are several key metrics to consider in your calculations as you find a data-driven approach to right-sizing your office and creating the best workplace experience.
Because determining an accurate employee-to-seat ratio is all about optimizing the use of space, you first need to understand how your office is actually used. Start by monitoring occupancy for a period of time (for example, three months) using real-time sensor data.
VergeSense’s Infinity Area Sensor captures person count, active occupancy, and passive occupancy, which together reveal not just who shows up, but how long spaces are being held or left idle.
After the monitoring period, analyze the data to identify the minimum and maximum occupancy across floors, departments, or neighborhoods. These benchmarks give you the bounds you’ll need when calculating your ratio.
No two departments use the office the same way. Your organization may include teams that are primarily remote, hybrid, or on-site. That’s why ratios should be calculated at the department level.
Assign each employee a number that reflects how often they work on-site — 1 for fully in-office, 0 for fully remote, and values in between for hybrid employees (e.g., 0.25 for one week per month, 0.75 for three days per week).
Validate these assumptions with sensor data and booking trends, which show real attendance patterns rather than intended schedules. This ensures your ratios reflect reality.
At the 7th Occupancy Intelligence Summit, Gary Gaughan, Workplace Data & Planning Manager at Indeed, shared how Indeed tailors ratios and workplace design across its nearly 1.8M sq ft global portfolio. Instead of enforcing a one-size-fits-all model, they embrace four personas, In-Office, Flex Scheduled, Flex Unscheduled, and Remote, while accounting for local nuances. For example, their Dublin office sees extended midweek attendance driven by social culture, while London trends toward Thursdays as the high-engagement day. These rhythms directly shape how much and what type of space each office needs.
The takeaway: ratios should be informed by real employee behavior, not just policy. Even two offices of the same company may require different seat strategies depending on cultural context and local working patterns.
Your ratio isn’t just about the number of desks — it’s about the mix of space types employees need. Use metrics like capacity usage and active time usage to understand how effectively each type of space is being used.
The 2025 Workplace Occupancy & Utilization Index found that enclosed offices and meeting rooms often have higher active time usage (20–22%) than open desks, showing the continued demand for private or semi-private spaces. At the same time, many large meeting rooms are underutilized: 44% of rooms are sized for 5+ people, even though most meetings average fewer than two in-person attendees.
Analyzing this distribution often prompts a redesign. For example, replacing oversized boardrooms with smaller, hybrid-ready rooms can improve utilization and better support your team’s needs.
Booking systems serve two purposes. First, they improve the employee experience by allowing people to pre-book desks and rooms, which makes hybrid schedules easier to plan. Second, they provide an additional data layer on how employees intend to use the office.
When integrated with sensor data, booking data helps identify ghost bookings (spaces reserved but unused) and gaps between planned versus actual usage. Together, these insights give you a more accurate picture of demand.
Calculating your employee-to-seat ratio isn’t a one-time project — it’s an ongoing process. By continuously monitoring with occupancy sensors and analytics, you can spot when assumptions drift from reality.
You may find, for example, that focus rooms are underutilized while huddle rooms are consistently overbooked, or that desk utilization rises as hybrid schedules shift. VergeSense’s Predictive Planning, part of the Decision Intelligence suite, helps you stress-test your ratios against multiple scenarios — from headcount growth to changes in hybrid policy. The embedded Breakpoint Analyzer identifies the tipping points where adding more seats stops delivering value.
As the 2025 Index shows, desk active time usage has already increased year-over-year, signaling renewed demand for individual workstations alongside collaboration spaces. Regular monitoring ensures your ratio adapts with these shifts.
Flexibility is key. By treating your employee-to-seat ratio as a dynamic measure — continuously updated with real-world data — you’ll build a hybrid workplace strategy that reduces wasted space, improves employee experience, and stays resilient as work evolves.
Optimize your Spaces with Occupancy Intelligence
As the way we work evolves, so must workplace strategies. Occupancy Intelligence and Decision Intelligence together help leaders move beyond outdated 1:1 ratios and design agile, cost-efficient, and employee-friendly workplaces.
If you’re looking for benchmarks to get started, download the Workplace Occupancy & Utilization Index (7th Edition).
Frequently Asked Questions