A buyer sends a headcount — "we have 180 people" — and asks for 180 desks. For a fully assigned floor that is right. For a hybrid one it usually over-orders, and the furniture is the most expensive thing on the plan to get wrong. Before we quote a bench system, the question we ask is not how many staff you have. It is how many are in on a peak day.
What the ratio actually is
Desk-sharing ratio is staff per desk. A 1:1 ratio is the old assigned-seat model — one person, one desk, kept warm whether they are in or not. A 1.5:1 ratio means roughly three people share every two desks; planners land there by assuming 65–75% of staff are in on the busiest day, not all of them at once. Across the industry the centre of gravity has moved: a majority of organisations running hybrid now set a target at or above 1.5 people per desk, where a few years ago 1:1 was the default.
Run the arithmetic on that 180-person floor. At 1:1 you buy 180 workstations. At 1.3:1 you buy about 138. At 1.5:1, about 120. That is a third of the bench order — and a third of the floor area, the cable runs and the freight — riding on one assumption you make before drawing a single desk.
The trade-off nobody likes to say out loud
Higher sharing ratios save money twice, on furniture and on rent, which is why finance likes them. The cost lands somewhere else: on the worst Tuesday of the quarter, when more people show up than the ratio assumed, somebody has no desk. Push the ratio too hard and you trade a furniture saving for staff hunting for a seat — which is a worse outcome than a few empty desks. We would rather you set the ratio off your own attendance data than off a benchmark from someone else's office. If you do not have that data yet, plan conservatively at 1.2:1 to 1.3:1 and design the floor so it can absorb a higher ratio later, instead of betting 1.6:1 on day one and re-buying.
Why the ratio shapes the system, not just the count
A shared desk is a harder-working desk. If three people touch a surface across a week, the top sees more wear, the height mechanism more cycles, and the cable management more plugging and unplugging than an assigned desk ever would. So a high sharing ratio is one of the reasons we steer a floor toward a hard-wearing top — melamine or HPL rather than veneer — and toward hard-wearing cable access on the open-plan benches, while saving the softer finishes for the assigned executive offices that one person keeps. The ratio is not just a quantity; it is a duty rating.
It also drives the support pieces. A sharing floor needs lockers, more meeting and focus rooms, and soft-seating touchdown points, because people who do not own a desk still need somewhere to land. That is exactly the kind of mixed brief our custom workspace work is built around — one drawing set covering the benches, the lockers and the lounge, on one finish palette.
Neighbourhoods beat hot-desking
One refinement worth making before you set a single ratio across the whole floor: most teams do not share well as anonymous hot desks. The model that tends to stick is the neighbourhood — a zone assigned to a team, sized at that team's own sharing ratio, with the desks unassigned within the zone. A sales team in three days a week might run at 1.6:1 inside its neighbourhood; a finance team that is in most days sits closer to 1.1:1. Averaging both to a single floor-wide number under-desks one and wastes space on the other. We would rather plan the floor as a set of neighbourhoods on the same component grid, so each zone is sized to its own attendance while the whole thing still reads as one project and re-plans as one.
What data to collect first
If you are setting a ratio for the first time, two numbers beat any benchmark: peak-day attendance (the busiest day in a normal week, not the quarterly all-hands) and the spread between your quietest and busiest days. A floor with a tight spread can be desked aggressively; a floor that swings from 40% to 90% across the week needs more buffer or it fails on the high days. Badge or booking data over a month gives you both. Until you have it, plan conservatively — and design in the grid headroom to tighten the ratio later rather than betting the whole order on a guess.
How to brief us
Send a floor plan, the headcount, and your best read on peak-day attendance. We come back with a desk count at one or two ratios so you can see the cost difference, a layout that holds the same component grid if you re-plan, and an honest note on which finishes suit a shared duty versus an assigned one. If you are running OEM under your own dealer brand, we do the same exercise per project. The fastest start is a note through our contact page — a plan and a headcount is enough.
Related reading: how to specify a bench-desk system and choosing the right desk top.