This office fit-out budget template turns your headcount into the furniture figure a finance team will ask for. It runs on the same planning ranges we apply to New England projects this year. Change any input above and the range updates as you type, and the Excel version further down holds the same arithmetic for a budget meeting.
What the worksheet calculates
It prices furniture, delivered and installed, for the people your space has to hold. The method is the one in our guide to what a fit-out costs per seat: pick the per-seat range for your finish tier and multiply it by headcount. Per seat counts everything the office buys against the people in it, so the furniture for meeting rooms, reception and break areas is already in the figure.
From that one multiplication, the calculator works out the rest:
- ›Cost per employee and cost per desk, side by side, so neither gets compared with the other by mistake.
- ›The part of the furniture line that is shared space, at 35 to 45 percent.
- ›The number of desks to buy once private offices and desk sharing are counted.
- ›The floor area your desks and meeting rooms take up.
- ›The lines that sit on top of the furniture: clearing out the space you are leaving, height-adjustable desks if you want them, and a contingency of 5 to 10 percent.
What does the calculator leave out?
It is a furniture budget, not an office build-out cost estimator. Construction, demountable walls, AV and IT cabling are separate budgets. So is the electrician who connects powered furniture to the building at the feed, and so is the move. Keep each of those on its own line, priced by the trade that does the work.
Inputs: headcount, desk ratio, private office percentage, meeting room count, finish tier
Five inputs carry most of the result, and each one changes a different part of it.
- ›Headcount is the number of people the space has to hold at the end of the plan. Today’s payroll undercounts a company that is still hiring.
- ›Desk ratio is people per desk on the open floor, and 1 means a desk each. A New England peak day runs at 60 to 75 percent of the team, about 1.3 to 1.7 people per desk, and our benching and private office density guide sets out what each ratio assumes. Private offices stay at one person each.
- ›Private office percentage is the share of people who get a room. A private office takes 100 to 150 square feet, against 25 to 40 for a benching seat or 48 to 64 for a panel workstation with storage, and it holds more furniture for one person.
- ›Meeting room count is split into four-person huddle rooms at 100 to 150 square feet and eight-person conference rooms at 250 to 300. Their furniture is already in the per-seat range, so the count changes the floor area, not the furniture line.
- ›Finish tier is Good, Better or Best: $2,500 to $4,500, $4,500 to $8,000, or $8,000 to $15,000 or more a person. Most established companies furnishing a space they mean to keep land in Better.
Three more settings finish the picture. Choose benching or panel workstations for the floor area. Tick height-adjustable desks to add $400 to $900 per desk. Enter the square footage of the office you are leaving, and the calculator prices clearing it out at $2.50 to $6.00 a square foot, the range in our removal and decommissioning guide.
How to read your output and where projects overrun
Read the result as a range and keep both ends in view. The furniture line uses the same arithmetic as the 25, 75 and 150-person table in our office furniture cost per employee benchmarks, so the two check each other: 75 people at Better shows $337,500 to $600,000 in both. Every line under it either sits inside that figure, as shared space does, or is added on top, as contingency is.
Projects rarely overrun on the desks. These are the usual causes:
- ›Shared space priced late. The workstations get priced first, the conference rooms, reception and lounge get forgotten, and the shared space turns out to be about a third of the spend after the budget is set. The calculator shows that line from the start.
- ›Lines outside the furniture number. Electrical connections and core drilling for floor boxes are not furniture. Storage becomes a cost when move-in slips, and we hold product at our Hooksett warehouse between order and occupancy at no charge.
- ›Problems found on install day instead of on the plan. Fixing a wrong density on a 75-person plan usually costs 8 to 15 percent of the project total, and an accessibility failure runs $10,000 to $40,000 plus the schedule, as our free space plan breakdown shows.
- ›Quotes that expire. Manufacturers commonly hold a quote for 30 to 90 days, so a second phase a year out gets re-quoted at that year’s prices.
- ›Dates that slip. Lead times run past the quoted date often enough that we pad every schedule by 25 percent, as our 2026 lead-time table explains.
Why does the cost per desk rise when you share desks?
Because the furniture line does not fall with the desk count. A shared desk serves more people, so it is worth putting more into it, and the shared space does not shrink at all. Total spend lands about level with a desk-each plan, or a little under. Divide that by fewer desks and the cost per desk goes up, while the cost per employee holds. Show finance both figures, with the denominator written on each line, or a sound hybrid plan reads as over budget.
Download the Excel version
Download the office fit-out budget worksheet as an Excel file. It holds the same inputs and the same arithmetic as the calculator, on one sheet. The cells to edit are yellow with blue text: your inputs, and every planning range in its own cell beside the page it comes from. Everything else is a formula.
As bids arrive, replace our ranges with the quoted figures. The sheet then becomes a furniture budget per employee worksheet for your own project, with the per-employee and per-desk lines side by side.
Assumptions and New England labor and freight adjustments
Every range is a 2026 planning figure from New England projects, for furniture delivered and installed. That is why the sheet has no separate labor or freight line: both are already inside the per-seat numbers.
Installation runs 8 to 15 percent of the product cost inside those numbers, and the building decides where a project lands. A loading dock and a straight run to the suite sit at the low end. A shared freight elevator and a long carry sit at the high end. A building that takes freight only at night or on weekends moves the work into after-hours labor, so ask about access before you compare bids.
The calculator rounds to the nearest $100 and treats the top of the Best tier as open-ended, so read that figure as a floor. To turn the range into a budget you can defend line by line, send us the headcount and the space.
