The Workplace Benchmark — Q3 2025
How people meet depends on culture, role, industry, in-office policy and geography. This complexity leads workplace designers to rely on personas or intricate models to figure out the right meeting room mix. But these approaches can overcomplicate and underdeliver.
of meeting room use is misuse—small groups occupying big rooms
in wasted space costs annually per average floor in the Density portfolio
When employees can’t find the right size space, in-person collaboration suffers—and valuable real estate gets squandered.
To understand how people actually meet, we analyzed meeting behavior on 154 typical office floors—nearly 1 million square feet of real estate—across six behavioral lenses:
Examine how people meet at the busiest times
Understand what meeting spaces people choose
Determine the right size and quantity of meeting rooms to meet demand
Analysis across our client portfolio shows that peak meeting activity aligns with peak floor occupancy. What does that mean exactly?
In the busiest periods—or the top 10% of heaviest floor use—the max number of meeting rooms are in use at the same time. During this time, they're also being used with the greatest efficiency, when attendance closely matches room capacity. Single-person use is lowest, suggesting a shared sense of responsibility to avoid blocking rooms when space is scarce.
Industry best practice is to design workplaces for the busiest meeting times—those peak-demand moments when it seems like everyone is in a meeting. It is understood that space won’t always be full, but if you don’t plan for the busiest times, people miss out when they need it most.
So what does peak meeting room demand look like?
At the busiest floor times, we see an average of one 5-to-9-person meeting for every 55 people for example. The ratio for that meeting size can range from one per 38 employees to one for every 70.
Meeting Demand Ratios
Design spaces to accommodate meetings for the busiest meeting times—roughly the top 10% of measured occupancy—when demand for space is highest. That way, you’ll be ready for peak demand but all the other moments as well.
Our data reveals a mismatch between meeting demand and room supply, especially for medium-sized spaces (5–9 people). Despite having more rooms than meetings of that size, floors run out of medium conference rooms an average of 16.6% of the time. Running out is defined as more than 90% of the rooms in use simultaneously.
For example, those 5-to-9-person meetings happen at an average demand ratio of 1:55, meaning a 200-person floor typically sees about four of these meetings happening at once during peak times.
The average planning ratio is 1:39, suggesting a 200-person floor is built with around five 5-to-9-person rooms, one more than actually needed. But, they’re running out of rooms 16.6% of the time. This indicates that space is being misused, perhaps because fewer people show up in person or because people like a little extra space.
Comparison of median planning ratios and median occupancy ratios across the Density portfolio
Aligning room counts to average demand isn’t enough. You also need to account for how people actually behave when booking rooms, especially their tendency to upsize.
The research shows that 53% of meetings “upsize,” even though the right size room was available at the start of the meeting. Expecting perfect efficiency (e.g., four-person meetings always occurring in four-person meeting rooms) isn’t realistic.
In fact, groups of four tend to be the worst offenders, taking a larger room 74% of the time, even when a 4-to-5-person room was available. But, nearly a third of the time that groups of 5–10 upsize, it’s not because they want to stretch out. It’s because no right-sized room was available.
Some 97% of solo meetings in larger rooms happen when a 1–2 person room is available on the floor. The issue isn’t a lack of small rooms—it’s the lack of people choosing to use them.
% of upsized meetings that upsized when a right-sized room was available on the floor.
When it comes to programming, we can’t rely on ideal room-to-meeting ratios. We need to factor in human behaviors. Among those? P— like that people like a little extra space and the uncertainty that, and the likelihood everyone invited shows up to a meeting.
There’s no standard meeting pattern—even within a single company. Technology companies tend to have more meetings per person. But even in tech, there’s wide variation floor to floor.
On a busy floor at the high end of the spectrum, we may see one meeting for every 20 people (that’s ~10 meetings happening at once on a 200-person floor). On the low end, some workplaces have just 1 meeting for every 90 people at peak times.
Ratio of People per Meetings by Size
What’s “normal”? It depends. In other words: there’s major variation, even within a single organization.
No single, off-the-shelf ratio guarantees high utilization. The way that people meet varies so significantly—even within companies, industries or locations—that there is no one ideal space mix.
In looking at how well meeting spaces are used, as a combination of average time used and efficiency, there’s no correlation between ratios and utilization. The relationship varies widely for some floors but not others, even within the same organization.
For example, in our dataset, the ratio for 5-9 person rooms ranges from a meeting-room rich 1:19 to a more sparse 1:62. Within that range, average time used varies between 2.8 hours and 4.2 hours per day and efficiency varies between 13% and 55%.
Peak Occupancy per Space by Room Size
No standard ratio guarantees high utilization—not even by industry, company or location.
Our approach is built on a simple principle: Plan for how people actually use space.
By analyzing real-world booking behavior across 154 typical office floors—nearly 1 million square feet—we’ve developed a three-step framework that helps workplace teams align meeting room supply with true demand.
Step 01
Start by identifying your peak periods—typically the top 10% of busiest times on the floor. These are the moments when demand is highest and efficient use of rooms matters most. Most meetings happen during these peak times and they tend to be more efficient (i.e., better size-to-room match) than during the rest of the day.
As floors fill up, people naturally make better space decisions—they’re more mindful of room size, availability and impact. Planning for the peak ensures your workplace can support collaboration when it’s needed most.
Step 02
Next, examine not just what rooms people use, but why. With enough data, the probability of certain behaviors becomes more useful for planning than any individual input—like team structure or invitees expected.
As we know, 53% of meetings “upsize,” even when a right-sized room is available. People often prefer more space or arrive to find their group is smaller than expected. Solo meetings frequently happen in 3+-person rooms—even when 1-to-2-person rooms are free.
This behavior isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of how people collaborate.
Step 03
Once you know how often different group sizes meet—and how often they upsize—you can model the number of rooms needed for each size category.
Use the behavior-based ratio ranges from our broader dataset as reference points. These ratios already account for real usage patterns, like upsizing and fewer people showing up in person.
For example, a typical floor might need one 5-to-9- person room for meetings of that size and an additional four rooms to accommodate 2-to-4- person meetings that upsize. Your ideal mix will depend on your team’s patterns.
During the busiest times, there were an average of 135 people on the floor. The most common meeting group size was 2–4 people.
At peak, they hosted an average of:
Behavior data showed that 65% of 2-to-4-person meetings were held in 5-to-9-person rooms, even when smaller rooms were available.
Similarly, larger groups also occasionally upsized when the right-sized space wasn’t open.
The data confirmed consistent upsizing—highlighting the need for flexibility in mid-sized room supply.
Based on this behavior, the recommended mix for this floor is:
This recommendation reflects both what people need and how they behave—ensuring availability without overbuilding.
We applied the Density approach to our customer portfolio.
The recommended ratios for each floor were varied—a reflection of the diversity in meeting habits, cultures and floor layouts.
Using current ratios, companies are providing 18% more meeting rooms than necessary to accommodate bad behavior. That costs $39,600 per year for the average floor in the Density portfolio, based on average commercial lease costs.
This research focused on 154 typical workplace floors—nearly 1 million square feet—across 20 organizations. A typical floor has a good balance of desks and meeting spaces and excludes any "specialty spaces" like large training rooms and cafes.
We looked at the busiest times, during normal business hours. We’ve excluded floors where we may have partial sensor coverage (i.e. not all meeting rooms measured). The utilization data spans from January 2, 2025 to June 30, 2025
