Budget per seat, then multiply
When a CFO asks what the new office will cost to furnish and the honest answer is "it depends," the project loses momentum. Before any bid exists, you need a planning number, and the most reliable one in this industry is cost per seat.
Per seat means total furniture spend, everything, divided by headcount. Workstation or desk, task chair, personal storage, plus that person's share of the conference rooms, lounge, reception, phone booths, and break areas. Roughly 55 to 65 percent of the per-seat number is the individual workspace. The rest is the shared space everyone uses.
Get the per-seat tier right and you can budget a 50-person or a 200-person office in one line on a spreadsheet, then refine it with a real specification later.
Three tiers, real 2026 numbers
These are furniture-only ranges, installed, for a standard New England office this year. They exclude construction, demountable walls, AV, and IT cabling.
Functional tier: $2,500 to $4,500 per seat. Commercial-grade but value-focused. Open-line workstations or benching, a solid mid-tier task chair, basic storage, functional conference and break furniture. This is the right tier for a fast-growing team that may restack in two years and wants durable furniture without premium finishes.
Professional tier: $4,500 to $8,000 per seat. The most common range for an established company furnishing a space it intends to keep. Height-adjustable desks, full-feature task seating, better finishes, proper lounge and reception, acoustic phone booths. This is where most New England fit-outs land.
Premium tier: $8,000 to $15,000-plus per seat. Design-led space, named-brand seating, custom millwork-grade casegoods, statement reception and lounge, full acoustic program. Common for client-facing headquarters, executive floors, and brands where the office is a recruiting tool.
Most real projects mix tiers across the floor. Premium reception and conference, professional at the desks, functional in the back of house. The blended number is what you budget.
What moves the number
Four factors push a project up or down within and across the tiers.
Sit-stand desks. Moving from fixed-height to height-adjustable desks adds roughly $400 to $900 per seat. It is the single biggest swing in the individual-workspace number and increasingly a default rather than an upgrade.
Conference and meeting density. A hybrid-era office with many small rooms carries more tables, chairs, and AV-ready furniture per seat than an open floor with two large boardrooms. More rooms, higher shared-space cost.
Brand strategy. A single-brand premium specification can run 30 to 40 percent above an open-line specification that meets the same brief. This is the gap we write about constantly, and on a per-seat basis it is the difference between the professional and premium tiers for the exact same quality of sit.
Lead time pressure. Quick-ship product to hit a hard move-in date sometimes costs slightly more per unit but saves far more in lease carry on an empty space. The per-seat number that ignores schedule is not the real number.
Set a budget that survives the project
Three moves keep the per-seat budget from drifting once the project starts.
Budget the blended number, not the desk. The cheapest mistake is pricing 50 workstations, forgetting the conference rooms, reception, and lounge, and discovering the shared space is a third of the spend after the budget is set. Always budget total furniture divided by seats.
Decide your tier per zone before you spec. Write down which areas get premium, professional, and functional treatment. That single page prevents the slow upgrade creep that blows budgets, and it tells the dealer exactly where to spend and where to save.
Get an open-line bid against any single-brand number. If you have a budget built on a major-line quote, a like-for-like open-line specification will usually come in a full tier lower for the same quality. That is real money on a per-seat basis multiplied across the floor.
Give us a headcount and a target tier and we will turn it into a real per-seat budget and a specification, free, on any project over 25 seats.
