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How much space does a desk need? Pick a desk size and enter your room — this home office layout calculator adds the chair's roll-back to the desk's depth, adds a file or credenza to the wall run, and tells you whether anybody can still walk behind the chair. Rooms in feet, furniture in inches.
Desk sizes and the roll-back allowance are Poché's own furniture-library figures — the halo the app draws. The roll-back is a convention we set, not a published standard. Verify it against your own chair.
A desk's width decides how much wall it eats. Its depth decides whether the room works, because depth is the number the chair adds to. These are the five in Poché's furniture library, with the clear-floor allowance the app draws in front of each.
| Desk | W × D | Clear floor in front |
|---|---|---|
| Writing desk | 42 × 20 | 30″ — a shallow desk with a light chair |
| Compact desk | 42 × 24 | 36″ |
| Desk | 48 × 24 | 36″ |
| Desk | 60 × 30 | 36″ — the home-office default |
| Executive desk | 72 × 36 | 36″ |
| Office chair | 26 × 26 | its own footprint, tucked in |
The gap between the smallest and the largest is bigger than it looks. A 42 × 20 writing desk with its 30″ allowance commits 50″ of depth. A 72 × 36 executive desk with 36″ commits 72″ — a whole extra two feet of floor, before anybody walks past.
You will find "36 to 42 inches behind a desk" repeated across the internet as though it were a published figure. We went looking for the source and could not find one. It is on our own do-not-publish list for exactly that reason, and we are not going to state it as a rule here just because everyone else does.
What this calculator uses instead is the allowance in Poché's own furniture library: 36 inches of clear floor in front of a desk, 30 in front of a shallow writing desk. That is the halo the app draws, it is a convention we set, and we are labelling it as one. It is the same shape of allowance as the 36 inches a dresser gets — a drawer or a chair travelling, plus a person standing in the rest — and it produces sensible rooms. It is not a standard, and the thing that actually rolls is your chair. Verify it.
The honest way to check: sit at the desk you have, push back until you can stand up comfortably, and measure from the desk edge to the back of the chair. That number is worth more than anything on this page.
Notice which number dominates: the desk is between a third and a half of the depth it commits. Everything else is chair and person. That is why a room that comfortably held a 60-inch desk against the wall suddenly does not hold it once somebody has to walk from the door to the window.
| Surface | Height | Tier and note |
|---|---|---|
| Desk or work surface | 29–30″ | standard — and a manufacturing convention rather than an ergonomic one. BIFMA and OSHA both recommend adjustability, 22–30″ seated |
| Kitchen counter | 36″ | standard — NKBA; useful if you are working at one |
| Dining table | 30″ | standard — the market runs 28–30″. A dining table is a taller desk than a desk |
The 29–30″ figure is worth stating carefully. It is what desks are manufactured at, not what any body of research says a person needs, and the standards bodies that touch the question recommend an adjustable surface rather than a fixed one. If you are buying one desk for one person, the height that suits that person beats the height the industry settled on.
Every height above is measured from the finished floor. Datum errors are the commonest mistake in vertical dimensions — every serious error we found while verifying this set was a datum error rather than an arithmetic one.
The subtraction on this page is exact and so are the desk footprints — they are the same figures the app places on a plan at true scale. The roll-back allowance is a convention we own, the drawer allowances are library figures, and the desk height is a manufacturing standard rather than an ergonomic one. Each is labelled where it appears, because a calculator that returns a confident wrong number is worse than no calculator: you cannot tell which one you got.
The walkway figures — 36″ primary, 30″ floor, 24–30″ secondary — are our published clearance set and they are set out in the living room layout guide. We do not yet publish a home-office field guide, so this page is the write-up; the pieces themselves live in the app's furniture library.
There is no single one, which is why our furniture library carries five. A writing desk is 42 × 20″, a compact desk 42 × 24, the common home-office desk 48 × 24 or 60 × 30, and an executive desk 72 × 36. Depth is the number that decides whether the room works: a 20″ writing desk and a 36″ executive desk differ by more than a foot of floor before anybody sits down.
Poché's furniture library allows 36″ of clear floor in front of a desk, and 30 for a shallow writing desk, which is the halo the app draws. That is our own convention and we state it as one — we could not find a published standard for a desk chair's roll-back zone, and the 36-to-42-inch figure repeated online has no source we were able to verify. Verify it against your own chair, which is the thing that actually rolls.
Add the desk's depth to the roll-back allowance to get the depth of the zone, and the desk's width to whatever sits beside it to get the wall run. A 60 × 30 desk with a 36″ roll-back commits a zone 60″ wide by 66 deep — five feet by five and a half — before a filing cabinet or a path behind the chair. Add a 36″ route behind the chair and the depth goes to 102″, which is eight and a half feet.
29–30″ from the finished floor. That figure is a manufacturing convention rather than an ergonomic finding, and it is worth knowing the difference: BIFMA and OSHA both recommend adjustability rather than a fixed height, with a seated range of roughly 22–30″. If you are buying one desk for one person, the height that suits that person beats the height the industry standardised on.
Often yes, and the arithmetic is the same as it is for a dresser. A desk commits its depth plus its roll-back allowance, so a 42 × 20 writing desk with a 30″ allowance takes 50″ of depth off one wall — comparable to the 56″ a 20″-deep dresser and its 36″ of standing room commit. The question is whether the bedroom has a second wall to spare after the bed has taken its own.
Yes, and more than its footprint suggests. Poché's library allows 27″ in front of a two-drawer vertical file, because the drawer travels nearly its own depth at full extension and you have to stand somewhere while it does. A lateral file and a credenza get 24. Those are library allowances rather than published standards; the model you buy publishes its own drawer travel, and that is the number to trust.
The demo plan is public and needs no account. Drop a desk into a real drawing at true scale, spin it to the other wall, and see where the door swing lands before the chair does.
Open the demo plan →