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How wide does a walkway need to be? Enter the wall-to-wall run and the depth of whatever stands on each side — this walkway clearance checker returns the clear gap and says plainly what it is: a primary walkway at 36″, a route at its 30″ floor, a secondary path in the 24–30″ band, or a squeeze. And it knows when the gap is not a route at all.
Depths we publish, if you need one: sofa 38″, grand sofa 40″, chaise sectional 65″, dining table 36″, queen bed 80″, dresser 20″, media console 16–17″, coffee table 24″, base cabinet 24″. Measure to the part that sticks out furthest — an arm, a handle, a counter overhang.
| Gap | Width | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Primary walkway | 36″ | the main route through a room — the figure to design to |
| Primary, floor | 30″ | never below this for a route people actually use |
| Secondary path | 24–30″ | behind an occupied chair, sofa back to wall |
| Pass-through | 36″ | a circulating person modelled as a disk of 18″ radius |
| Door swing | 30–36″ | quarter-circle of dead floor, radius = the leaf width |
The test for a primary walkway is not whether one person can edge through it. It is whether someone can walk it at normal pace while another person is sitting in the chair beside it. That is the whole reason the figure is 36 rather than 24: a seated person's elbow, a shoulder turning to pass, and the fact that a route is used at the worst possible moment.
The binding body dimension here is shoulder breadth, not hip width. ANSUR II puts 97.6% of adult males over 17.7″ bideltoid, which is why 22–24″ is the hard packing limit for a person and why a 20-inch gap is not a path in any sense.
This is the part most clearance advice gets wrong, and it is the reason this tool asks what the gap is before it judges it. There are two completely different kinds of gap in a furnished room, and applying one's numbers to the other produces confident nonsense in both directions.
| Pairing | Gap | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Sofa → coffee table | 14–18″ | in front of the seat — reach a drink, get past a seated person |
| Nightstand → bed | 0–12″ | to the side of the bed; flush against it is correct |
| Side table → seat | 0–12″ | back or side of the seat |
The pairing figures are a convention, not a published standard. They come from the interior-design guidelines literature — Merrell, Schkufza, Li, Agrawala & Koltun, Interactive Furniture Layout Using Interior Design Guidelines (ACM TOG 30(4), 2011), which attributes them to Panero & Repetto's Anatomy for Interior Designers. We verified the paper directly; we did not verify Panero & Repetto, whose copy is lending-restricted. That is a real citation through peer review and it is not the same as a primary one, so treat these as targets to verify rather than rules to obey. The sofa-to-coffee-table band of 14–18″ is our own living-room guide's figure.
Why it matters: a nightstand four inches from a bed is correct, and a tool that judges that four inches against a 30-inch walkway will tell you your bedroom is broken. Zero is inside the range. That single fact retires an entire class of false alarm.
When a primary route comes out at 26 inches, the instinct is to shave the furniture — a 72-inch sofa instead of the 84, a shallower console. Sometimes that is right. More often the room is telling you the route is in the wrong place, and the fix costs nothing.
Our living-room guide's blunt version: any route that crosses the sight line between the sofa and the television will be used, and it will be used at the worst moment. Moving the route behind the seating — even at the cost of floating the sofa 36 inches off the wall — buys a real walkway out of floor you already own, and in a deep room it also brings the seating to the distance the screen actually wants. That is one move that fixes two problems, and no amount of measuring the wrong gap will find it.
The same trick works in a bedroom. A bed pushed to one wall hands the whole clearance back to the open side: two 24-inch gaps become one 48-inch one. The cost is that the bed can only be made from one side, which most adults sharing a bed will not accept for long — but in a child's room or a small guest room it is usually the right answer.
The 36 / 30 / 24–30 set is published in our living room layout guide and our sofa & sectional guide, and it is the same clearance set Poché draws as a halo around a piece on your plan. They descend from the standard interior-design references — Architectural Graphic Standards, Time-Saver Standards for Interior Design, and Panero & Zelnik's Human Dimension & Interior Space.
Kitchen aisles are a separate standard and a larger one: the NKBA work aisle is 42″, and 48″ where two people cook, because an open dishwasher door plus a human is most of that and somebody still has to get past. If the gap you are checking is between an island and a counter, use the kitchen island fit calculator rather than this one — the kitchen's numbers are bigger for a reason.
36″ for the primary route through a room, and never below 30. Secondary paths — behind an occupied chair, or between the back of a sofa and the wall — work at 24–30. The test is not whether one person can edge through sideways; it is whether someone can walk it while another person is sitting in the chair beside it.
It is the floor, not the target. 30″ is the absolute minimum our guides give a primary route, and a route at 30 works right up until two people meet on it or somebody is carrying a laundry basket. If the gap is 30–35″ you have a real path that is under its own target; at 36 or more you have the full figure. Below 30 it stops being a primary route and becomes a secondary path at best.
A circulating person is modelled in the interior-design guidelines literature as a disk of about 18″ radius, which is where the 36″ pass-through comes from — one person walking normally, not turning sideways. Two people passing want more. Below 24″ you are turning your shoulders, and shoulder breadth rather than hip width is the binding dimension: ANSUR II puts 97.6% of adult males over 17.7″ across the deltoids.
No, and judging it as one is the commonest false alarm in furniture layout. A sofa-to-coffee-table gap is a pairing distance between two pieces that belong together, and it wants 14–18″ — close enough to reach a drink, far enough to get past a seated person. Our living-room guide is explicit that it should not be judged against the 36″ walkway figure. The same applies to a nightstand beside a bed, where zero is inside the published range and flush is correct.
A quarter-circle of dead floor whose radius is the leaf width, so 30–36″ for a standard US interior door. Furniture cannot live in it, and neither can a walkway that has to stay open while the door is open. This is the single most common thing that turns a gap that measured fine into a room that does not work.
As a secondary one, yes. 24″ is the bottom of the 24–30″ band our guides give secondary paths — behind an occupied chair, or between a sofa back and the wall. It is one person, and at the bottom of that band it is one person turning slightly. It is not a primary route, and a room whose only path through is 24″ wide has a layout problem rather than a clearance problem.
The public demo plan is ours, and it needs no account. Open it, drag a sofa toward a wall, and watch the clearance halo go amber the moment the route pinches — door swings included.
Open the demo plan →