Office Space for 10 People in FiDi

Where the 175 square feet actually goes

The 175 square feet per person behind this page is a whole-footprint number, not a desk allowance, and that distinction is where first-time sizing goes wrong. Ten workstations with workable aisles take up a minority of the plan. The rest of the 1,750 feet absorbs a conference room, a phone room or two, a pantry with somewhere to sit, storage, an IT corner, and the circulation joining all of it. In the test fits we run at this size, the rooms and the pantry regularly take more plan area than the desks.

Teams move off 175 in both directions for predictable reasons. Private offices for the founders push the number toward 200 or 220, since every wall costs corridor as well as floor. A fully open plan with unassigned seating can land at 140 to 150, but only when the meeting rooms are sized for the busiest day rather than the average one. Work involving hardware, video or physical design review needs bench and storage a software team never asks for.

What 1,750 square feet costs downtown

At the $60 per square foot median behind this page, 1,750 square feet runs $105,000 a year, about $8,750 a month. Against the $75 median across our whole New York book the same footprint costs $126,000 a year, roughly $10,500 a month. That difference is $1,750 a month, or $21,000 across the year, which is nearly two and a half months of FiDi rent at this size.

The wider spread sits inside FiDi rather than between FiDi and the city. Our four downtown floors ask $60 to $115 against a submarket median of $72, level with the citywide median, so the $60 driving this page is the bottom of the range rather than its center, and at $72 the same 1,750 feet would run $126,000 a year, about $10,500 a month.

What a ten-person floor has to hold

Count rooms before square feet. Ten people need one conference room seating the whole company plus a guest, because the all-hands, the board update and the client meeting all land in that room, and a table for six becomes a scheduling problem within a quarter. One or two phone rooms absorb the calls otherwise taken across the desks, the pantry doubles as lunch and informal meeting space, and a candidate arriving early needs somewhere to sit that is not the engineering row.

One floor, always, at this headcount. What actually shrinks the plan is the loss factor: New York leases on rentable feet that include a share of lobbies, corridors and mechanical space, and usable area typically runs 15-25% below, so 1,750 rentable is roughly 1,310 to 1,490 usable, or 131 to 149 real feet per person. Ask for the usable figure, or a test fit on the actual floor plan, before agreeing a space is large enough.

One and a half times ten

Fifteen people at the same allowance need about 2,625 square feet, half again the space and half again the rent, and downtown that jump is not hypothetical: the single FiDi floor within reach of this search measures 2,624 feet. A ten-person team can take it now at about $13,120 a month instead of $8,750, which prices two years of hiring at roughly $4,370 a month of carried space. Whether that reads as insurance or as waste comes down to how funded the hiring plan is.

Set the term and the exit clauses against that uncertainty rather than against the rent. Three to five years is the normal range at this size, and a shorter term on a pre-built floor costs a little more per foot while buying the right to be wrong about headcount. Formal expansion options are rare on a footprint this small, so the clause that matters more is assignment and sublease: consent that cannot be withheld unreasonably, and no landlord right to recapture the space instead of approving your subtenant.

On our book right now in FiDi

• 45 Broadway, Partial 12th Floor: 2,624 sq ft at $60 per square foot, about $13,120 a month, pre-built with a conference room, a pantry and exposed ceilings, sized for roughly 15 desks

That is the only FiDi floor on our book a ten-person team can realistically use, and it is half again the 1,750 feet the arithmetic calls for. The rest of the downtown availability is built for larger companies: 32 Old Slip at $64 on 6,997 feet, 17 State Street at $79 on 6,606, and 4 World Trade Center at $115 on 5,023, the smallest of which is close to three times what a ten-person team needs. The real decision at ten people downtown is to grow into 45 Broadway, wait for a smaller sublease to surface, or widen the search toward Tribeca, Battery Park City or the Seaport.