Office Space for 20 People in FiDi

Where the 175 square feet per person actually goes

The 3,500 square feet comes from a planning allowance, not a desk size. A workstation takes a small fraction of 175 feet, and the rest goes into rooms and area nobody is assigned to, which is why sizing a floor by desk count comes out too small.

• Meeting rooms: one seating close to the whole team plus two for groups of four to six, the largest non-desk consumer of any plate.
• Phone rooms: roughly one per eight to ten people, since open floors fail on calls before they fail on seats.
• A pantry with real seating that doubles as the all-hands space, plus reception, storage, the IT closet and circulation you cannot furnish.

Private offices push a team above 175, hosting clients all day does the same, and desk sharing pulls it down, rarely as far as anyone hopes.

What 20 people cost here, and what they cost citywide

The two floors matching this footprint ask $60 and $115 per square foot, and their midpoint of $87.50 is the $88 median quoted above. Across 3,500 square feet that is $306,250 a year, $25,521 a month. The same footprint at the $72 citywide median costs $252,000 a year, $21,000 a month, roughly $54,250 a year less.

Most of that gap is an artifact of a two-floor sample holding one expensive tower floor. Across all four FiDi floors we carry the median is $72, the same number as the city, putting 3,500 square feet at $252,000 a year, $21,000 a month, and that is what we would budget before anyone tours. Electricity is billed on top at $2 to $4 per square foot, while free rent and improvement allowance move the real number more than a dollar off the face rate.

What a floor for 20 genuinely needs

Every square foot on this page is rentable, and New York rentable area includes your share of lobbies, corridors and mechanical space. Usable typically runs 15-25% below, so 3,500 rentable is 2,625 to 2,975 feet you can lay out, and the honest allowance per person falls from 175 to between 131 and 149. Ask for usable area and a test fit before comparing floors that quote the same size.

The layout question at this headcount is how many rooms the plate carries rather than how many desks: one room for the full team, two small rooms, two or three phone rooms, a pantry with seating. Twenty people belong on one floor, and both FiDi floors on our book here are single partial floors with the room count already decided. Count the rooms you would still have to build.

Growing into it, and growing out of it

At 30 people, half again this page's headcount, the same allowance calls for 5,250 square feet, a move rather than a renegotiation unless the lease anticipated it. 4 World Trade Center becomes correctly sized rather than generous, and 45 Broadway drops out entirely. The next rung on our FiDi book is 17 State Street, 6,606 square feet at $79, and 32 Old Slip, 6,997 at $64.

Term length decides how much of that you can buy today. Direct deals at this size run five to seven years, because landlords amortize free rent and improvement money across the term, while a sublease runs shorter and cheaper with the space as it stands. Ask for a right of first offer on contiguous space, then push harder on sublease and assignment rights with consent not to be unreasonably withheld, the clause that pays out when growth goes the other way.

What is on our book at this size in FiDi right now

Two floors match today, and they make opposite arguments.

• 45 Broadway, Partial 12th Floor. 2,624 square feet at $60, about $13,120 a month, prebuilt with a pantry, a conference room and exposed ceilings. At 20 people that is 131 rentable feet each, and our record rates the floor at 15 desks, so it fits a team running lean at roughly $656 per head per month.
• 4 World Trade Center, Partial 44th Floor. 5,023 square feet at $115, about $48,137 a month, furnished, with reception, pantry, conference room and floor-to-ceiling windows. At 20 people that is 251 feet each and about $2,407 per head, buying a finished floor and room the team has not grown into.

Neither floor is 3,500 square feet: one runs about a quarter under and the other more than 40% over, which is ordinary in a four-floor submarket. Send the hiring plan and we will run test fits on both.