Office Fit Out Cost in London 2026: £ Per Sq Ft

London Cat B office fit-out runs £65–£175 per square foot, net of VAT — on a 2,500 sq ft suite, £162,500 to £437,500. Two contractors can quote the same floor plate £100,000 apart while both being honest, because the rate compresses five different budgets into one number and quietly leaves four more outside it.

A per-square-foot rate is a summary, not a price. This guide opens it up: what sits inside the rate, the compliance figures that decide your layout before a designer touches it, and the costs the rate does not carry.

Our commercial fit-out page sets out how we work on the delivery side, and it deliberately has no estimator on it — our pricing engine has eight project types and every one of them is residential, so a floor area cannot price an office. A fit-out is priced from a walk round the floor.

The three bands

These are our own bands for the sub-5,000 sq ft London market, all net of VAT.

Cat A landlord base build sits below these, at roughly £35–£65 per sq ft. For scale at the top end, Turner & Townsend's Global Office Fit-Out Cost Guide 2026 puts London high-specification fit-out at about £4,397 per m² — roughly £409 per sq ft, second in the world behind New York. A premium corporate scheme is a different product from a 2,500 sq ft suite, and the gap between that figure and the table above is specification, not sharp practice.

What you are actually buying

You are not paying for square feet. You are paying for the gap between what is there and what you need — which is why the same floor area produces two honest quotes a hundred thousand pounds apart, and why a rate found online was built for a different building in a different condition.

Note what the range is not. It is not a quality ladder where Essential means badly built. Essential means less is being built: fewer partitions, less M&E rework, simpler joinery. The workmanship standard should be identical in all three, and if a contractor's cheap band is cheap because the standard drops, that is not a band — that is a different contractor.

What sits inside a per-square-foot rate

Take the middle of the Balanced band — £107.50 per sq ft on 2,500 sq ft, £268,750 net — and split it across the five budgets a Cat B scheme actually contains. The shares below are indicative, not a published benchmark: they are the apportionment we use to interrogate a tender, and yours will move with the scheme.

Two practical consequences follow, and they matter more than the exact percentages.

M&E is a quarter of the money and most of the risk. On services-heavy schemes it runs materially higher. If the existing VRF is at end of life, or the landlord's floor boxes are in the wrong places, that single element moves your total more than every finish decision combined. Establish the condition of the services before you fix a budget, not after.

Furniture and IT are frequently quoted out. A quarter of the total sitting in someone else's budget is how a fit-out comes in "on budget" and still costs a quarter more than expected. Ask every contractor, in writing, which of those five lines their number includes.

Cat A, Cat A+ and Cat B — check what you are inheriting

The expensive mistake here is assuming you are taking Cat A when you are taking a previous tenant's Cat B. Inherited partitions in the wrong places are worse than an empty floor: you pay to remove them, you dispose of them, and you may be inheriting their reinstatement obligation too. Get the base condition confirmed in the heads of terms.

The two documents

The rate answers "how much per foot". The lease answers "how much in total". Read the alterations and yield-up clauses before you brief a designer.

The compliance figures that shape the layout

A fit-out is a regulated building project, not decoration. These figures decide how many meeting rooms fit on your floor and where the corridor can run.

Approved Documents are statutory guidance to the Building Regulations 2010 for England. Compliance is judged against the Requirements in Schedule 1; the Approved Document shows one way of meeting them. Your building control body has the final word on your specific building.

Approved Documents are statutory guidance to the Building Regulations 2010 for England. Compliance is judged against the Requirements in Schedule 1; the Approved Document shows one way of meeting them, and your building control body or approved inspector has the final word on your building.

Three of those numbers do most of the damage to a space plan.

The 18-metre dead end. A run of glazed offices down one side of a floor plate creates a corridor with one way out. Eighteen metres goes quickly. This is the single most common reason a beautiful first layout comes back from the fire engineer marked up.

The two densities. The BCO 2023 occupational density standard is 10 m² per person, so a 2,500 sq ft (232 m²) suite holds about 23 desks. Escape is calculated at 6.0 m² per person — the same suite is designed for about 38 people getting out. Those are two different numbers doing two different jobs, and confusing them produces either an undersized escape strategy or an oversized services design.

The ventilation crossover. Ten litres per second per person divided by ten square metres per person is exactly one litre per second per square metre. So at the BCO standard density the two Part F rules give the same answer — here, about 232 l/s. Densify past 10 m² per person and the per-person rule takes over, and your ventilation design has to grow with your headcount.

What moves a project between the bands

The costs the rate does not carry

1. 01Licence to Alter. The landlord's consent pack — drawings, specifications, M&E information — plus the landlord's surveyor's and solicitor's fees, which the tenant normally pays. It is also, routinely, the longest item on the programme.
2. 02Dilapidations on the space you are leaving. Reinstatement is commonly quoted in the London market at roughly £15–£35 per sq ft depending on how far back you must strip, and it is negotiated under the RICS dilapidations protocol rather than paid as claimed. On 2,500 sq ft that is a five-figure sum falling in the same year as the new fit-out. Get your own surveyor's assessment rather than budgeting from the landlord's schedule.
3. 03Contingency. Hold 5–10% on a modern building and closer to 10–20% on older stock. In a building whose services you cannot fully survey until you open the ceiling, contingency is not padding — it is arithmetic.
4. 04VAT. Every figure on this page is net. VAT is in addition at the standard rate. Most commercial tenants recover it, which is exactly why the honest way to quote a business is net — and why we do.

A declaration you are entitled to weigh

We deliver commercial fit-out, and windows and glazing come from our own AtoZ Design & Glass, so we profit directly from the partitioning line inside that builders'-work share. Read our enthusiasm for glazed offices with that in mind — and note that the section above tells you partition count is the fastest way to increase your bill.

When a fit-out is the wrong answer

Sometimes the right advice is not to build.

The case for building properly is real, though. Where you hold a long lease, know your headcount, and the building's services are sound, a considered Cat B is the cheapest per year of anything on this page — and the difference between a floor people want to come to and one they tolerate is made of partition acoustics, daylight and air, all of which are on this list.

How to budget your own fit-out before you go to tender

1. 01Confirm the base condition in writing. Cat A, Cat A+, or a previous tenant's Cat B. It decides where in the range you start and whether you are inheriting a strip-out.
2. 02Read three clauses of the lease first. Alterations, reinstatement, yield-up. They set the dilapidations liability you create on the day you install a partition.
3. 03Fix the density before the layout. Net internal area divided by your real m² per person. The BCO 2023 standard is 10 m² per person — use your actual figure, not your aspiration.
4. 04Test the plan against escape distances. 18 m one direction, 45 m more than one. Do it on a sketch, before a designer has spent a fortnight on the drawing.
5. 05Survey the services. Age and condition of HVAC, distribution capacity, floor box positions. A quarter of your budget and most of your risk lives here.
6. 06Price the five elements separately. Builders' work, M&E, security/IT/AV, furniture, fees. Then add Licence to Alter, dilapidations, out-of-hours and contingency as named lines.
7. 07Issue your document, not theirs. Give every contractor the same element breakdown in your order, and require them to price it that way. Comparable tenders are created by the document you send out, never by the ones that come back.

The same discipline, applied to a smaller job, is set out in two quotes, same job — what is inside the price. And the detail that decides whether a partitioned floor performs the way it was drawn is in fire-stopping, before the walls are closed.

What working in an open building actually costs

We deliver commercial fit-out in buildings that stay open while we are in them — Cat A and Cat B works inside the V&A’s Europe 1600–1815 galleries, and retail on Sloane Street.

The lesson from that work is not the one people expect. On a job like that the finish is rarely what drives the cost. Working around a building that is still open is. Restricted hours, protection of everything you are not touching, one delivery window, and the place spotless before the doors open in the morning. None of it shows in a photograph, and all of it is in the price.

The four things that let somebody price it properly

Any number given without seeing your building is a guess, and you pay for a guess later. Hand a contractor these four and the guessing stops.

1. 01The size and the floor. Net internal area, which floor it is on, and how you get materials in and waste out. Not the postcode — the floor.
2. 02The condition of the space today. Cat A, Cat A+, or a previous tenant's Cat B still standing. And the age and state of the services, because that is where a quarter of the budget and most of the risk lives.
3. 03What you actually need in it. Desk numbers, meeting rooms, whether the tea-point is a counter or a kitchen, and which of it is fixed. Open plan with a simple kitchen sits at one end; acoustic pods, feature joinery and a proper reception sit a long way from it. Both are legitimate — they are just different buildings.
4. 04Your dates, and the building's rules. When you need to be in, and whether the landlord permits work in normal hours. Nights and weekends are not a small uplift; they change the labour rate across the whole programme.