Office Refurbishment vs Fit-Out in London

An office refurbishment is defined by what you keep. Keep the core, the risers and the ceiling void and you inherit their limits: the British Council for Offices 2023 standard of 10 m² per person sets the desk count, while Approved Document B Volume 2, Table D1 designs the escape route on a different number, 6.0 m² per person. A fit-out chooses those constraints. A refurbishment is handed them — which is why the same floor plate carries two different jobs, two different consents and, often, two different people paying.

Refurbishment, fit-out and reinstatement get used as if they were the same word. They are three separate scopes with three separate funding routes, and the confusion is not academic: it is the most common reason a commercial project is priced against the wrong brief and then re-priced three weeks in.

This guide separates them, then sets out the four questions that decide which one you are actually in.

The three words, in the order they happen

Fit-out is the work that turns a serviced blank into a workspace. Cat A is the landlord's base build — raised access floor, suspended ceiling, basic lighting, primary HVAC, finished perimeter, compliant escape. Cat B is the tenant's workspace built on top of it: layout, partitions, meeting rooms, tea point, joinery, AV. What sits inside a Cat B rate and what it leaves out is a separate question, and the rate is the thing most often compared without checking the scope behind it.

Refurbishment is the upgrade of a workspace that already exists. You hold it, you are often still in it, and the starting condition is whatever the last occupier left plus whatever has aged since. Nobody hands you a blank.

Reinstatement is the removal of the work at the end — putting the space back to the condition the lease describes. It is not a variation of a refurbishment; it is a separate obligation that a refurbishment can create.

The sentence worth remembering

A fit-out starts from a specification. A refurbishment starts from a survey, because the specification is whatever is already there.

What you keep, and what each kept element costs you

This is the whole analysis. Every element you retain saves its replacement and imposes its geometry.

A refurbishment brief written without deciding these four things is not a brief. It is a wish, and it will be priced as one.

The four questions that decide the scope

1. 01Is the alterations covenant absolute or qualified?. One word in the lease decides whether you have a negotiation or a request. Qualified means section 19(2) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1927 is available to you; absolute means it is not, and the landlord may refuse for any reason or none.
2. 02What does the yield-up clause require, and will this work add to it?. Alterations made under a licence are commonly required to come out at the end. Settle the reinstatement position inside the Licence to Alter rather than leaving it to a schedule of dilapidations years later, when it is an argument rather than a clause.
3. 03Which lines are improvements, which are repairs, and which are plant?. Improvements to the demise are normally tenant-funded. Repairs follow the repairing covenant. Plant and structure often sit with the landlord and return to you through the service charge. Three buckets, three payers, and the scope should be sorted into them before it is priced.
4. 04Is the building occupied and managed?. If it is, the goods lift and the loading bay write the programme before any trade does. Deliveries and waste both run through slots controlled by the estate team, so the sequence is built around lift windows rather than around trades.
5. 05What is the actual net usable area?. Not the figure on the lease plan. Measure what is left after the core, the risers and the circulation, because that is the number the occupancy and escape standards apply to and the number a desk count has to survive.

Consents: the licence is the long pole, not the planning

Most internal office refurbishment is not a planning matter at all. Signage, plant, external alterations and any change of use are. What does apply, almost every time, is the landlord's consent.

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.

How the Licence to Alter actually runs, and why it is usually longer than the build is worth reading before you commit to a date, because it depends on the landlord's surveyor and solicitor rather than on your programme.

And because a refurbishment can create a liability at the other end, what you agree to hand back belongs in the same conversation rather than in a drawer until year ten.

Why a builder is writing this

Because the difference between these three words is discovered on site, and whoever is on site is the one who finds it.

We deliver commercial work in central London in buildings that stay open. The V&A's Europe 1600–1815 galleries in South Kensington SW7 were Cat A and Cat B works across multiple phases, all of it outside public opening hours, alongside the museum's own estate team and conservation officers. That is a refurbishment in the strict sense: almost everything was kept, and what was kept set the method.

2VP is the builder, not a marketplace — one contract, one named project lead, and no introducer fee stacked on the build cost. Our own glazing and joinery companies, AtoZ Design & Glass and Selection.Works, mean the reception counter and the tea-point run are made rather than bought in.

We do not price a commercial floor from an area. Our commercial fit-out page deliberately carries no estimator: the pricing engine has eight project types and every one of them is residential, so a square-metre figure cannot price a kept ceiling void. It is priced from a walk round the floor.

The one line to take away

Before you ask what a refurbishment costs, write down what you are keeping. That list is the scope, the constraint and the consent question all at once — and it is the only version of the brief that two contractors can price the same way.