The Square-Meter Math:
What Every Room Really Costs

Short answer: Take a room's floor area, multiply by your all-in cost per square meter per year (typically €200–€600, or $300–$900 per m² depending on city and building), and you have its annual cost. Divide by the hours it's actually used and you get its cost per used hour — which is where the surprises live. Meeting rooms usually come out fine; single-purpose spaces like canteens, town-hall rooms, and VIP boardrooms are the expensive ones, and the fix is usually making them bookable rather than getting rid of them.

Most offices know their total rent. Very few know what a specific room costs — and almost none know what it costs per hour of actual use. That second number is the one that changes decisions.

The all-in rate: what a square meter really costs

Rent (or mortgage) is only part of it. An honest per-m² figure includes:

• Rent or building cost
• Heating, cooling, and electricity
• Cleaning and maintenance
• Insurance, property tax, service charges

Depending on your city and building class, this all-in figure typically lands somewhere between €200 and €600 per m² per year (roughly $300–$900). Secondary cities and older buildings sit at the low end; prime central locations at the high end. If you don't know your exact number, €400/m²/year is a reasonable middle estimate for a European office — but check your own lease, because the spread is wide.

The two-step formula

1. Annual room cost = room m² × all-in rate per m²
2. Cost per used hour = annual room cost ÷ hours actually used per year

Step 1 tells you what the room costs to exist. Step 2 tells you whether that cost is doing anything. A room used 4 hours a day, 250 working days a year, delivers 1,000 hours of use. A room used twice a month delivers about 50.

A worked example: three rooms, same office

Assume €400/m²/year all-in, 250 working days:

The conference room everyone complains about being "always booked"? It's the cheapest space per hour in the building. The prestigious room that's "kept free for important meetings" costs fifty times as much for every hour it's actually used.

Single-purpose is what makes a room expensive

The pattern is consistent: the cost problem isn't small rooms or busy rooms — it's rooms that are reserved for one purpose and idle the rest of the time.

• The canteen — often the largest single room in the office, used two hours a day for lunch
• The town-hall room — sized for the whole company, used for the monthly all-hands
• The VIP boardroom — held free "in case a client comes," which happens twice a quarter

None of these should be eliminated. They exist for good reasons. They just shouldn't be idle the other 80–95% of the time.

The fix: make idle space bookable

Every one of these spaces can become an ordinary calendar resource in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 — the same mechanism as any meeting room. Once it's on the calendar with digital signage at the door showing live availability, the canteen becomes the office's biggest and often best-equipped meeting room from 9 to 11:30 and 1:30 to 5. One of our customers did exactly this with a canteen that was 25% of their floor area — we wrote up how they turned their canteen into a meeting room.

→ If the per-hour cost of a space embarrasses you, don't shrink the space — grow the hours.

To put your own numbers in and compare against the cost of adding rooms instead, use our conference room ROI calculator.

What this math is good for (and what it isn't)

This is a prioritization tool, not an accounting exercise. Don't use it to charge departments for room time. Use it to answer one question: which spaces should we make bookable next? Sort your rooms by cost per used hour, start at the top, and work down. The top three are almost always single-purpose spaces nobody thought of as meeting rooms.

FAQ

How much does office space cost per square meter per year? All-in — rent, heating, cleaning, insurance — typical figures run €200–€600 per m² per year in Europe, or roughly $300–$900 in the US, depending heavily on city and building class.

How do I calculate what a meeting room costs? Multiply the room's floor area by your all-in cost per m² per year for the annual cost, then divide by the hours the room is actually used per year to get cost per used hour.

What are the most expensive rooms in an office? Usually not the busy conference rooms — it's large single-purpose spaces like canteens, town-hall rooms, and rarely-used boardrooms, which combine big footprints with very few hours of actual use.

The Room Display turns any idle space into a bookable resource with live status at the door — $99 per iPad, one-time, on the calendar you already have.