Minimum Space Required for a Corporate Office in Makati
"How much space do we actually need?" is the first question in any office search and the one most businesses answer badly. Take too little and you are renegotiating within eighteen months, having already spent millions on a fit-out you cannot extend. Take too much and you pay Makati central business district rates, currently in the region of ₱900 to ₱2,400 per square meter per month for Grade A space, on floor area nobody uses.
There is no single minimum. What exists is a set of density ratios that vary sharply by business type, a gap between usable and leasable area that catches out first-time occupiers, and a practical floor below which conventional leasing stops making sense in Makati at all. This article works through all three, with the arithmetic for the most common requirement sizes.
Start With Density, Not Total Area
The right way to size an office is to establish square meters per person for your specific operation, then multiply. Applying a generic figure is how businesses end up with a boardroom they use twice a year and no space for the team that grew.
Traditional corporate and professional services, law firms, accountancy practices, consultancies, holding companies, typically require 8 to 12 square meters per person. The driver is enclosed offices for senior staff, substantial meeting facilities, client-facing reception, and file storage. A firm where partners expect private offices sits at the upper end.
Modern corporate with hybrid working typically requires 6 to 8 square meters per person, calculated against headcount rather than desks. Open plan, shared meeting rooms, and desk-sharing ratios of around 0.7 desks per employee bring the figure down. This is where most Makati corporate occupiers now sit.
Information technology and business process management operations run at 4 to 5 square meters per seat, and the calculation is per seat rather than per employee because seats are shared across shifts. A well-configured Ayala Avenue floor of approximately 1,593 square meters has been marketed at around 393 workstations, which is roughly four square meters per seat inclusive of meeting rooms, pantry, and support space, a realistic benchmark for a fitted BPO floor.
Seat-lease and plug-and-play arrangements run denser still. Marketed configurations of 28 to 30 workstations in 60 square meters appear in Makati listings, which is close to two square meters per seat. These are viable as short-term or overflow arrangements but are not a template for a permanent office, and they should not be used to size a long lease.
Usable Versus Leasable Area
The second thing that catches occupiers is that the area you lease is not the area you occupy.
Leases in Makati are typically written on leasable area, which includes the tenant's proportionate share of common areas, lobbies, corridors, lift lobbies, and shared facilities. Usable area is what sits inside the demised premises. Net usable area is what remains after internal circulation, columns, and service risers.
The relationship between these is the building's efficiency factor, and in Makati it commonly runs between 80 and 88 per cent for modern Grade A towers, lower in older stock with inefficient cores or heavy column grids.
The practical consequence: a business calculating that it needs 400 square meters of working space should be looking at leases of roughly 450 to 500 square meters. Sizing against usable area and then signing on leasable area is a recurring and expensive error.
What Has to Fit Besides Desks
A workspace calculation that only counts desks will always come out short. A functioning Makati office needs to accommodate reception and a waiting area, meeting rooms in a range of sizes, at least one enclosed room capable of holding a confidential conversation, a pantry or break area, a server or electrical equipment room, storage, and internal circulation.
Circulation alone typically consumes 25 to 35 per cent of usable area once corridors, walkways between workstations, and clearances around doors and equipment are accounted for. This is not discretionary, it is what makes the space navigable and compliant with egress requirements.
Restrooms in most Makati Grade A buildings are provided in the common areas rather than within the tenant's premises, which is one of the few things that works in the occupier's favour on the area calculation.
Occupant load, means of egress, and fire safety provisions are governed by the National Building Code and the Fire Code, and the permitted occupancy of a given floor area is a matter for the building's design and the local building official rather than the tenant's preference. Any fit-out plan should be reviewed against these requirements by the design professional before it is priced, because a layout that fails on egress will be redrawn at the tenant's cost.
Worked Example: A 30-Person Professional Services Firm
A law or consulting firm of thirty people, with six partner offices, a boardroom, two meeting rooms, reception, pantry, and file storage.
At 10 square meters per person, the requirement is approximately 300 square meters of usable area. Applying an efficiency factor of 85 per cent, the lease should be sized at roughly 350 to 355 square meters of leasable area.
At a mid-range Makati Grade A rate of ₱1,200 per square meter, base rent is approximately ₱426,000 per month. Common area dues at ₱200 per square meter add ₱71,000. Parking at the customary allocation of one slot per hundred square meters gives three slots at around ₱4,000 to ₱6,000 each. Value-added tax at 12 per cent applies to the total.
The move-in position is the part that surprises: three months advance and three months security deposit is standard in Makati, so approximately ₱3 million is required before occupation, before any fit-out. Where the space is delivered bare, Makati fit-out costs have been running at approximately ₱25,000 to ₱45,000 per square meter in 2026, which on 350 square meters is a further ₱8.75 million to ₱15.75 million of capital expenditure.
Worked Example: A 100-Seat Outsourcing Operation
A BPO taking 100 workstations across two shifts.
At 4.5 square metres per seat, the requirement is approximately 450 square metres of usable area, or roughly 520 square metres leasable at an 87 per cent efficiency factor.
Three additional considerations apply that do not apply to the professional services example. First, common area dues will be charged at the twenty-four-hour rate rather than the twelve-hour rate, Makati listings show this differential clearly, with twelve-hour operation quoted around ₱200 per square meter and twenty-four-hour operation around ₱300. On 520 square meters that difference is approximately ₱52,000 a month, or over ₱3 million across a five-year term.
Second, power and cooling requirements are materially higher, and not every building can support the load per square meter that a dense operation needs. This is a technical due diligence item, not an assumption.
Third, if the operation qualifies as an export enterprise, PEZA accreditation of the specific floor becomes decisive, because it changes the VAT treatment of rent. Makati has substantial accredited stock, but accreditation is building-specific and sometimes floor-specific.
The Practical Floor in Makati
Below a certain size, conventional leasing in Makati stops being sensible.
The smallest strata-titled units marketed in newer Makati towers run in the region of 108 to 130 square meters, and typical whole-floor offerings run from 150 square meters upward into full floors of 1,500 to 1,600 square meters. A business needing 40 square meters will struggle to find a conventional lease and will pay disproportionately for the privilege.
More importantly, the fixed costs of conventional occupation do not scale down. Six months of advance and deposit, a fit-out at ₱25,000 to ₱45,000 per square meter, and a minimum term of three years are the same structural commitments whether the space is 100 square meters or 1,000. On a small requirement, that capital is better deployed elsewhere.
The practical guidance is roughly this. Under about ten people, serviced offices or coworking are almost always the better economics. Between ten and thirty, the answer depends on how confident the business is in its headcount over three years, a fitted small unit can work, a bare shell rarely does. Above thirty people, conventional leasing generally wins on cost per head, provided the business can fund the fit-out and commit to the term.
Sizing for Growth Without Overpaying
The tension in every office search is between paying for space you do not yet need and being trapped in space you have outgrown. Three approaches manage it without simply taking more area.
Take a modest growth allowance rather than a generous one. Ten to fifteen per cent above current requirement is defensible. Thirty per cent is speculation funded at Makati rates.
Negotiate expansion rights instead of leasing the space. A right of first refusal over adjoining space, or an option on additional area within the building, costs nothing today and solves the problem if growth arrives. Landlords with vacancy elsewhere in the building are frequently willing to grant it.
Design the fit-out for higher density than you initially occupy. Power, data, and cooling capacity installed at the outset is far cheaper than retrofitting. Leaving desks out is easy; adding electrical capacity to a live floor is not.
Questions to Settle Before Signing
Confirm whether the quoted area is leasable or usable, and obtain the building's efficiency factor in writing. Confirm the parking allocation, commonly one slot per hundred square meters, and whether additional slots are available. Confirm the common area dues rate for your actual operating hours, not the standard rate. Establish the handover condition, bare shell, warm shell, semi-fitted, or fully fitted, because it determines whether the fit-out is a capital cost or already amortized into the rent. Confirm the fit-out period granted rent-free, with one to three months being common in Makati. And if the business may qualify for incentives, confirm the PEZA accreditation status of the specific floors under consideration.
Getting the area right at the outset is worth more than any rate concession available afterwards, because the wrong footprint costs money for the entire term. Comparing Makati floor plates, handover conditions, and building attributes side by side is considerably faster when the details are visible before you enquire, you can explore office space across Makati, Bonifacio Global City, and the rest of Metro Manila at The Grid Property Ventures, the Philippines' smartest real-estate platform.
