Space Requirements

How much space to I need for my party or event?

Many people call us and ask ‘I’m having a party or holding an event – How many people can I fit in the space I have available?’

Drinks party, reception, standing around, 5 ft² per person.
As an example, a room 20ft x 20ft would give you 400ft² of space allowing room for 80 people.

As ever you need to allow more room for a bar or any other serving tables. Poseur tables are a good idea to give people a place to put their drinks. They end up on window sills and balanced on radiators! Even more important for a standing buffet – reduces spillages.

For a standing buffet you may need to increase the space per person to 7 or 8ft² each.
This gives people more room to circulate and actually eat!

So, how much room do you need for chairs and tables?

For a wedding reception or dinner dance, we recommend 15 to 20m² per guest.

Using one of our standard Cheltenham banquet chairs, Camelot  or folding Samsonite interlocking chairs which are approximately 40cm wide and just under 50cm deep we can calculate that 100 chairs in theatre style would take up 4m x 8.5m = 34m²

This figure does not take account of gangways and staging – my figure is purely the space needed to seat the attendees.

For dining at 5ft round tables seating 10 guests on each, you would need 3m x 3m per table = 9m²
That’s about 10ft x 10ft or 3 strides by 3 strides if you haven’t got a tape measure!
Therefore, for every 100 diners you must allow 90m²

Here’s an example of a 12m x 6m (40ft x 20ft) Marquee with room for 8 tables of 10 guests, 80 in total:

As another example, if you have a marquee of 40ft x 100ft (12m x 30m) you would be able to seat 400 guests. However, once you add in a dance floor, bar, serving tables and room to move around, you’re down to 200 – 250 guests.

For 6ft Round tables seating 12 guests, you need 11.5m² per table, in reality meaning 100m² for 100 guests.

To seat people in straight lines, we recommend 6ft x 3ft banquet tables. These seat 3 each side with room to get table decorations down the middle. You can get one person at each end.
For every 6 guests you need 2.5m x 1.8m per table = 4.5m² (Including room to get round). Using this calculation, you need around 75m² per 100 guests seated in rows.
Using 6ft x 2ft6 trestle tables, there is just enough room to get people down both sides although with large place settings you would need to use double width rows.

Again these figures do not take into account room for walkways, stages, dance floors, serving tables etc etc…Dance floors are usually calculated on 4 square ft per person which is 1.2m²

You can see how many people will fit round a table in our table sizes guide