How to Properly Budget Your Office or Workspace Design

Most office furniture budgets arrive at SKG with a number attached that someone wrote down a few years ago and has not revisited since. The number might have been accurate when it was written, but current market pricing is higher than most budget owners expect.

SKG has spent over 30 years pricing commercial furniture projects for organizations across Texas. As a 100% woman-owned, HUB-certified dealer and the exclusive Allsteel dealer in Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, with project capability nationwide, we price everything from a five-person field office to a full campus. That volume is what lets us tell you what a project actually costs today rather than what it cost when the benchmark was set.

This guide covers what to budget per square foot in 2026, why older numbers came up short, and how we can still get a quality project into the $16 to $19 range, even with inflation.

What Does Office Furniture Cost Per Square Foot in 2026?

An entry-level office furniture project in 2026 averages about $25 per square foot, with mid-tier projects near $35 and high-end projects above $50. Budgets set before 2020 are usually short, because commercial furniture producer prices have risen roughly 46 percent since January 2020.

Here is how the three tiers break down in practice.

These are planning ranges, not quotes. A project’s actual number moves with the mix of spaces being furnished, how much ancillary and lounge product is in scope, and freight and installation. Delivery and installation are typically their own line items rather than assuming they are folded into product cost.

Why Your Old Budget Number Is Probably Wrong

The cost of commercial furniture has moved over the past 18 to 24 months, along with nearly everything else. Material prices, fuel, tariffs, and surcharges have all pushed on the cost of goods and on where manufacturers can source components.

What is worth understanding is that furniture has not been an outlier. It has tracked general inflation closely. The following figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Consumer categories from the CPI release for August 2026. Commercial furniture from the Producer Price Index for Commercial Furniture, series WPU122, through July 2026.

Commercial furniture came in at 3.4 percent, matching headline inflation almost exactly. Gasoline rose eight times faster. Milk got cheaper.

So the problem is not that furniture spiked. The problem is arithmetic. Commercial furniture producer prices are up 45.6 percent since January 2020. Run an $18 per square foot benchmark through that increase and you land at $26.20. A number that was correct in 2019 or 2020 has been compounding quietly ever since, and nobody sends a notice when it goes stale.

This is why we tell clients that unless they have priced multiple projects recently, their budget number is probably off. Not off by a rounding error. Off by roughly the amount that separates a project that funds cleanly from one that gets value-engineered down to something nobody is happy with.

It also means SKG’s own published guidance has moved. Earlier in 2026 we put entry-level projects in the $16 to $20 range. Today the market number for entry-level is closer to $25. That is how fast this is moving.

How to Get a Project Into the $16 to $19 Range

The $25 figure is the market average for entry-level work. It is not a floor, and it is not what every project has to cost.

With our HNI product family and the services we bundle into a project, SKG can put quality furniture with full manufacturer warranties into the $16 to $19 per square foot range. These are contract-grade products with real warranty coverage behind them, not closeout inventory.

This matters most for the organizations that rarely get a serious conversation from a furniture dealer. Not every client is furnishing an enterprise headquarters with a bespoke specification. Plenty of organizations need functional, durable workspace for administrative teams, operations groups, distribution and manufacturing offices, and satellite locations, and they need it without a long design cycle and without friction.

What gets a project into that range:

• Standard configurations over custom: Typicals that repeat across a floor price better than one-off layouts and install faster.
• Narrowed finish selections: Fewer finishes across the order reduces cost and shortens lead time. Also, eliminate COM’s (customer own materials) and choose from the manufacturer’s standard fabric library.
• Like-new and demo product where it fits: The SKG Shop carries new and gently used demo seating, desks, tables, storage, and accessories at reduced pricing, available to order directly online.
• Bundle Manufacturers: Buying from the same manufacturer allows us the opportunity to bundle based on volume and capture deeper discounting.

Spend the Dollar Where It Shows

A budget does not have to be spent evenly across a floor plan, and spreading it evenly is usually the wrong call. The same total dollar figure produces a very different space depending on how it is allocated.

A cafe that hosts company events and all-hands meetings is doing cultural work every week. That space might justify the Better or Best tier. A back-of-house storage and file area serves a narrow function and performs fine at the Good tier. Putting both at the same tier means overspending on one and underspending on the other.

This is the conversation worth having before anything is specified:

• Which spaces do clients, candidates, and visitors actually see?
• Which spaces carry culture, recruiting, or events?
• Which spaces are purely functional?
• Which spaces are likely to be reconfigured within three years?

Answer those four and the allocation writes itself. The organizations that get the most out of a fixed budget are the ones that decide deliberately where to concentrate it.

SKG built this into how we scope. Our proprietary planning platform, FOLIO, generates good, better, and best pricing options at current costs, so the trade-offs are visible before anything is ordered. Paired with CET live design technology, which lets our NCIDQ-certified design team model and price product in your actual floor plan, the budget conversation stops being a guessing game. You see what each decision costs while you still have the ability to change it.

What a Dealer Adds That a Catalog Does Not

Comparing a dealer quote to an online retailer’s cart total is comparing two different things. The dealer number typically carries items the catalog price does not.

• Manufacturer warranty coverage, with an in-house warranty specialist managing claims rather than a support queue.
• Design services included in the project, rather than billed separately or skipped entirely.
• Delivery and installation by a certified in-house team, using SKG’s own fleet, with two climate-controlled warehouses in Austin and San Antonio for staging and storage when a schedule slips.
• Leasing and financing. SKG’s Furniture Flex Program offers structured terms from 36 to 60 months with no upfront costs on select plans, and the financing calculator lets you model monthly cost against a proposal value before committing. Affirm and credit card options are also available.
• Buy now, ship later, which locks pricing during planning and schedules delivery to match the actual move-in date.
• Post-purchase support, including a single point of contact, 24-hour response times, and our HotShot Service for minor repair, replacement, and audits on a 48-hour turnaround.

SKG works with more than 350 vetted manufacturing partners, which means a single order can span seating, desking, storage, ergonomics, and accessories without coordinating four vendors and three delivery windows. Our design, project management, delivery, installation, and warehouse teams are all in-house. That is what closes the coordination gaps that quietly add cost when a project is assembled from separate sources.

Get a Current Number Before You Commit

Entry-level office projects now average about $25 per square foot, mid-tier about $35, and high-end about $50. Commercial furniture has risen in step with general inflation rather than ahead of it, but six years of compounding has left most older benchmarks well short of what a project costs today. With the HON family and our bundled services, SKG can bring quality, fully warrantied projects into the $16 to $19 range.

If you have not seen a budget from SKG recently, the number you are working from is probably not the number you need.

SKG provides commercial furniture and office design services in Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, and manages projects nationwide. Contact our team for a current good, better, and best budget on your space, built on today’s pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions