A stacking plan is the picture of which department sits on which floor, drawn as a stack of horizontal bands, one per floor, sized by headcount. It is the oldest instrument in space planning and still the one that decides most moves, because it is the only view where the question "does this fit" can be answered in ten seconds by people who do not otherwise think about buildings. This page sets out what a stacking plan has to show to be useful, how to test one before anybody packs a box, and where the free sheet on this site prices the space a good stack frees up.
What the stack has to show
Floors as bands, departments as blocks within them, sized by desks rather than by headcount, with the spare capacity on each floor visible as space rather than implied by a number. Sizing by desks rather than headcount is the detail that makes the difference in a hybrid estate, where a team of forty may need twenty-four desks and a stack drawn on headcount will show a building that is full when it is not. Adjacency matters too and is usually the reason a stack is redrawn: two teams that work together across three floors is a real cost that no utilization figure captures.
Testing a stack before anybody moves
Two tests. First, does each floor still work at peak rather than at average: a stack built to the average will fail on the busiest day, and the objection will arrive from the department that experiences it. Second, does the utilization of each block hold after the move, or has the plan simply relocated the empty desks. On the utilization sheet here, 180 desks with 108 occupied is 60% and 72 empty; run the same arithmetic per floor on the proposed stack and the plan either releases a floor or it does not, and the answer is arithmetic rather than opinion.
Facility mapping, and where the floor plans come from
A stack sits on top of floor plans, and the state of the plans decides how much of this is a software problem. Estates with current CAD drawings can load them; estates whose drawings predate two refits have a survey to pay for first, and that survey is frequently the largest line in a space software project. Ask early and honestly what state your drawings are in, because stacking plan software bought against drawings nobody trusts produces a beautiful picture of a building that no longer exists.
What stack planning is worth in money
The point of stack planning is consolidation, and consolidation is worth the running cost of what it releases. On the worked figures here, an estate at 60% utilization carries $168,000 of a $420,000 annual cost on desks nobody sits at, and 5,600 of 14,000 square feet could in principle be released. A stack that consolidates that into a releasable floor turns those numbers into a lease decision; a stack that spreads the same teams more evenly across the same floors improves the picture and saves nothing, which is worth knowing before the exercise starts.
Questions people ask about stacking plan
What is a stacking plan?
A view of which department occupies which floor, drawn as horizontal bands sized by the space each one takes. It is used to test whether a proposed arrangement fits and to plan moves, and it is the view where non-specialists can answer the question quickly, which is why it survives every fashion in space planning.
Should a stacking plan be sized by headcount or by desks?
By desks, especially in a hybrid estate. A team of forty that needs twenty-four desks will make a headcount-sized stack show a full building that is not full, and every decision taken from that picture will be wrong in the same expensive direction.
Do I need stacking plan software?
Not for a single building with current drawings, where the exercise is a morning with a floor plan. Software earns its cost across several buildings, with frequent moves, or when the stack needs to be tested against real occupancy repeatedly rather than drawn once. Check the state of your drawings first: that, not the software, is usually the real cost.
How do I know whether a stack actually saves money?
Run the utilization arithmetic per floor on the proposed arrangement, not just on the estate as a whole. A stack that consolidates empty desks into a releasable floor is worth the running cost of that floor; a stack that spreads the same people more evenly is a tidier picture with no saving attached.