Australia's building code deems a restaurant to hold 1 person per square metre of usable floor area and a standing bar area 2 people per square metre, but that figure sizes your exits and is not a legal cap on customers.
Skai Solutions builds phone agents for Australian and New Zealand venues, so we spend a lot of time on what a dining room can actually hold and what it earns. This page gives you the code figures, the floor area that counts, and the limit that really governs a busy Friday.
Table D2D18 of the National Construction Code sets an area per person for every type of space, and the hospitality rows are the tightest in the table. These are the figures a certifier uses, published by the Australian Building Codes Board in NCC 2022 Volume One.
| Use | Area per person | People per 100 m2 |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant | 1 m2 | 100 |
| Cafe or dining room | 1 m2 | 100 |
| Bar, standing | 0.5 m2 | 200 |
| Bar, other | 1 m2 | 100 |
| Dance floor | 0.5 m2 | 200 |
| Kiosk | 1 m2 | 100 |
| Kitchen | 10 m2 | 10 |
| Office | 10 m2 | 10 |
| Storage space | 30 m2 | 3.3 |
Two of those rows do more work than the rest. A standing bar area is deemed to hold twice as many people as the same floor area of dining, which is why converting a dining corner into standing room changes your exit requirements rather than just your layout. And a kitchen is deemed to hold one person per ten square metres, so a 40 square metre kitchen counts as four people no matter how many are actually in it at eight on a Saturday. The code is sizing escape routes, not rostering your pass.
The table note on the standing bar row matters if you are drawing a plan: standing bar area means the area used by standing patrons, and it extends not less than 1.5 metres out from the outside edge of the bar.
Not the lease area, which is the number most operators reach for first. D2D18 divides the floor area of each part of the space by the figure in the table, and it specifically excludes lifts, stairways, ramps and escalators, corridors, hallways, lobbies and the like, service ducts and the like, sanitary compartments and other ancillary uses.
So a 180 square metre tenancy is not 180 people. Take out the entry lobby, the back corridor, the toilets and the service duct and you might have 120 square metres of dining, 25 of kitchen and the rest excluded. That is 120 people from the dining area and 2.5, rounded as the certifier requires, from the kitchen. The difference between the lease number and the code number is routinely a third of the floor plate, and it is the single most common error in a back of envelope capacity sum.
If you are still at the planning stage, the area you are paying for and the area you can use are two different numbers in your rent as well. Our restaurant occupancy cost page works through rent as a share of revenue, and the cafe fit out cost page covers what the unusable third costs you to build anyway.
This is the part that is wrong almost everywhere, and the correction comes from the Building Codes Board itself rather than from us. The ABCB guidance to D2D18 states that the clause and its table "are only intended for the purposes of determining BCA requirements which depend on the number of occupants likely to occupy a building or storey" and that they "are not intended to restrict the number of occupants using a building, or to enforce any building use or licensing requirements".
Read that twice if you have ever been told your venue "has a code capacity of 140 so you cannot have 150 in". The code figure drives how wide your exits must be, how many of them you need, how many toilets you install, your hearing augmentation and parts of your mechanical ventilation. A hard cap on patrons, where one exists, comes from somewhere else: a planning permit condition, a liquor licence condition, a fire safety order or a council approval. Those are real limits and they are often lower than the code number. The code number is the design input, not the rule on the door.
The practical consequence is that you have two numbers to know, not one, and only one of them is in the building code. Ask your certifier for the D2D18 figure and ask your council or licensing body for the permit condition, because the lower of the two is the one that governs a busy Friday.
The code number tells you the ceiling the building was designed for. Your seating capacity is a commercial decision underneath it, and the ABCB guidance effectively says so: where a restaurant has fixed tables, booths, dining alcoves and architectural features that take up significant floor space, "the actual number of patrons able to be accommodated may be much less" than the table figure, and counting seats is the better method. It adds a warning worth writing on the plan: if you count seats, "due allowance must be made for the employees, as well as the potential for alternative seating layouts".
Capacity is only a number until you put turns and spend against it. If your dining room seats 70 and you turn it 1.8 times on a Saturday, that is 126 covers. At the average spend figures on our spend per head page that is the whole evening, decided months earlier by a floor plan. Push the turn rate rather than the seat count and you get the same result without a build: the table turnover page has the arithmetic.
Seats also set your outdoor question. Adding a footpath area is usually the cheapest capacity you will ever buy per square metre, and the permit is the constraint rather than the building code. The outdoor dining permit page has the state by state fees.
If you run a takeaway with four stools, or a dark kitchen with no dining room at all, D2D18 is not your problem and you should not pay anybody to model it. The same goes for a venue that is already built, certified and trading inside a permit condition it never gets near. The number matters at three moments: when you are signing a lease, when you are changing the use of a space, and when you are arguing with a certifier about exit widths. Outside those three, knowing it changes nothing you do this week.
A full dining room is the moment your phone stops being answered. Skai Solutions answers every call on the first ring, takes the booking and sends it through, so the Saturday that fills your 70 seats is also the Saturday that fills next Friday. That is the whole case: capacity you have already paid for, sold on a night nobody could reach the handset.
If your phone mostly carries supplier calls and enquiries rather than bookings, a basic message taking plan is the right buy and it is not us. If it carries bookings during service, read what an AI receptionist for a restaurant actually does and judge it against the covers your floor plan already allows. Setup takes five days.
The same floor area drives a second requirement that catches people late. See how many toilets a cafe needs, where design occupancy is one person per square metre unless you count fixed seats instead, and the male and female columns diverge fast above 50 patrons.
How many people per square metre can a restaurant hold in Australia?
Table D2D18 of the National Construction Code deems a restaurant, cafe or dining room to hold one person per square metre of usable floor area, and a standing bar area two people per square metre. Kitchens are deemed to hold one person per ten square metres.
Is the building code figure a legal limit on how many customers I can have?
No. The Australian Building Codes Board states that D2D18 and its table are not intended to restrict the number of occupants using a building or to enforce any building use or licensing requirements. A hard cap comes from a planning permit, a licence condition or a fire safety order instead.
Does the kitchen count toward my restaurant occupancy number?
Yes, but at ten square metres per person rather than one. A 40 square metre kitchen is deemed to hold four people under Table D2D18 however many are working in it.
What floor area is excluded from the occupancy calculation?
D2D18 excludes lifts, stairways, ramps and escalators, corridors, hallways, lobbies and the like, service ducts and the like, sanitary compartments and other ancillary uses. On a typical tenancy that removes a significant share of the lease area.
How many square metres do I need per seat in practice?
Once fixed booths, a service aisle and circulation are laid out, most dining rooms land well below the code ceiling of one person per square metre. The Building Codes Board guidance says the actual number of patrons may be much less than the table figure where fixed tables and architectural features take up floor space.
Do staff count in the occupancy number?
Yes. The ABCB guidance says that if you count seats instead of using the table, due allowance must be made for employees as well as for alternative seating layouts that could increase the number of people present.