Office commute calculator: where should your London office be?

Put it where the team's journeys are shortest overall, not where the founders live or where the old office was. Map everyone's home postcode, time each person's journey to every candidate district, and compare the headcount-weighted average and the share of people within 30 and 45 minutes. For a team spread across London that usually lands in the City, Shoreditch, King's Cross or the West End, but an east-heavy or south-heavy team can shift the answer by a whole district.

You paste or upload your team's home postcodes, optionally with a headcount for each. Your browser cuts each postcode down to its district, finds the district's centre with the free postcodes.io service, and groups people by district. A shortlist step then picks the three of 21 London office districts closest to your team as the crow flies, and Google times a public transport journey from each home district (up to 33 per run) to each of them, arriving for 9am. It ranks the three by average commute, or by the share of people within 30 or 45 minutes, and shows the best fit, its key stations and the team on a map.

Every time is a timetabled Google public transport journey from the centre of each home district to one spot in each shortlisted district (its main office cluster, or the rail terminal most of your team's rail commuters arrive at, such as King's Cross for a team from the north), arriving by 09:00 on the next Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, including the walk at each end. Each run times up to 33 home districts, the biggest groups and longest trips first; anyone beyond that, or any journey Google can't route, is marked not timed and left out of the averages rather than guessed. Times are measured from the centre of each home district, so a single person's door-to-door trip can differ by a few minutes. Check the shortlisted districts in a journey planner before you commit.

No. Your browser reduces every postcode to its district, such as E8 or SW9, before anything leaves it, so a full postcode is never sent anywhere. Only districts and headcounts go to postcodes.io, a free public UK postcode lookup, and to Great Space to fetch journey times. The only thing kept is the journey time between two districts, which is shared by everyone who uses the tool and says nothing about your team. If you ask for the results as a PDF, your name, company and email are used to send it and to get in touch about your requirement, as described below.

We email you a short PDF of your results: the best district, the runners-up, key stations, how the times were worked out, and what a month of flexible office space would cost your team in each district's main areas, at budget, mid-market and premium prices. To send it, your name, company, email, team size and the district results go to Great Space; home postcodes and home districts never do. Ticking the box also lets us get in touch about your office requirement. It is not a mailing list, and we won't pass your details to a broker or anyone else without asking you first.

On-peak times are for arriving at the office by 09:00, the busiest time on London's network, and they drive the ranking. Off-peak times, which you can add with one click, are for arriving by 11:00, so you can see how much flexible hours would shorten the trip for a team that doesn't need to be in for nine.

There is no official standard, so pick a ceiling your team agrees with. Thirty minutes each way is comfortable for most people and 45 minutes is a common upper limit when shortlisting office locations, which is why the calculator reports the share of the team inside each. Look at the longest journey too: a district with a great average can still leave one or two people with a commute that would make them think twice about office days.

The 21 postcode districts Great Space treats as London office markets: EC1, EC2, EC3, EC4, WC1, WC2, W1, W2, W8, W12, SW1, SW8, SW11, SE1, SE10, N1, NW1, E1, E2, E14 and E16. That covers the City, the West End, Midtown, King's Cross, Shoreditch, Canary Wharf, Battersea, White City and the South Bank.

Turn it into a shortlist of real offices. A flex or managed workspace broker can source available space in your top two or three districts, compare prices and terms, and arrange viewings, at no cost to you because providers pay the broker's commission. Great Space's London broker directory lists brokers you can contact directly.