The complete home office setup

You have a room and a budget and a list of tabs open. Here is the thing that list will not tell you, from a site that would make more money if it stayed quiet about it: most of what makes a desk comfortable costs nothing, because it is geometry rather than equipment.

A surface at the right height. A chair at the right height relative to it. A screen at the right height relative to your eyes. Wrists that are straight. None of those four are products. They are relationships between things, and you can satisfy every one of them with furniture you already own, a tape measure, and a couple of books under a monitor. If you do only that and buy nothing, you will have captured most of the available benefit and spent nothing at all.

So this page is in two halves. The free half comes first, because it comes first in real life. The spend order comes second, and it is deliberately ruthless about what is worth money and what is not.

The free half, and it is the bigger half

Before you buy anything, spend twenty minutes doing this. It costs nothing, and it changes what you need to buy — usually downward.

Find your desk height number. It is your seated elbow height, and it is not derivable from your body height, whatever every other calculator on the internet implies. Our desk height calculator works it out and shows its arithmetic. This number is the reason the free half matters: for the median adult it lands belowthe 29″ a conventional desk gives you, and HFES 100-2007’s mandated seated range tops out at 28.3″. The standard desk is too tall for most people. That is a geometry problem, and a chair and a stack of books solves it for nothing.

Raise your chair to meet the desk, then support your feet. If your desk is fixed — and it is — you cannot bring the surface to your elbows, so bring your elbows to the surface and then give your feet a floor. A box works. A ream of paper works. OSHA’s condition for seat height is fit, not measurement: “The chair height is appropriate when the entire sole of the foot can rest on the floor with the back of the knee slightly higher than the seat of the chair.” A footrest just moves the floor.

Put the monitor on some books. Top of screen at or slightly below eye level, per OSHA. Books are free, and for a single static monitor they do the same job as a stand. The case for buying an arm is real but narrower than it is usually sold as, and it is mostly about desk space and repositioning rather than height.

Turn the desk ninety degrees. If a window is behind your monitor, you are fighting it all day, and the mechanism is contrast rather than brightness. Moving the desk so the window is to the side is free and beats any lamp you can buy. It is the single highest-leverage thing on this page and nobody sells it, which is precisely why nobody mentions it.

Move the mouse closer.OSHA: “Elbows stay in close to the body”. If a number pad is pushing your mouse out to the right, your elbow is out there with it. Free fix: use the keyboard you have, further left. Paid fix: a smaller keyboard. Do the free one first.

Do all five. If you are now comfortable, close this page and keep your money — we mean that, and the methodology page explains why a site with no test lab has no business telling you otherwise.

The spend order, if you are still buying

You are furnishing a room, not solving comfort — those are different projects and it is worth knowing which one you are on. In rough order of what returns the most per unit of money:

1. The chair

First, and by a distance. You are in contact with it for the entire day, it is the hardest thing to improvise (books do not simulate a lumbar curve), and it is where the gap between the cheap version and the good version is widest.

What you are actually buying at the top of the market is adjustment range and warranty. Both are checkable on the manufacturer’s own page, which is why we rank on them. Warranty in this category runs from three years to lifetime on chairs that photograph identically, and that spread is the most honest signal available about what a maker thinks their own product will survive.

What you are notbuying is a certification that means anything ergonomic. “BIFMA certified” is the most misunderstood phrase in the category: ANSI/BIFMA X5.1-2017’s own scope says, in its own words, that the standard “does not address lounge seating, flammability, surface material durability, cushioning materials, product emissions, or ergonomic considerations.” It tests whether a chair survives being dropped on and swivelled. It says nothing whatsoever about whether it fits you. Start at the best ergonomic office chairs, and if the seat-height spec is what decides it for you — it should be — note how many manufacturers do not publish one. The whole chairs hub covers the sub-questions.

2. The desk

Second, and cheaper than the internet thinks, because the expensive feature is height adjustment and you may not need it.

If you buy an adjustable desk, buy it for the floor height, not the ceiling. Every listing advertises how high a desk goes. Almost nobody advertises how low, and the low end is what decides whether it fits you seated — across the desks in our standing desk roundup the bottom of the range spans nearly eight inches. That is the difference between a desk that fits a shorter adult and one that never will, and it is invisible in a photograph.

If you buy a fixed desk, the only spec that matters is size, and people systematically get it wrong in both directions — what size desk do you need has the arithmetic. One thing OSHA does specify: leg clearance under the desktop “should generally be between 20-28 inches (50-72 cm) high.” It is the only desk number OSHA gives, and a drawer pedestal is the usual thing that violates it.

And if the standing question is the reason you are here at all, answer it before you spend: standing desk vs sitting lays out what the evidence does and does not show, which is less than the marketing suggests. The desks hub covers the rest.

3. The monitor arm — conditionally

Third, and genuinely optional. Books hold a monitor at a height perfectly well. Buy an arm when you need the desk space underneath, when you reposition the screen regularly, or when you are running two and the stands have started colliding — not because a stack of books is somehow less ergonomic than aluminium.

The spec that decides it is the weight range, and the minimum is the half nobody prints. Several arms are gas-sprung and will not stay down with a light modern monitor on them. Check VESA and weight ratings before you shop, then the best monitor arms or the wider monitor arms hub.

4. The keyboard and mouse

Fourth. A smaller keyboard brings your mouse in, which is the OSHA “elbows in close to the body” line satisfied for the price of the cheapest thing on this list.

Read our mouse and keyboard pages specifically for the claims sections, because this is the category where manufacturer marketing is furthest from manufacturer documentation. One headline strain-reduction percentage on a major vertical mouse rests on an unpublished in-house study whose only footnote names no method and no sample size at all. One keyboard on our list carries a genuine named third-party ergonomic certification. Telling those two apart is most of the value in the category.

5. The light

Fifth, and only after you have tried turning the desk. If you do buy, the specs worth having are colour rendering and rated life, and be aware the authorities disagree about how much light you even want: CCOHS puts computer tasks at 75–300 lux while OSHA calls for up to 73 foot-candles (about 785 lux by our conversion) for LCD monitors. Nobody agrees, so distrust any page that gives you one confident number. Lighting for eye strain works through it; the desk lamp picks and the lighting hub have the products.

6. The cables

Last, always, and the reason is not aesthetics. Cable management is set against the final position of everything else, so doing it before the desk height is settled means doing it twice. It is also the cheapest category on the site by a wide margin, which is a pleasant note to end a budget on. How to hide desk cables for a fixed desk; standing desk cable management if yours moves, because that is a different problem with a real failure mode. The cable management hub has the rest.

What we would tell a friend

Buy a chair with a warranty you can read and an adjustment range that covers you. Use the desk you have until the calculator tells you it does not fit, and then buy on the floor height. Put the monitor on books until the books annoy you. Turn the desk away from the window. Ignore everything else until you have a specific complaint about it.

That order is deliberately unexciting, and it does not spend most people’s budget. We would rather publish it than the version that does. If it is useful, the ergonomic desk setupis the next page — it assumes you have the things and covers the order to arrange them in, which is the half that is actually free.

One last caveat, and it applies to this entire page. We have not tested any of the products we link to, and none of this is medical advice. Stephen V. is an enthusiast who reads spec sheets and standards, not an ergonomist or a clinician. What we can do is show you the manufacturers’ own published numbers with a citation next to each one, and tell you when a number does not exist rather than inventing it. What we cannot do is tell you how a chair feels on hour six, or diagnose anything. For the first, owner reviews beat us. For the second, ask someone with a licence.