Most of the cash required for a new office goes out before move-in—and never appears on the rent quote. This iceberg shows where it goes, using a 19,000-square-foot San Francisco office as the baseline.
A market baseline, not a prediction. These are illustrative planning figures—not a quote or budget. Your building, scope, company profile and negotiated terms will change the outcome.
A furnished sublease, a suite the landlord already built, or raw space you build yourself. Move the sliders and watch the icebergs re-scale. Each one is a market planning case, not a project budget; the waterline is where rent stops and everything else begins.
This model uses broad San Francisco market assumptions to show the full exposure before a specific building, deal or scope is known. It is intentionally complete and conservative. It is not a budget, a quote or what we expect every tenant to spend.
Resource's work starts here. We compare lower-capital ways to take space, negotiate the deal, challenge unnecessary scope, reuse what makes sense and sequence the move to limit double rent.
Choose furnished or prebuilt space, reuse what already works and remove scope the team does not need.
Improve rent, free rent, the landlord's contribution, the deposit and the delivery terms.
Benchmark bids, right-size specifications and align the move so two offices overlap for less time.
Some costs can be reduced. Some can be shifted to the landlord. Some can be avoided entirely.
Five things you pay for before your first rent check, with the ranges we see in San Francisco this year for a floor of roughly 19,000 square feet.
A full build-out in a San Francisco tower runs about $225 to $275 per square foot in 2026, the highest in the Americas. The landlord contributes an allowance, but on a five-year lease it is usually $60 to $90 per SF, not the $125 to $150 you see quoted on ten-year deals. The gap is yours. Design, engineering and city permits add roughly 10% on top, and San Francisco's permit fees alone come to about $60,000 on a project this size.
New workstations, task chairs, conference tables, lounge and café pieces. A mid-range setup for a tech team lands at $2,500 to $5,000 per person, or $35 to $60 per square foot once meeting rooms and common areas are counted. Lead times of 8 to 14 weeks are normal, which is why furniture, not construction, often sets the move-in date for a prebuilt suite.
Cabling is the cheap part at $2 to $9 per SF. The rest is video-conferencing in every meeting room, an all-hands space, network gear, a cooled equipment room, Wi-Fi, door access and cameras. Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 guide puts AV and IT together at $28 to $44 per SF in San Francisco. Fiber circuits cost little but take 60 to 90 days to deliver; order them the day you sign.
Moving and IT cutover ($30,000 to $80,000), restoring the office you're leaving ($25,000 to $100,000), legal fees on the new lease ($25,000 to $75,000), and the line that changes the whole comparison: rent on your current space while the new one is built. A 7 to 12 month build-out means paying for two offices, and if your old lease ends first, holdover rent typically runs 150% to 200%.
Landlords size the deposit to what they have at risk: the allowance, free rent and commissions. For a venture-backed company taking a large allowance, that means 9 to 12 months of rent, usually as a letter of credit that your bank backs with 100% cash collateral. It is refundable, but it is not runway. Banks charge 1% to 3% a year on top.
Tell us two things and we'll size a market baseline for all three options. Pierce or Andrew will then replace the broad assumptions with real buildings, scope choices and negotiated deal terms.
Every market input on this page comes from a published 2025–2026 source or from a lease we negotiated. We use those inputs to size the exposure before a building and deal are known—not to predict your result.
Resource represents tenants only, never landlords. We'll tell you what your space will really cost before you fall in love with it.
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