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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Home office

Acoustic panels for home offices: the complete guide

What makes home offices noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Clear video calls and a calmer room to think in. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In home offices the main sound sources are your own voice, speakers and keyboard, and the most common complaints are that your voice sounds hollow on video calls, the microphone picks up room echo, and that typing and chair noise bounce around the room.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical home office of 12 × 10 ft with a 8 ft ceiling has a volume of about 960 ft³. With typical surfaces (drywall, a rug and some furniture), its echo time is about 0.80 seconds. The target for home offices is 0.45 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for home offices.

The recommended starting point

For a home office like the one above, we suggest about 7 24 × 48 in rectangular panel, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.43 s. That is roughly 16% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for home offices is about 85% on walls and 15% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our home office solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for home offices.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for home offices