AcousticPanels.ca
USDYou’re in the United States store. Switch to Canada. Sign in Cart0

Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Open-plan office

Acoustic panels for open offices: the complete guide

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

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

Lower background chatter so teams can focus and talk. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In open offices the main sound sources are conversations, phone calls and equipment, and the most common complaints are that nearby phone calls are distracting, the room gets louder as people raise their voices, and that there is no quiet place to think.

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 open office of 60 × 40 ft with a 10 ft ceiling has a volume of about 24,000 ft³. With hard and bare surfaces (tile, concrete, glass and little soft furniture), its echo time is about 3.46 seconds. The target for open offices is 0.60 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 open offices.

The recommended starting point

For a open office like the one above, we suggest about 143 96 × 12 in rectangular baffle, 2 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.60 s. That is roughly 57% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for open offices is about 30% on walls and 70% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our open-plan 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 open 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 open offices