Plan your mezzanine floor

It is accurate enough to tell you whether a mezzanine is worth pursuing in your building, and no more than that. It works from the floor area you want, how many decks you want stacked, and the clear height you have, using the standard proportions a storage mezzanine needs. It cannot see your slab, your sprinklers, the columns already in the room or how your forklifts move, and all four change what will actually fit. Treat the answer as a reason to have the conversation rather than as a design.

Yes, where the building is tall enough. Stacking decks is the cheapest way to add a lot of floor area, and multi-tier mezzanines are common in picking and e-commerce operations. Height is the limit: every deck needs working space beneath it plus the thickness of the floor itself, so each extra level costs a full storey of clear height. Fire strategy and escape routes also get more involved with each tier, which is worth establishing early rather than late.

Because they are different things. A cost is what you need in order to decide whether to go further, so it is given up front and in the open. A specification is the work: steel sizes, column grids and floor build-ups come out of a survey and a structural design, both of which take real time to do properly and neither of which can be guessed from three measurements. The detail follows once there is a project.

No. It is a range, and it is meant to stay a range. It assumes a sound slab, ordinary access to the building and a rectangular floor, and it covers the structure, the deck, installation, staircases and edge protection, fire protection and the building regulations work. It cannot include what nobody has looked at yet: a slab that needs strengthening, sprinklers or services in the way, or anything building control asks for once it sees the drawings. A survey is what turns the range into a fixed price, and it is free.

As a working minimum you need about 5.4 metres of clear height inside: roughly 2.4 metres underneath, 2.4 metres above, and around 600mm for the thickness of the floor itself. If forklifts need to work beneath the floor rather than just people, the space underneath has to grow and so does the total. Measure to the lowest obstruction, because sprinklers, lights and roof steelwork all eat into what is really available.

Not on this page: this tool covers mezzanine floors only. Racking and shelving have their own configurator, the storage configurator, which lays out runs of bays on the floorspace you have and answers the same fit and budget questions for them. The two tools work the same way, and each links to the other.

Then the configurator is the wrong tool and a site survey is the right one. Low ceilings, poor floors, tight access, sprinklers in awkward places and columns in the middle of the room all change what will fit. A survey is free, so finding out costs nothing.