How to Plan a Company Offsite: A Week-by-Week Timeline
A full-day company offsite for 20 to 60 people realistically takes about twelve weeks to plan: roughly four to fix the date, the budget and the headcount, four to book a venue and design the day around it, and four to collect what you cannot guess and brief everyone properly. Published planning guides put the floor at 90 days for a mid-size group and four to six months where people are travelling in. Below is what belongs in each of those blocks, what an away day actually costs per head in the UK, and the HMRC rule that quietly decides whether the whole thing ends up on someone’s P11D.
How far ahead you actually need to start
Twelve weeks is the middle of a range, not a law. What sets your real lead time is usually not the venue.
| What you’re planning | Realistic lead time | What actually sets it |
|---|---|---|
| Half-day away day, local venue, one team | 4 to 6 weeks | Room availability |
| Full-day offsite, 20 to 60 people | 8 to 12 weeks | Diary clashes, not venues |
| Offsite with an overnight stay | 12 to 16 weeks | Bedroom blocks and travel budget |
| Whole company, people travelling in from several sites | 4 to 6 months | Rail and flight prices, plus budget sign-off |
The binding constraint is almost always diaries and approval, not availability. A decent regional venue will usually take a booking six weeks out. Getting forty people to agree on a Thursday, and getting a finance director to approve a five-figure number, will not move that fast.
Twelve weeks out: the date, the budget and the headcount
Three decisions unlock everything else, and none of them are about venues.
Fix the date before you look at a single venue, and run the poll backwards. Do not ask which week suits people, because every week suits somebody. Ask which weeks are impossible, then choose from what survives. Avoid the last fortnight of any quarter if there is a sales team, and check school holiday dates for the regions your people actually live in, which differ across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Get the budget approved as a figure per head, not a total. Headcount moves right up to the week before. A total gets renegotiated every time someone joins or leaves; a per-head figure with an expected range does not.
Decide who is invited, and whether attending is genuinely optional. This sounds like a soft question. It is not: it changes the tax treatment, it changes whether part-time and shift staff can realistically come, and it changes what you can ask of people who have caring responsibilities outside working hours.
Write those three down and circulate them before anything else happens. Almost every offsite that goes wrong in week eleven went wrong here, in week one, when one of the three was left implicit.
What a UK away day actually costs per head
Most venues quote a day delegate rate (DDR): a per-person price covering the room, refreshments through the day and lunch. It is the number to plan against, because it scales with headcount the way your budget does.
| City | Day delegate rate, per person | Meeting room hire | Full-day venue hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | £45 to £150 | from £50/hr | from £3,000/day |
| Cambridge | £55 to £110 | from £45/hr | from £1,800/day |
| Oxford | £50 to £100 | from £40/hr | from £1,500/day |
| Edinburgh | £40 to £85 | from £35/hr | from £2,500/day |
| Manchester | £35 to £80 | from £30/hr | from £2,000/day |
| Bristol | £38 to £75 | from £30/hr | from £1,000/day |
| Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool | £35 to £70 | from £25/hr | from £1,200/day |
| Leeds, Newcastle | £32 to £65 | from £22/hr | from £800/day |
| Cardiff | £35 to £65 | from £25/hr | from £1,000/day |
| Belfast, Sheffield | £30 to £60 | from £20/hr | from £700/day |
UK figures from Jigsaw Conferences’ 2026 UK venue pricing benchmark, compiled June 2026. These are typical advertised ranges, so treat the bottom of each band as negotiable and the top as a central-London or premium-brand number.
A DDR buys you the room, the tea and coffee, the biscuits nobody eats and lunch. It does not usually buy you AV beyond a screen and a clicker, an evening meal, a bar tab, or a breakout room. Ask for those as line items before you compare two quotes, because a £48 DDR with £600 of AV bolted on is not cheaper than a £62 one that includes it.
For an overnight, ask for the 24-hour rate instead: DDR plus dinner, bed and breakfast. And budget travel separately and honestly. For a company with people in three cities, travel is routinely the largest single line, and it is the one that gets estimated from the London office’s postcode and then blows up.
The £150 rule that decides whether your offsite is taxable
This is the part almost no offsite guide mentions, and it is the one that generates an awkward email from payroll in March.
The working part of an offsite is not a taxable benefit. The venue counts as a temporary workplace, so travel, accommodation and subsistence that you reimburse for a genuine working day are a business expense, not something employees get taxed on.
The social part is treated differently. HMRC’s exemption for annual parties and similar functions covers up to £150 per head per tax year, and only where the event is annual and open to staff generally. Separate events per department or per site are fine, as long as everyone can attend one of them.
Three details do the damage:
- It is an exemption, not an allowance. HMRC’s own guidance is explicit that where a function falls outside it, employees are chargeable on the full cost per head, not just the excess over £150. A dinner that lands at £158 a head is taxable on all £158.
- The £150 is shared across the whole tax year. A summer offsite dinner and the Christmas party come out of the same limit, in aggregate.
- Cost per head means total cost divided by attendees, including VAT and including transport and accommodation provided for the social element.
The practical move is simple: cost the working day and the social evening separately from the start, and know the per-head number for the evening before you sign anything. If it is close to £150, that is a conversation with your finance team while you can still change the booking, not after. The current rules are on GOV.UK under expenses and benefits: social functions and parties, and anything borderline is worth putting to your accountant rather than guessing.
Eight weeks out: book the venue, then build the day around it
Book once you have a date and a headcount range. Two questions to ask before signing: what is the release date for provisional space, and what are the cancellation terms at four weeks, two weeks and one week. Both will be in the contract; neither will be volunteered.
Then design the day, and design less of it than you want to. Overpacking is the failure mode most offsite facilitators warn about: six sessions of forty minutes produces six surface conversations and no decisions. Two or three properly resourced sessions produce something you can act on.
Three things worth being strict about:
- Put a named owner on every session. Not a team, a person. “Product” does not prepare a session; a named human does.
- Build in transit time between rooms and real breaks between sessions. Twenty minutes of nothing after lunch is a legitimate agenda item, not slack to be reclaimed.
- Send the pre-work. One page: the question you are actually there to answer, the numbers everyone needs in their head, and two prompts to respond to in writing beforehand. Skip it and the first session is spent getting to a shared starting point instead of using one.
Six weeks out: collect what you cannot guess
Everything in this block is information that only the attendee has, and that gets expensive if you assume it.
Dietary requirements, with a deadline and a named person. A Slack thread asking “any allergies?” is not collection. Caterers need final numbers by category, and “vegan” and “coeliac” are not the same request.
Access requirements, asked directly. Step-free access, a hearing loop, a quiet room, seating rather than standing sessions, and whether the venue’s step-free route is actually the main entrance or a service corridor at the back. Ask the venue too, and ask specifically rather than accepting “yes, we’re accessible.”
Travel and getting home. Who is coming from where, who has a school pickup, and who cannot do an overnight because of caring responsibilities. If the answer for several people is “I can’t stay”, that is a design constraint on the evening, not an individual problem for them to solve.
The expenses policy, stated up front with the actual limits. People will not ask what they can claim for dinner. They will either overspend and feel awkward, or underspend and resent it.
Set one deadline for all four, then chase once. Half of it arrives after the deadline regardless, which is why the deadline sits two weeks before the caterer’s, not on the same day. If you are wondering how to get all of this in front of people on the day itself, that is the job the corporate event app post covers in detail.
Two weeks out: send the thing people will actually read
Send one link, not five attachments, and definitely not a PDF. The reality of an offsite is somebody standing on a platform at 7:40am trying to remember which entrance to use, and a PDF on a phone is close to useless at that moment.
What has to be in it:
| What | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Full address with postcode, and the nearest station | This is the single most re-read line |
| Arrival window and start time, stated separately | “9:30 start” and “doors from 9:00” are different instructions |
| The shape of the day with times | People plan their trains around the end time, not the start |
| What to bring and what to wear | Prevents twelve identical DMs |
| Food, including what’s covered | The second most re-read line |
| A name and a mobile number for the day | Someone will be lost or late |
Keep the detail somewhere it can be updated, because some of it will change. Republishing a link is instant; a re-sent attachment means everyone now has two versions and no idea which is current.
The last week, and the morning itself
Venues usually want final numbers five to seven working days out, and that number is what you are charged for whether or not everyone turns up. Confirm it on their deadline, not before, and know whether you can add people afterwards and at what cost.
Send one short message the day before: start time, address, transport notes, weather if it is relevant to anything outdoors, and the contact number again. Short enough to read on a phone in a queue.
On the day, assume the schedule is the thing that changes. A session overruns, a speaker’s train is delayed, lunch is late. Everything else you sent stays true; the running order does not. Whatever you use to publish the day needs to be something you can edit at 11am and have everyone see the new version, which is the one argument against printing the agenda and handing it out at the door.
The week after: the part almost everyone skips
An offsite is judged on what happens in the following fortnight, and most of that is decided in the first 48 hours while people still remember what was agreed.
- Send the outputs within two days. Owners and dates, not themes. “Improve onboarding” is not an output; “Priya, first draft of the new starter checklist, 3 October” is.
- Ask two questions, not a survey. What was worth the day, and what would you cut. A ten-question form is more work to answer, so fewer people answer it, and the ones who do tick middle boxes.
- Say where the photos go, and by when. People took them. Left alone they stay on individual phones, and the one group photo everyone wanted disappears into a camera roll.
Quick answers
How far in advance should you plan a company offsite? Around twelve weeks for a full-day offsite of 20 to 60 people, four to six months if people are travelling in from several sites.
What does a UK away day cost per person? Day delegate rates run roughly £30 to £80 per person outside London and £45 to £150 in London, covering room, refreshments and lunch.
Is a company offsite a taxable benefit? The working part is a business expense, but the social element falls under HMRC’s £150 per head annual functions exemption, and exceeding it makes the full amount taxable.
Can employees be required to attend an offsite? If it falls inside contracted working hours at a temporary workplace, generally yes; if it runs into evenings, weekends or an overnight stay, that is outside normal hours and needs agreement rather than instruction, so settle it before you set the date.
How long should an offsite agenda be? Two or three substantial sessions per day, with real breaks. Packing in six short ones reliably produces less.
What should you send attendees beforehand? One link with the address, arrival and start times, the day’s shape, food, what to bring and a contact number, sent about two weeks ahead.
The countdown checklist
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 12 weeks | Date poll (ask which weeks are impossible), per-head budget approved, invite list and whether attendance is optional |
| 10 weeks | Shortlist venues, request DDR and 24-hour quotes with AV itemised |
| 8 weeks | Book, note the release date and cancellation terms, draft the agenda |
| 7 weeks | Cost the social element per head against the £150 exemption |
| 6 weeks | Collect dietary, access, travel and overnight constraints, with one deadline |
| 5 weeks | Confirm session owners, commission the pre-work |
| 4 weeks | Confirm catering by category, book travel |
| 2 weeks | Send the joining details as one link, send the pre-work |
| 1 week | Final numbers to the venue, run through the AV list |
| Day before | Short reminder: start time, address, transport, contact number |
| Day after | Outputs with owners and dates |
| Week after | Two-question feedback, photos collected and shared |