Most enquiries for cinema and auditorium seating open with "what's your price per seat?" It is the wrong first question, and answering it honestly means slowing the buyer down. A fixed seat that fits the room and one that gets rejected at inspection cost almost the same to build — the difference is the seating plan, and that is where we start.
Row pitch is not a comfort preference
Row-to-row spacing carries a legal floor before it is ever a comfort choice. The minimum row-to-row dimension commonly cited is 760 mm, and in practice that is too tight — most layout guides push you to 850–900 mm so people are not climbing over knees. What actually matters at inspection is the clearway: the gap between the front edge of a tipped-up seat and the back of the seat in front. For traditional seating with aisles each side, the minimum passing clearway is around 300 mm. For continental seating (long rows, no centre aisle), it widens to roughly 400–500 mm because everyone exits sideways.
This is why the tip-up mechanism is not a frill. A gravity or spring tip-up buys back the clearway that lets a row meet code; a fixed cushion that does not lift forces a wider, more expensive row pitch and burns floor area you could have sold as seats.
Seat width, and the cost of getting it wrong at volume
Tipped seat depth typically sits in the 425–500 mm band, and back-to-back spacing in the 760–850 mm range — but those are starting points, not your spec. Send us seat width, seats per row, the row pitch and the rake of the floor. We would rather quote from a drawing than a catalogue page, because a mis-spec on 300 fixed seats is not a chair you quietly swap. It is a re-tool and a re-ship.
Sightlines: the rise nobody checks until it is built
The one calculation that separates a good hall from a frustrating one is the sightline rise. Designers take the distance from a seated person's eye to the top of their head as roughly 100–125 mm, and the floor rake has to deliver at least that much clearance per row so the row behind sees over the heads in front. We do not design your rake — your architect does — but the seat height we build to has to match it. Tell us the riser height per row and we set seat-to-floor accordingly, instead of shipping a standard seat that puts every second row staring at a scalp.
Aisles and seat count per row
One more constraint that drives the layout: under common building code (IBC), a row reaching one aisle is limited to about 7 seats, and a row between two aisles to about 14, before you are forced into a wider clear accessway. That rule decides how many seats fit a given width, which decides your total seat count, which decides your budget. We flag it early because buyers often size the order off a width measurement and forget the aisle math.
Armrests, cup-holders and the width they steal
One detail buyers underestimate is what the armrest does to your seat count. A shared armrest between two seats is narrow; an armrest with an integrated cup-holder is wider, and a fold-away writing tablet for a lecture hall widens the unit again. Across a long row those millimetres add up to a whole seat lost or gained, so we factor the armrest choice into the layout rather than bolting it on after. The same goes for end-of-row panels and aisle lights, which are fixed widths that eat into the usable run. If your brief includes cup-holders or tablets, tell us at the plan stage — adding them later either drops a seat per row or forces a re-pitch, and on fixed seating neither is a quiet change.
The practical ask is short: send a seating plan or even a rough sketch with dimensions and rake, and we will come back with a real per-seat build and count — not a number off a list. We build to ranked-seating patterns and testing can be arranged; more on the durability levels in our note on EN 12727 seating levels. Start at the contact page or read how a fixed-seating order runs through our OEM/ODM process.