A task chair is bought once and used for years. The longer it stays in use, the better it is for the environment and for your budget. This guide covers what to check before you order, whether you're furnishing an office, an NHS building or a university. If you're buying specifically for a campus, our guide to durable university task chairs covers what student use asks of a chair.
Buy for the whole life of the chair
FIRA benchmarks an average task chair at around 72 kgCO2e. Most of that is emitted in making it, before anyone sits in it. Every extra year a chair stays in use spreads that carbon over a longer life, so the first thing I'd ask about any chair is how long it can be kept working.
That's why we look after furniture long after it's installed. Everything we supply carries a 10-year supported warranty, and for furniture with no moving parts we extend that to 20 years, with maintenance included. At UCL's Engineering Building we furnished five floors in 2005, and we still look after them today.
Can it be repaired?
The parts that wear on a task chair are predictable: castors, arm pads, gas lifts, seat and back cushions, and the mechanism. A chair worth buying lets you replace each of them. Ask how long the manufacturer guarantees spare parts; some commit to ten years. Chairs often stay in use long after the model stops being made. We look after chairs that are no longer in production, and they still need parts. Some manufacturers now supply kits so worn parts can be replaced on site, without the chairs leaving the building.
Can it be recovered?
Look for covers that aren't glued into place. A chair put together without glue can be taken apart in minutes, so it can be re-upholstered instead of replaced.
On a task chair pilot, re-upholstery kept 92% of the components, saved 92% of the carbon and cost 60% less than a new chair: 66 kgCO2e saved on a single chair. At UCL's Chandler House, recovering 80 chairs cost £90 each against £160 to replace them. There's more on how it works on our re-upholstery page.
Suppliers use three words for this, and they mean different things. Repair fixes what has failed. Refurbishment is selective, such as recovering a seat. Remanufacture restores a chair as close to new as possible, usually by its original maker. Two of the largest manufacturers now remanufacture or resell their own used chairs with a five-year warranty, but neither programme is widely available in the UK.
Read the carbon figure carefully
An Environmental Product Declaration, or EPD, gives a chair's carbon footprint, and a good manufacturer will have one. Before you compare two, check what each figure covers. Sedus publishes a full life cycle assessment for each of its chairs: its se:air mesh task chair comes to 53.6 kgCO2e from raw materials to the factory gate, and 73.5 once end-of-life processing is added. Against the 72 kg benchmark, the same chair is either well below average or right on it, depending on which stages are counted. So make sure both figures cover the same stages.
Look too at recycled content, whether the foams are free of CFCs and HFCs, and whether plastic parts over 50g are marked with their material so they can be recycled at the end. Our supplier audit asks every new manufacturer about all of these.
Check the certificate
If your project is assessed under Ska Rating 2.0, task seating has to be designed for disassembly, and FISP (S) certification of the manufacturer is a recognised route to compliance. Ska 2.0 was published in September 2025, and FISP (S) was introduced the same year. FISP certification runs on a two-year cycle, so many manufacturers will probably move to the S at their next renewal. Expect this to change over the next year or two.
You can check where a manufacturer stands yourself: find it on the FISP register, open its certificate, and read the version line. It should say (S) Manufacturer. For timber components, ask for FSC or PEFC certification. There's more on Ska on our sustainable office design page.
Read the warranty properly
A headline warranty is usually the maximum, and the parts that move are often covered for less. It's common for the frame to carry ten years while the mechanism, gas lift and upholstery carry five, and for normal wear and tear to be excluded.
Compare warranties on hours of use, not just years. A ten-year warranty for a single shift covers roughly 21,000 hours. A five-year warranty for 24-hour use covers roughly 44,000, about twice as much. It makes the biggest difference in buildings that are open around the clock, like hospitals and control rooms. Check the specific model too, because cover varies within a manufacturer's range.
Ask what happens at the end
Well-made chairs with parts support keep their value. Premium task chairs have an active second-hand market, and cheap ones rarely do, because there isn't enough chair to justify recovering. Before you buy, ask whether the supplier will take chairs back, and whether they'll be reused, recovered or recycled. Ska 2.0 asks for at least half of the existing chairs on a project to be reused or returned through a closed-loop scheme. If you're refurbishing later, the chairs you buy now can count towards that.
Questions to ask your supplier
- How long are spare parts available, and which parts can be replaced on site?
- Are the covers glued, and can the chair be re-upholstered?
- Is there an EPD, and which life-cycle stages does its figure cover?
- Does the manufacturer's FISP certificate say (S) Manufacturer?
- What does the warranty cover for the mechanism, gas lift and upholstery, and for how many hours a day?
- Will you take the chairs back, and what will happen to them?
If you're choosing chairs for a project and want help with any of these, we're happy to go through the options with you. There's more on how we plan furniture into a project in our guide to FF&E procurement.
Correct at the time of writing, September 2026. Ska Rating and FISP are both changing, and we'll update this guide as they do.