Anyone who loves a bargain will happily spend forty minutes comparing cashback sites to save £1.50 on a pair of socks. So it might come as a surprise that the best money a bargain hunter can spend on working from home isn’t a fancy laptop or a ring light. It’s a chair. A proper, boring, sensible chair.
Thrilling stuff, admittedly. But anyone working from home who’s sitting on a dining chair or a wobbly stool right now could save themselves a few months of grumbling about their back.
Why cheap seating is usually a false economy
The maths is what tends to make it click. Say a decent chair costs £250 and gets used for six hours a day, 250 days a year. That’s 1,500 hours, which works out at roughly 17p an hour in the first year, and it keeps getting cheaper the longer the chair lasts. Compare that with the cost of a physio appointment, or the cost of losing a week’s work because turning your head has become impossible.
Back pain isn’t a personality trait, although plenty of people try to make it one for a while. For anyone spending most of the day at a desk, ergonomic office chairs are one of the few things money can buy that genuinely pay for themselves in comfort. The whole point is that they adjust, so the chair fits your body instead of you contorting to fit the chair.
What to look for (without getting sucked in by the extras)
A chair with fourteen levers and a heated seat isn’t necessary. These are the features that actually matter:
- Seat height adjustment, so your feet rest flat and your knees sit at about a right angle
- Lumbar support that follows the curve of your lower back
- Armrests that move, so your shoulders can relax
- Seat depth adjustment, which helps if you’re shorter or taller than average
- A breathable fabric if you run warm, because nobody wants a sweaty back in July
Everything else is a bonus. If a chair ticks those boxes, it’s doing the important work.
Can you claim it as an expense?
Self-employed people who work from home should find out whether their furniture counts as a business expense. The rules depend on individual circumstances, so it’s best to check HMRC’s guidance or have a quick chat with an accountant rather than relying on a blog post. But it’s a question that costs nothing to ask, and a lot of freelancers never do.
The spare seat problem
Most home workers end up with more than one place to sit and work. There’s the desk, and then there’s the second spot where the laptop ends up when the desk gets tiresome, or when somebody else needs to borrow it for homework. If that second spot is a hard kitchen stool, the damage will show by Friday.
When shopping for extra office chairs for a spare desk, the same rules apply as before: adjustable, supportive and tough enough to survive teenagers. The spend doesn’t have to match what went on the main chair, but anything that looks lovely and has the back support of a cereal box is best avoided.
Getting a bargain without getting it wrong
Nobody should be told off for hunting for a deal. Second-hand chairs on Facebook Marketplace and eBay can be brilliant, and plenty of them have barely been used. The trick is to test before buying:
- Sit on it for at least ten minutes, because anything feels fine for thirty seconds
- Check the height lever works smoothly and actually holds your weight
- Make sure the back tilts and locks without slipping
- Look for sagging foam or cracks in the base, which are harder to fix than they look
If testing in person isn’t possible, check the return policy before parting with any money.
The desk bits that make it all work
A chair can only do so much on its own. The screen should sit at about eye level, roughly an arm’s length away, so you’re not hunched over like a question mark. For laptop users, a stand and a separate keyboard cost very little and save a lot of neck ache. Elbows should sit at about 90 degrees when typing, and decent light helps, ideally from a window to the side of the screen rather than behind it.
Then there’s the boring stuff that nobody wants to hear: get up every hour, have a stretch, drink some water and look out of the window for a minute. Few people manage it every day, but most know they should.
Was it worth it?
Absolutely. More work gets done, the day ends with far less of that folded-into-a-suitcase feeling, and Thursday afternoons stop being something to dread. It’s not the most exciting purchase going, and it won’t get any likes on Instagram. But for anyone working from home for the long haul, sorting out the seat is one of the most sensible things to do, and for once, spending a bit more really does save money in the end.