How Much Light Do You Need in a Room?

Finding the perfect lighting to go with your home decor and style is hard enough. So how do you know how many lumens you need? Let’s start with what lumens are. Lumens are technically defined by the amount of light per second. For our purposes let’s say lumens refers to how much light a fixture or bulb will give off.

Why is this important? Because you can get the most gorgeous lights but if they aren't producing enough light, you are going to have a hard time seeing in your home. Basically, if you don’t have enough lumens, you will be sitting in the dark.

A general rule of thumb is to multiply foot candles by your room’s square footage and convert that to lumens. For example, if you have a 100 square foot living room, multiply 10-20 foot candles per square foot and convert that to lumens. So you would need about 1000-2000 lumens for a 100 square foot living room. 

We recommend a certain amount of foot-candles per room. Scroll our chart below to see how many foot candles we recommend for each room.

Of course, you can always look at the lumens of a fixture or bulb you’ll be purchasing but you can also look at the watts. See our table below to see how lumens correlate to watts. Shop our bulbs here.

Hopefully, this helps! And as always, email us at cs@lightingdesign.com if you need help figuring out how many lumens you need.