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Tools
Measure the room rather than the table. Enter the space you have and we will give you the largest table that fits with room to pull a chair out, and what a table you are considering will really seat.
The space
A table you are considering (optional)
Enter the space you have, a table you are considering, or both.
Circulation is the first. A chair pulled out, with someone standing behind it, needs about 90cm from the table edge to the nearest wall or piece of furniture. Seventy-five centimetres works where nobody has to walk past a seated diner — one long side against a wall, say. Below that, someone is climbing over a chair every time they get up.
Place settings are the second. A comfortable setting is 60cm of table edge per person. Fifty-five is tight but workable, and below 50cm it stops being dinner and starts being a queue.
Rectangular tables lose their corners, which is where published seat counts get optimistic. The last 20cm at each end of a long side collides with whoever sits at the head, so a 180cm table has 140cm of usable edge per side, not 180cm. This calculator takes that off before counting.
A round table of the same capacity almost always takes less space than a rectangular one, because there are no corners to walk around and every seat has the same reach to the middle. If a rectangle will not fit a small dining room, that is the first thing to try rather than dropping a seat.