How to Adjust an Office Chair, in the Order That Matters

Most people adjust an office chair once, on the day it arrives, in the wrong order, and then never touch it again. The result is a chair with eight adjustments set to the factory defaults and one seat height chosen because it felt about right while standing next to it.

The order below takes about nine minutes. It matters because each adjustment changes the reference point for the next one, so doing them in the wrong sequence means doing several of them twice.

Before you start

Two things.

Sit in it properly. Shoes on if you wear them, at your actual desk, with your keyboard where you use it. A chair adjusted in the middle of a room is adjusted for the middle of a room.

Find every lever first. Reach under the seat and along both sides and count them. Most task chairs have between four and eight adjustments and most owners have found two. The Branch Ergonomic Chair advertises eight points of adjustment: 3D removable armrests, height, tilt, tilt tension, seat depth, and a height-adjustable removable lumbar rest. If you own something in that class and have only ever touched the height lever, you have been using a fraction of the chair.

Step 1: Seat height, set from the elbow

Not from the knee, and not by feel.

Sit with your feet flat and raise or lower the seat until your forearms are parallel to the floor when your hands are on the keyboard, with your elbows somewhere between 90 and 120 degrees and your upper arms hanging close to your body.

That is the height. It is decided by your desk, not by your leg length, and that is exactly why the next step exists.

Step 2: Feet, because step 1 probably lifted them

Look down. If your feet are not flat on the floor with your thighs roughly parallel to the ground, you need something under them.

This is not optional. A leg dangling from the hip puts its weight on the front edge of the seat pan, and the body responds by rolling the pelvis backward, which flattens the lumbar curve and rounds everything above it. Every remaining adjustment on this page assumes a supported pelvis.

Books work. Whether a purpose-made footrest is worth buying has a thirty-second test behind it.

If your feet were already flat and your elbow height is nowhere near the desk, you have a desk problem rather than a chair problem, and the arithmetic is short.

Step 3: Seat depth

Slide the seat pan forward or back, or slide yourself, until you can fit two to three fingers between the front edge of the seat and the back of your knee while your back is against the backrest.

Too deep and you will slide forward to relieve the pressure behind the knees, which takes you off the backrest entirely and makes every remaining adjustment pointless. Too shallow and you lose thigh support.

Not every chair has this adjustment. If yours does not and the pan is too deep, a lumbar cushion that effectively moves the backrest forward is the workaround.

Step 4: Lumbar height

Slide the lumbar support up or down until its apex meets the deepest part of your lower back curve, roughly at belt-line height.

Reach behind you and feel for it. If the firm contact is between your shoulder blades it is too high, and it is arching your mid-back rather than supporting your pelvis. What the support is actually for is worth two minutes if you have never thought about it, because the height matters far more than the firmness.

If there is no lumbar adjustment, this is the step where you find out whether the fixed bulge in the backrest happens to land at your curve. For a lot of bodies it does not.

Step 5: Backrest angle and tilt tension

Two separate things on most chairs, and both are usually left at the factory setting.

Angle. Unlock the recline. Sitting bolt upright at 90 degrees is not the target and never was. A slight recline transfers some of your upper body weight into the backrest, which is what the backrest is for.

Tilt tension. This is the knob, usually a large wheel under the seat, that sets how hard you have to push to recline. Set it so you can lean back with a normal amount of effort and the chair comes back up with you when you sit forward. Too loose and you fall backward every time you relax. Too tight and the recline never gets used, which is the more common failure by a wide margin.

Some chairs remove this decision. The Branch Multitask Chair uses a weight-activated tilt that responds to your body weight with no manual tension adjustment at all, which is one fewer thing to get wrong and one fewer thing to tune.

Step 6: Armrests, last

They come last because everything above them has just moved.

Set the height so your shoulders are relaxed and your forearms rest lightly with the elbows at the same 90 to 120 degrees. The armrests should support the weight of your forearms without lifting your shoulders.

If your chair has 3D armrests, move them in as well as up. Armrests set wide push the elbows away from the body, which is the same shoulder abduction problem that a badly placed mouse causes.

And if the armrests stop the chair sliding under the desk, take them off. A chair you cannot get close to the desk forces you to reach forward, and reaching forward beats any armrest benefit.

Step	Set it from	The mistake
1. Seat height	Your elbow at the keyboard	Setting it from knee angle, which ignores the desk
2. Feet	Flat contact, thighs parallel	Skipping it, which rolls the pelvis and undoes steps 3 to 6
3. Seat depth	Two to three fingers behind the knee	Leaving a deep pan, so you slide off the backrest all day
4. Lumbar height	The deepest point of your curve	Assuming the factory position is anywhere near it
5. Recline and tension	A slight recline you actually use	Locking it upright, which is the most common setting in any office
6. Armrests	Relaxed shoulders, elbows in	Setting them first, then having to redo them

The check, two weeks later

Sit down and run through the list again without adjusting anything, just noticing. Two things usually drift.

Seat height, because people raise the chair to see a screen that is too low. If you have crept upward, the problem is the monitor, and the published targets will tell you by how much.

Tilt tension, because a spring that felt right on day one feels stiff by week three. This is normal and it is a five-second fix.

The rest should hold. A chair set up properly is set up until your desk changes.

Questions people actually ask

What order should I adjust an office chair in?

Seat height first, set from your elbow at the keyboard. Then feet, seat depth, lumbar height, recline and tension, and armrests last. Each step changes the reference point for the next one, so doing armrests first means doing them twice.

Should I sit upright at 90 degrees?

No. Unlocking the recline and sitting with a slight lean transfers some upper body weight into the backrest, which is what the backrest is there for. A backrest locked bolt upright is the most common misconfiguration in any office.

How do I know if my seat is too deep?

You should be able to fit two to three fingers between the front edge of the seat and the back of your knee while your back is against the backrest. Too deep and you will slide forward to relieve the pressure, which takes you off the lumbar support entirely.

Where should armrests be?

High enough to take the weight of your forearms without lifting your shoulders, and pulled in rather than set wide. Wide armrests push the elbows away from the body, which loads the upper trapezius in the same way a distant mouse does.

My chair has no lumbar adjustment. What do I do?

Feel for where the fixed bulge lands. If it is at your belt line, you are fine. If it is between the shoulder blades, a separate cushion positioned at the right height is the workaround, and the failure mode to watch for is one that migrates down the backrest during the day.

Sources

• OSHA Computer Workstations eTool: chairs, for seat height, depth, backrest and armrest targets.
• OSHA Computer Workstations eTool: working postures, for the 90 to 120 degree elbow angle.
• Adjustment counts and tilt mechanisms from the Branch Ergonomic Chair (branchfurniture.com) and Branch Multitask Chair (branchfurniture.com) specification pages, read May 2026.