A staff changing room is mandatory when workers have to wear specific work clothing, and in a hotel that almost always covers the kitchen, housekeeping, laundry and maintenance. The locker is personal, one for every employee on the payroll rather than one per shift, it must lock with a key held by the worker, and it must allow civilian clothes to be kept separate from work clothes. The reference is Annex IV of the Italian consolidated law on workplace safety (Testo Unico sulla sicurezza sul lavoro), point 1.12, and the specific case always needs checking with a health and safety consultant and the local health authority (ASL) with jurisdiction.
Contents
When it’s actually required
The law ties the obligation to two conditions: that the worker has to wear specific work clothing, and that for reasons of health or decency they can’t be asked to change elsewhere. In a hotel with a restaurant, the first condition is met from the outset for kitchen staff, who have a dedicated jacket, trousers and footwear, and for housekeeping staff who wear a uniform. A receptionist in a suit and tie is a more debatable case, but in practice almost every property still provides somewhere to leave a coat and bag, which is in any case what the law requires even where a full changing room isn’t needed.
The room must be of adequate capacity, easily accessible, ventilated, lit, protected from the weather, heated in the cold season and fitted with seating. Those are descriptions, not numbers, and that’s exactly the point that trips up hoteliers at their first site inspection: national law doesn’t set a square-metre figure per employee. The numbers come from local health authority guidance and municipal hygiene regulations, which can vary from province to province, and they need reading before the design is signed off.
Anyone renovating often runs into a second obligation, independent and stricter: hygiene regulations for staff handling food, which in many local jurisdictions require a dedicated changing room for the kitchen, a toilet with an anteroom, and a washbasin that isn’t hand-operated. This is why, in a property with a restaurant, changing rooms often end up split into two separate groups.
Lockers: the double compartment and the sizes
The idea behind the double compartment is simple and important: a soiled work uniform shouldn’t touch the coat a worker goes home in. A locker with two vertical compartments divided by a partition, both accessible from the same door or from two doors side by side, solves this in most cases. In dirty processes or those involving hazardous substances, the rule tightens and calls for genuinely separate cabinets for work clothing and personal clothing, meaning two units rather than two compartments. Which of the two situations applies to your kitchen or your laundry is determined by the risk assessment, not by a supplier’s catalogue.
The locker must be washable, disinfectable and capable of being treated against pests. In practice that means epoxy powder-coated steel sheet for dry areas, resin or stainless steel where there’s moisture, meaning next to showers and in the laundry. Melamine-faced chipboard in a changing room with showers lasts two seasons before it swells at the lower edges.
The other features that matter are a sloped top, which stops dust and boxes piling up on top of the lockers, feet that lift the base 15 centimetres off the floor so it can be washed underneath, ventilation slots on the door and back panel, and provision for a padlock or personal lock. A locking mechanism the worker controls isn’t an accessory: it’s explicitly required.
Reference sizes for a single column are 30-40 centimetres wide, 50 deep and 180 tall, plus the feet. Thirty centimetres is enough for a uniform, but with a winter jacket and a motorcycle helmet it gets tight, and in mountain properties it’s worth moving up to 40. Depth under 45 centimetres forces jacket shoulders to fold. Inside there should be a crossbar for hangers, a high shelf for a cap or helmet, and a low shelf or separate base for work shoes, which shouldn’t rest on top of clothing.
Stacked two- or three-tier lockers save space and are popular for seasonal staff, but a 60-centimetre-tall compartment won’t hold a hanging coat. They work for a summer seaside property, much less well for a hotel open all year round.
How much space is needed
Locker numbers are worked out from total headcount, not from how many people are on site at once. A 40-room hotel with a restaurant has, on average, between 15 and 22 people among permanent, seasonal and part-time staff, and each one needs their own locker even if only six are on site at that moment. The room’s floor area, on the other hand, is sized on the maximum number present at the same time during a shift change, which is when those coming off shift and those starting overlap in the changing room.
| Rooms | Staff on payroll | Total lockers | Changing room area (one per gender) | Indicative showers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| up to 20 | 8-12 | 10-14 | 5-7 m² | 1 per room |
| 21-40 | 15-22 | 18-26 | 8-11 m² | 1 per room |
| 41-70 | 25-38 | 30-44 | 12-16 m² | 2 per room |
| 71-120 | 45-70 | 50-80 | 18-26 m² | 2-3 per room |
| over 120 | over 70 | over 80 | 30 m² or more, with separate rooms per department | as assessed |
The criterion most commonly used by local health authorities starts at 1.2-1.5 m² per person present at the same time up to around ten staff, with roughly 1 m² for each additional person, but this is guidance, not a national rule. The number of showers and toilets is determined the same way, based on the risk assessment and local hygiene regulations, with a rough order of magnitude of one shower for every ten staff in roles that require one.
Anyone wanting to check their own headcount before sizing the room should start from the actual numbers per department, factoring in how many rooms a housekeeper covers in your property and how the rest of the housekeeping team is structured. In a seasonal property the number swings considerably between high and low season, and lockers should be sized on the peak.
For the room’s geometry, the maths is simple: a row of 40-centimetre lockers takes up 0.4 linear metres per head, the bench needs 40 centimetres of depth, and the aisle between two facing rows shouldn’t go below 120 centimetres if there are benches in between. A changing room with two 3.20-metre rows, so sixteen lockers, fits into a room of 3.20 by 3.00 metres, just under 10 m².
Benches, showers, facilities
Seating is explicitly required and isn’t optional. The bench should be 35-40 centimetres deep and 45 tall, with 60-70 centimetres of linear length per person present at the same time. Benches with hooks on the backrest are handy but tend to become the spot where a uniform hangs all night, so in a small changing room a plain bench is the better choice.
The floor needs to be non-slip and washable, with a rating suited to wet areas in the shower zone, and sloped towards a drain so it can be hosed down. Walls should be finished in washable material up to two metres in height. The room needs continuous air changes, mechanical if there are no windows, sized so moisture doesn’t linger: a changing room with four damp uniforms and no extractor is recognisable by its smell as soon as the door opens, after a month.
Showers, where needed, require hot and cold water, means of washing and drying, and a dry area to set down clean clothes. A shower tray with a raised threshold is the wrong choice: flush to the floor with a trapped drain is what cleans easily and doesn’t trip anyone. The temperature of domestic hot water also carries weight for legionella prevention, a real issue in showers used intermittently: the protocol should be written together with the maintenance contractor and included among the checks for seasonal reopening, because a system left idle for three months needs flushing through before showers go back into service.
Men and women
The regulation requires separate changing rooms for the two sexes, or separate use of the same room. The second option exists and is legitimate, but in a hotel it’s almost impractical: kitchen and housekeeping shifts overlap, and an arrangement based on time bands holds up only until a shift runs late. Two rooms, even small ones, is the solution that causes no problems at the first inspection.
In the smallest properties, where two rooms won’t fit, a single changing room with individually lockable cubicles for changing can be considered, but it’s a solution to discuss with a health and safety consultant and put in writing in the risk assessment document, not improvised. It falls among the hotelier’s obligations as an employer, and responsibility for that choice remains theirs.
It’s also worth building in room to grow from the start. A room with twelve lockers in a property that has eleven staff is already full the day you take on a twelfth person, and adding one more locker means removing a bench.
Where to put it
The changing room belongs on the service route, near the staff entrance and the clocking-in point, and from there it needs to reach the kitchen, laundry and service lift without ever crossing guest areas. A member of staff in uniform walking in through the lobby with a bag over their shoulder is the sign that no service route exists.
The most common location is in the basement next to the in-house laundry and the storeroom, and that makes sense because the drainage and extraction are already there. Two things need attention, though: basement rooms have their own requirements for height, ventilation and lighting that need checking case by case, and a changing room next to the laundry picks up heat and moisture that make good air changes essential.
If the changing room is far from the departments it serves, the travel time multiplies by the number of shifts and ends up inside labour costs, the heaviest line item among a hotel’s annual running costs. An extra thirty metres, four times a day, for twenty people, adds up to several hours a year that nobody puts in a budget.
In department terminology the changing room often appears as the staff room, and anyone working with international teams finds it useful to settle the terms alongside the rest of the department vocabulary from day one.
The inspection worth doing
Before opening, test the changing room with the maximum number of people who will actually be in there together, not with two. You’ll immediately see whether the aisle is too narrow, whether locker doors clash with each other when two rows open at the same time, whether there’s room to put a bag down while changing. Add to the list a check of the extractor running with the door closed and confirmation that hot water reaches the shower in under thirty seconds.
The other check worth doing concerns the key: if padlocks are personal, you need a procedure for cutting a padlock off when an employee leaves without returning it. If the locks are keyed with a master key system, you need a register of who holds it. These items sit well in the pre-opening checklist alongside the systems inspections.
Changing room lockers come in standard catalogue sizes, but in rooms carved out under a ramp or inside a narrow space, the columns never quite close flush against the walls and you lose twenty or thirty centimetres per side. We design bespoke locker units in-house for these situations and build them through a supply chain of selected Italian workshops, with a single point of contact from survey to inspection, applying the same construction standards we use for bedroom wardrobes to a room that still has to stay washable and moisture-resistant.
The guidance on this page is provided for general information. Checking the specific obligations, the number of showers and toilets, the floor areas and any exemptions that apply to your building is a matter for a health and safety consultant and the relevant local supervisory authority.
Frequently asked questions
Is a staff changing room mandatory in a hotel?
Yes, when workers have to wear specific work clothing and when, for reasons of health or decency, they can’t be asked to change elsewhere, a condition that in a hotel applies to the kitchen, housekeeping, laundry and maintenance. Where a changing room isn’t required, every worker must still have somewhere to store their own clothing. Assessing the specific case is a matter for the employer together with a health and safety consultant.
Do lockers need to have a double compartment?
The locker must allow civilian clothes to be kept separate from work clothes, and a double compartment is the standard way of meeting that requirement. In dirty processes or those involving hazardous substances, the rule calls for separate cabinets rather than two compartments in the same unit. Which situation applies is determined by the property’s risk assessment.
How many lockers does a hotel need?
One for every person on the payroll, not one per shift: the locker is personal and stays assigned even when the worker isn’t on duty. A 40-room hotel with a restaurant, which typically has between 15 and 22 staff among permanent, part-time and seasonal employees, installs 18 to 26, allowing a margin for growth. The room’s floor area, however, is calculated on the maximum number present at the same time during a shift change.
What size should a changing room locker be?
The most common single column measures 30-40 centimetres wide, 50 deep and 180 tall, with feet that lift the base 15 centimetres to allow washing underneath. Thirty centimetres is enough for a light uniform, while with winter jackets and helmets it’s worth moving up to 40. Inside, you need a hanging rail, a high shelf, and a separate low compartment for work shoes.
Can men and women use the same changing room?
The regulation calls for separate changing rooms for the two sexes, or separate use of the same room in distinct time bands. In a hotel the second option holds up poorly, because kitchen and housekeeping shifts overlap, so two rooms, even small ones, is the practical choice. Any alternative solution needs to be agreed with a health and safety consultant and recorded in the risk assessment document.
