The Complete Pendant Sizing Guide

Thinking of perking up your space with a pendant or two (or more)? Before you buy, it’s important that you know what size pendant you’ll need to get!

Knowing what you need before you buy ensures that your pendants will perfectly fit your room and reduces the chances of you needing to return your items.

Our pendant sizing guide helps you buy pendant lights with confidence!

First, think about where you want to put those pendants, because you’ll need to look at different things for different locations.

Pendant sizing over a kitchen island

A pretty popular use of pendants (say that 5 times fast) is over a kitchen island. Measure the width of your island in inches and subtract 12. This will give you a good maximum size for pendants to go over it.

Say you have an island that is 48 inches wide. 48 minus 12 is 36, so 36 is the maximum size per pendant.

We recommend hanging pendants about 18 inches to 2 feet apart, evenly spaced over your island. You most often see pendants used in groups of 2 or 3.

Hang your pendants between 28 and 34 inches above the island.

Pendant sizing in a room

A large pendant can be a great and stylish way to light your room! To get it sized right, first you need to measure your room’s length and width, both in feet. Then add those two numbers together to find a good size for a chandelier (in inches).

Let’s say your room is 10 feet by 10 feet. A 20-inch wide pendant will work nicely there.

Also, find an ideal height for your pendant. Do that by taking your room’s height in feet and then multiplying it by both 2.5 and 3. This gives you a range of pendant heights to consider.

If that 10 by 10 room of yours has a 12 foot ceiling, then your height range for a pendant would be 30 to 36 inches.

Hang the pendant 7 feet above the floor. If you have a very high ceiling, use longer lengths of downrod or chain to make sure the pendant isn’t hanging up too high.

Things to consider

If you’re using pendants over an island and need to hang them up a bit higher for sight line reasons (like you want to be able to see the TV while you’re working at the island), that’s OK!

Large pendants are pretty popular right now. If you want to go a few inches larger than the recommended size for your space, that should be fine.

Need pendant sizing advice? Comment here, call us at 1-866-688-3562 or email [email protected]!