About ninety minutes per drink is the usual unwritten rule, and around two hours is as long as most cafés expect anyone to sit without ordering again. Neither is a law. Both are what staff have in mind when they start glancing at your table.
What actually changes the answer
- The hour. Three or four hours in a half‑empty room at 10am bothers nobody. Forty‑five minutes at the 12:30 rush can. Time of day matters more than total duration.
- The size of the room. A place with thirty seats can carry a long sitter. A place with eight cannot, and knows it.
- Whether a limit is posted. Plenty of cafés post one — commonly 60 or 90 minutes at peak, or no laptops at weekends. A posted limit overrides every convention on this page.
- Whether the place has equipped itself for you. Sockets at every table and a room full of laptops is a business that has decided long sitters are its model. Marble bar, no sockets, standing customers: it has decided the opposite.
The practical version
Order on arrival. Order again at around ninety minutes, or leave. If you want a long session, arrive before the rush rather than during it, take a small table, and plan to be gone or to have bought lunch by the time it gets busy. If you need four uninterrupted hours and do not want to keep buying coffee to earn them, that is a library or a coworking day pass, not a café.
Places we list show their opening hours and, where anyone has told us, whether there are outlets and how the Wi‑Fi held up — which is usually a better guide to how long you can settle in than anything a rule of thumb will tell you.