Cognizant will pay ₹4.77 crore a month in rent for one Chennai office

Imagine paying ₹4.77 crore in rent. Not for a year. For one month. That is what IT company Cognizant will pay for a giant new office in Chennai, according to transaction documents reported by Business Standard on 15 October 2026. The space is about 6.45 lakh square feet, spread over ten floors of one tower.

Here is what the deal looks like, how office rent works, and what it tells us about where India's offices are growing.

The deal in one breath

Cognizant Technology Solutions India has leased 645,172 square feet in Tower 3 of Embassy Splendid TechZone, an office park in the Pallavaram area of Chennai. It takes the ground floor up to the ninth floor. The lease runs for five years, the rent is ₹74 per square foot every month, and it rises by 15% every three years. The documents were accessed by the property data firm Propstack.

Quick check of the sum: 645,172 square feet multiplied by ₹74 comes to about ₹4.77 crore. So the numbers add up.

Counter rising to 4.77 crore rupees per month, with five bars for each year of the lease, the last two taller after a 15 percent rise — Five years of rent: the same for the first three, then 15% higher.

What is a lease, in simple words?

A lease is a rent agreement. One side owns the building. The other side pays to use it for a fixed time. It is the same idea as renting a flat, just much bigger.

Office rent in India is usually priced per square foot per month. A square foot is a small square, about the size of a school notebook opened flat. So ₹74 per square foot means Cognizant pays ₹74 every month for every notebook-sized patch of floor.

The rent escalation is the planned price rise. Here it is 15% every three years. Think of it like a cricket coaching fee that the academy says will go up by a fixed amount after a few seasons. Everyone knows the jump in advance, so there are no surprises.

Four steps: pick floors in an office park, sign a five-year lease, pay 74 rupees per square foot each month, rent rises 15 percent every three years — The four parts of this office deal.

How big is 6.45 lakh square feet?

Very big. If a small bedroom is about 100 square feet, this space could hold more than 6,400 such rooms. That is a lot of desks, meeting rooms and canteens.

On a yearly basis, the rent comes to about ₹57.24 crore (₹4.77 crore times 12). If the 15% rise kicks in after year three, the monthly rent becomes roughly ₹5.49 crore. Across all five years, that would add up to around ₹303 crore. These are simple sums based on the numbers in the report, not figures Cognizant has shared.

This is not Cognizant's only new office

The same Chennai area has seen Cognizant sign more than one deal. In September 2026, it signed a lease with flexible workspace company WeWork India for 141,392 square feet, also in the Pallavaram office park on Pallavaram-Thoraipakkam Road. And in 2025, it renewed an office in Navi Mumbai for 92,208 square feet at a monthly rent of ₹62,70,144.

Bar chart of Cognizant office deals: 92,208 square feet in Navi Mumbai in 2025, 141,392 with WeWork in Chennai in September 2026, and 645,172 at the Embassy park in Chennai in October 2026 — The new Chennai lease is more than four times the size of the WeWork deal a month earlier.

Why Chennai matters to Cognizant

Cognizant has a huge team in India. Its profile on Great Place To Work India lists 256,867 India-based employees, with Chennai as its location. So a big new Chennai office is a bet on its biggest home base.

The office park itself is a serious one. When property investment trust Embassy REIT agreed to buy it in April 2024, it described Embassy Splendid TechZone as a 5 million square feet office park on Pallavaram-Thoraipakkam Road, and said its finished buildings were 95% occupied by global firms like Wells Fargo and BNY Mellon. A REIT, or real estate investment trust, is a company that owns rent-paying buildings and shares the rent with the people who invest in it.

Here is the park, in a video from Embassy REIT:

Watch on YouTube

The bigger picture: offices are busy

This deal lands while India's office market is very active. Property advisers Anarock found that offices took up a net 49.2 million square feet in the first nine months of 2026, up 2% from 48.2 million a year earlier. For the first time in a nine-month period, co-working operators took more office space than IT companies.

Co-working means shared offices, like WeWork, where companies rent desks or floors on flexible terms instead of signing up for a whole building. Cognizant's own September deal was itself with a co-working company.

Another adviser, Knight Frank India, counted 66.7 million square feet of office deals across eight big cities in the same nine months, about the same as last year.

Why should a student care?

Offices are where many first careers begin. A five-year rent deal for ten floors is a long-term commitment to that space. For anyone hoping to start out in IT, the cities where these big leases are signed are worth watching, and Chennai just got a very large new one.

The short version

Cognizant has leased about 6.45 lakh square feet in a Chennai office park for five years, at ₹4.77 crore a month, with a 15% rise every three years. It follows a WeWork deal in the same area just a month earlier. And it comes as India's office market stays busy, with co-working now taking more space than IT firms.

Sources

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