Short answer: for most office work, yes. A second screen is one of the cheapest upgrades you can give someone.
The famous number people quote for it does not say what they think it says, though, and if you are going to spend money on screens for a whole office it is worth knowing what you are actually buying.
Where the 42% figure comes from
If you have read anything about dual monitors you have met this line: multiple displays increase productivity by 42%, according to Jon Peddie Research.
The research is real. JPR surveyed over 1,000 end users, across three surveys in 2002, 2012 and 2017. The wording in their own announcement is the bit that matters: “users of multiple monitors have an average expected productivity increase of 42%”. Respondents were asked to give an estimate of actual, or expected, improvement in productivity.
So it is a survey of what people believe they gain, not a measurement of what they produced. That is not nothing. People using two screens consistently report a large benefit, and they have been reporting it for over two decades. The expectation was 46% in 2002, then settled at 42% in both 2012 and 2017, which is a remarkably stable answer for a question asked fifteen years apart.
But it is not a figure you can put in a business case and defend. If someone tells you a second screen will make your team 42% more productive, they are quoting a survey about feelings as if it were an output study.
Jon Peddie’s own summary of it is better than the number: “the more you can see, the more you can do”.
When a second screen genuinely earns its space
Rather than a blanket percentage, look at what the person does all day. A second screen pays for itself fast in four situations.
Working from one document into another. Reading from a supplier invoice while entering it. Checking a quote against a job sheet. Copying figures from a report into a spreadsheet. Anything where the answer is on one page and the work happens on another.
Anything with a reference window that stays open. Practice management, job management, a rostering system, a CRM. If someone keeps one application open permanently and works in others around it, they are currently spending their day alt-tabbing.
Video calls where you share your screen. You can share one screen and keep your notes, your email and the client’s file on the other. This is a smaller benefit than it sounds until the first time you avoid showing a meeting something they should not see.
Anyone on a laptop at a desk. A 13 or 14 inch screen at desk height means looking down all day. An external screen at the right height fixes a posture problem and gives back the screen space at the same time.
When it does not help
Be honest about the roles where it will not.
Someone who works in one full screen application all day, does not cross-reference, and rarely shares their screen will use the second monitor for email and be slightly more distracted than before. That is the actual outcome, and there is no shame in saying so.
Small laptops driving two external screens sometimes cannot. Entry level machines and some lightweight laptops have real limits on how many displays they can run, and at what resolution. That is worth checking against the specific model before you order anything.
And a screen someone cannot see properly is worse than no screen. Very high resolution monitors at scaling settings that make text tiny is one of the most common complaints we deal with after a rollout.
The part nobody budgets for
Monitors are cheap. The bit that generates support work is everything around them.
In the year to 18 August 2026 our service desk handled 17 jobs about monitors and docking stations, across 8 businesses, taking six and a half hours. The pattern is consistent. It is almost never the monitor.
It is the docking station that stopped connecting after a Windows update. It is a screen that flashes because of the cable or the dock rather than the panel. It is a laptop that will not drive two displays at the resolution they were bought for. It is someone who has ended up with everything oversized after the second screen went in.
None of that is a reason to skip the upgrade. It is a reason to buy carefully.
What to actually buy
Match the model. One monitor model across the office, one dock model, one cable type. Two models means two sets of instructions and two different failure modes, and it costs more in support than it saves on price.
Check the dock and the laptop together. The number of external displays a laptop can drive depends on the machine, the dock and how the dock connects. Check the specification for the actual laptop model you have, not the family it belongs to.
Buy height-adjustable stands, or a monitor arm. The ergonomic benefit is most of the point for laptop users, and it disappears if the screen sits too low.
Match the sizes and resolutions. Two screens of different sizes and resolutions side by side means Windows scales them differently, and dragging a window between them changes how it looks. That is the source of a lot of quiet daily annoyance.
Get the same cable in every bag. If people move between desks, a spare of the right cable at each desk saves more time than anything else on this list.
How to decide without a spreadsheet
Ask the person. Not “would you like a second screen”, because everyone says yes. Ask them to describe the last three things they did that involved two windows.
If they can answer straight away, buy the screen. If they have to think about it, spend the money on something else, like a better chair or more memory in their laptop.
One step for today: walk past two or three desks and look at how many windows are stacked on top of each other. That, rather than a percentage from a survey, is the evidence you need.
If you are planning a hardware refresh and want a hand working out what each role actually needs, get in touch.