How far apart should path lights go?

Path lights are sold in fours and eights, and walks are not built in fours and eights. That mismatch is the entire problem, and it is why so many front walks end up with a line of lights that stops nine feet short of the door.

The rule this site uses is on the pathway hub and it is one line: one every 6 to 8 ft down each side of the walk you want lit, and one at each step. Everything below is that rule, worked out.

The arithmetic

Count the gaps, not the lights. A walk of length L at a spacing S has L ÷ S gaps in it, rounded up, and one more light than it has gaps — because there is a light at both ends.

lights = ceiling(L ÷ S) + 1

At the two ends of the range in the rule:

Then add one for every step, on each side you are lighting. A step is where somebody’s ankle is, and it is the one position on a walk where a light is doing a job rather than a look.

Why our own pages give two different numbers

The pathway hub says a 24 ft front walk wants a pack of four down one side or eight down both. The table above agrees. Four heads can cover about 24 to 32 ft of a single edge, yet the table says a 32 ft walk wants five.

Both are right and the difference is the end light. Four lights at 8 ft spacing cover three gaps — 24 ft between the first light and the last — and if you are happy for the run to finish a light short of the far end, the same four lights stretch over about 32 ft of walk. Whether you count that last fixture is the whole discrepancy.

Decide it deliberately rather than discovering it. Our advice is to count it: the far end of the walk is usually the door, and the door is the reason the walk is lit.

Wider than 8 ft, and what it costs you

Nothing stops you spacing at twelve feet. You get pools of light with dark between them, which reads as a dotted line rather than a lit edge, and on a curved walk it stops describing the curve — which is most of what path lights are for. Tighter than 6 ft on a straight front walk starts to read as a runway.

The two places to break the rule are both about the ground rather than the budget: put one at every step regardless of spacing, and put one on the inside of every real bend, because a bend hidden between two lights is the bit people trip on.

Throw is not output

Two different numbers get confused here, and only one of them is on most listings.

Output is lumens, and it is what the fixture makes. Throw is how far across the ground that light actually reaches, and it depends on the height of the head, the shade over it, and the beam the fixture was designed for.

The catalogue publishes output for most of the hub and throw for almost none of it:

The Linkind’s 2 m spread is the only real throw figure in the category here, and it is what makes eight of them and a 24 ft walk agree with the hub’s rule rather than merely coincide with it.

Note what the range of output does to the meaning of “spacing”. At 200 lm a head you are lighting the walk, and the gaps between fixtures are gaps in usable light. At 10 lm a head you are marking the edge of the walk, the gaps are not gaps in anything, and the spacing is purely a matter of how the line looks. Both are legitimate. A line of dim markers down a walk is often the nicer one. But do not buy markers and then space them as if they were floods, or the other way round.

Buying in packs

Work out the number, then round to the pack — up, not down.

• A short walk down one side lands on a four-pack.
• Anything over about 24 ft, or both sides of anything, lands on eight.
• Both sides of a 40 ft walk with two steps is fourteen, which is two eight-packs and two spares, and spares are not waste: the failure mode on solar stakes is individual units, and one in a shed is one you do not reorder.

The exception is the Ring Pathlight, which comes as a single fixture. Everything else in this hub arrives in fours or eights, so the per-walk cost multiplies in a way that catches people out.

What we could not check

We have not staked any of these. Every figure above is from a listing or a manufacturer’s page on the date printed on that product’s page.

The spacing rule itself is not a manufacturer’s figure at all — it is this site’s own working rule, applied consistently across the hub so that the pack sizes and the walk lengths on every page here agree with each other. It is not a standard, and nobody measured a lux level to arrive at it.

There is no beam angle published for any path light in this catalogue. There are beam angles for the spotlights — 45 degrees on the LEONLITE, 70 degrees on the DEWENWILS — because that category quotes them and this one does not. So the throw column above is mostly empty, and it is empty because the information is not there, not because we did not look.

Then look at the walk

Numbers settle how many. They do not settle whether a line of markers down one side looks better than a wash down both, which is a thing about your walk and not about the hardware.

Every path light here is staked along the same sample walk by its own count, so the picture you are comparing is the count and the spacing rather than a photographer’s choice — start with the Beau Jardin on the walkway scene. And if the walk is the second half of a job whose first half is the roof, the measuring guide is the other end of the same evening.

Price tiers are our own rough budget bands, not live prices. Check the listing for today’s price.