How to Create and Manage Breakout Rooms?

Owned by Sara Yasrebi
Last updated: Sept 08, 2020 by Michael HughesVersion comment
3 min read

Breakout rooms allow you to split your Zoom meeting in up to 50 separate sessions. The meeting host can choose to split the participants of the meeting into these separate sessions automatically or manually and can switch between sessions at any time.

Creating Breakout Rooms

  1. Start a meeting.
  2. Click Breakout Rooms.

  3. Select the number of rooms you would like to create, and how you would like to assign your participants to those rooms.


  4. Click Create Rooms.

  5. Your rooms will be created, but will not start automatically. You can manage the rooms prior to starting them by following the instructions below.

Options for Breakout Rooms:

  1. After creating the breakout rooms, click Options to view additional Breakout Rooms options.

  2. Check any options that you would like to use for your breakout rooms.

  3. Follow the steps below to assign participants to rooms or click Open All Rooms to start the breakout rooms.

Assigning participants to rooms

  1. To assign participants to your rooms, select Assign next to the room you wish to assign participants to and select participants you want to assign to that room. Repeat this for each room.

  2. Once a participant has been assigned (manually or automatically), the number of participants will show in place of the Assign button.



Preparing Breakout Rooms

After manually or automatically assigning participants to rooms, you can rearrange the participants. Participants who are not assigned to breakout sessions will remain in the main meeting when the rooms are started.

  • Move to (participant): Select a room to move the participant to.



  • Exchange (participant): Select a participant in another room to swap the selected participant with.



  • Delete Room: Delete the selected room.



  • Recreate: Deletes existing breakout rooms and creates new ones.


  • Add a Room: Add another breakout room.


  • Open All Rooms: Start the rooms. All participants will be moved to their respective rooms after confirming the prompt to join the breakout room. The host will be left in the main meeting until manually joining one of the rooms. The participants (and the host when manually joining a room) will see the following message shown when joining the breakout room.


Managing Breakout Rooms in progress

Once the Breakout Rooms have been started, the participants will be asked to join the Breakout Session. The host will stay in the main meeting until joining a session manually. If a participant has not joined the session yet, it will be noted by (not joined) next to their name.


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