How to Do Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Lots of meeting participants? No problem!
Ash Ash (362)
2 minutes

If you have a lot of meeting participants to manage in your Zoom meeting, you may want to use breakout rooms. This allows the host to separate meeting participants into groups. These groups can be brought into the main room which appears on any recordings for the meeting.

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Enable Breakout Rooms Zoom

If you want to use Breakout Rooms in Zoom, you need to make sure the feature is enabled on your account.

  1. Log into Zoom from a web browser.
  2. Access Settings from the left-hand panel.
  3. Scroll down to the In Meeting (Advanced) section.
  4. Enable Breakout Rooms button.

Start a new meeting in Zoom and join it. Check out our guide on how to set up a Zoom meeting for a detailed breakdown of this process.

Breakout Rooms Zoom

You'll need the Breakout Rooms settings menu to create them. Select the icon at the bottom of the window that looks like 4 blocks stacked together.

Create Breakout Rooms

To create your breakout rooms, enter the number of rooms you will need. There are three options that allow different permissions for the meeting participants.

You can manually assign participants to a room, let them choose a room, or let Zoom automatically assign participants to rooms at random.

Click Create Rooms.

When the breakout rooms are created, the host will be the only one who can assign participants to specific rooms by default. It’s up to the host to determine whether or not guests will be able to join any room freely or be assigned a room manually.

Moving between rooms

The host and co-host will be able to move freely between rooms. Whether or not the participants can will depend on the permissions set by the host.

Closing Breakout Rooms

You can set a timer for the breakout rooms. After the time you select has been set, they will close automatically once it reaches 0. You can also manually end or delete breakrooms as the host at any time.

If you found this guide useful, you might also appreciate our guide on how to share your screen in Zoom.

Don't lose all the work you've tabbed!
Britt Britt (157)
2 minutes

Being able to create tab groups in Google Chrome is great, but being able to save them for the next time you open Chrome is even better.