Google has introduced a waiting rooms feature for Google Meet, announced on October 23, 2025. This function provides meeting hosts with greater control over participant entry, designed to prevent interruptions and allow time for preparation before admitting attendees.
Once enabled by a host or co-host, participants who join a meeting are first directed to a virtual waiting room. Inside this room, they receive a message confirming they are in the correct place and will be admitted shortly. This process helps manage the flow of entry, ensuring smoother discussions. From the waiting room interface, hosts can individually admit or deny entry to each waiting participant, giving them full control over who joins the call.
The feature includes additional management tools. Hosts can broadcast one-way announcements to all participants in the waiting room, a tool for conveying information before the main session begins. The system also allows a host or co-host to move a participant from the active meeting back into the waiting room if necessary, providing another layer of in-meeting control.
Google identifies this functionality as particularly useful for meetings where private pre-meeting discussions are necessary, such as board meetings, interviews, parent-teacher conferences, and client meetings. To use the feature, hosts or co-hosts must enable the waiting room setting when creating or editing a meeting event within Google Calendar. Detailed guidance on its use is available in the Google Help Center.
For system administrators, the feature is set to off by default for end users. Administrators can modify this default setting at the domain, organizational unit (OU), or group level. The deployment begins on October 23, 2025, for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains. The rollout is gradual and may take up to 15 days for the feature to become visible to all users.
The waiting room feature is available for subscribers of specific Google Workspace plans. The eligible tiers are:
- Business Tiers: Standard and Plus
- Enterprise Tiers: Standard, Plus, Essentials, and Essentials Plus
- Education Tiers: Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning add-on
- Individual Tier: Workspace Individual subscribers
