> I will admit, when we were shopping it did seem hard to find homes listing a home office as feature even though several had them.

Forgive my ignorance (I'm not a homeowner and am just starting to think about it), but wouldn't a home office just be a bedroom that you use as an office?

Ideally, there's a difference. I just got an offer accepted on a house (yay!) that has an actual office. There's a tiny little foyer leading from the door to the main office space, the office itself would be too narrow to comfortably fit a bed, plus a space to walk around the bed, and there are four large windows in the relatively small room, and the sills of the windows dip down below where a bed would meet the wall.

I mean, you walk into it, and it's clearly not a bedroom. But, hey, throw in some bookshelves and a desk and you have a stereotypical office!

My parents also had a "study" (the house was built pre-internet, when people had studies) I actually used it as a bedroom as a teenager, but there were a couple things that separated it from a "bedroom" There were floor to ceiling built in bookshelves all along a large wall, but there was no closet. There was also a phone jack, which was a feature none of the other bedrooms had. The room was also sort of oddly shaped, with no clear place to put a bed without it blocking some of the floor to ceiling bookshelves.

So, yeah, there are some things, but, in many cases, they could be used interchangeably. I'm using a second bedroom as an office right now, and it's basically just a big office with a closet!

Pretty much. Plus you can call rooms an office if they don't qualify as a bedroom (I believe they need to have a window to be called a BR). Also, I would think an extra bedroom sells better than calling it an office.

You definitely need a window to qualify as a bedroom. It has to meet certain requirements that basically boil down to "could a 10-year-old escape a fire through this window?" Although "not falling to death after climbing out" isn't a requirement.

I believe technically a bedroom in the US is also supposed to have a built-in closet of some sort and a door that closes the space off. Lack of either of these often means a room is marketed as an office.

That's exactly what our "study" is - smallest bedroom in our flat/apartment that has a desk and chair, PC, printer (rarely used) and comfy chair.

It's also a cat free zone.

Yep. But as other have stated there are requirements for a bedroom which I didn't really need for my office. I suppose what I prefer as an office is a closed study. This tends to have the room located away from the other (noisier) living areas and bedrooms.