Office occupancy varies sharply by region, day, building type and measurement method. The statistics below distinguish average utilization, peak-day use, employee attendance, access-based indices and survey expectations across 2024–2026 benchmarks.
Key Office Occupancy Statistics
These are the most broadly useful office occupancy figures:
- In 2024, global average office attendance was 39% across the five-day week in CBRE large-client offices worldwide.
- In 2024, APAC offices averaged 50% occupation in CBRE’s large-client data.
- In 2024, EMEA offices averaged 46% utilization in the same CBRE client-office series.
- In 2024, the Americas averaged 33% office utilization in CBRE’s large-client offices.
- In 2024, global peak-day utilization reached 64%, compared with the five-day average of 39%.
- In 2024, EMEA peak utilization reached 81%, while average utilization was 46%.
- In 2025, 72% of Americas organizations said they met attendance goals, compared with 61% in 2024.
- In Q2 2025, 85% of Americas organizations had communicated an attendance policy.
- In Q2 2025, employers expected 3.2 in-office days per week while employees averaged 2.9 days.
- In Q2 2025, 73% of Americas organizations reported peak-day utilization in the 61%–100% capacity band.
- In 2025, 66% of Americas organizations reported average office utilization below 60%.
- In 2025, only 25% of Americas companies used assigned seating, down from 40% in 2024.
- In 2025, 93% of New Zealand organizations supported hybrid working.
- In 2025, New Zealand office utilization averaged 64% across a typical week.
- In 2025, Gensler’s global office workers spent about 55% of their week in the office and said they needed about 65% to perform at their best.
- In 2025, only 26% of Gensler respondents strongly agreed their workplace helped them do their best work.
- In JLL’s 2026 benchmark, global office utilization reached 56%, up from 49% in 2024.
- In CBRE’s 2025 global dataset, average peak utilization was 80%, compared with a pre-pandemic range of 65%–70% for most organizations.
Contents
- Global and regional office occupancy trends
- Office attendance and the hybrid-work gap
- Peak-day versus average office occupancy
- Office utilization by organization, building and seating model
- New Zealand office occupancy data
- Office occupancy outcomes and measurement signals
Global and Regional Office Occupancy Trends
CBRE reported that global average office attendance across the five-day week was 39% in 2024, up from 36% a year earlier. The dataset covers occupancy-management clients and therefore does not represent every office.
| Region or benchmark | Average utilization | Period or comparison |
|---|---|---|
| APAC | 50% | 2024 |
| EMEA | 46% | 2024 |
| Americas | 33% | 2024 |
| EMEA pre-COVID benchmark | 63% | Comparison with 2024 |
| Global JLL benchmark | 56% | 2026, versus 49% in 2024 |
Source: CBRE, Regional variation, daily volatility: Global office utilisation trends; JLL, Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report 2026.
CBRE reported utilization growth as 8% for EMEA, 3% for APAC and 2% for the Americas from 2023 to 2024. These are the report’s stated year-over-year changes and should not be reinterpreted as independently calculated relative growth rates.
JLL’s 2026 benchmark placed global utilization at 56%, compared with 54% in 2025, 49% in 2024 and 61% before the pandemic. JLL also reported that 64% of benchmark organizations saw increased utilization from office mandates in 2026; this describes organizational experience, not the size of each increase.
Office Attendance Statistics and the Hybrid-Work Gap
Americas occupier survey results show a widening emphasis on attendance management, while reported employee presence remained below employer expectations. In Q2 2025, employers expected 3.2 office days per week and employees showed up for 2.9 days on average.
- 72% of Americas organizations said they met attendance goals in 2025, compared with 61% in 2024.
- 38% expected attendance to increase in 2025, an expectation rather than a realized occupancy measure.
- 85% communicated an attendance policy in 2025, while 69% measured compliance, up from 45% in 2024.
- 37% took attendance-policy enforcement action in 2025, compared with 17% in 2024.
- 26% expected four or five office days per week in 2025, compared with 23% in 2024.
Among organizations with at least 10,000 employees, expected attendance was 3.1 days and actual show-up was 2.5 days per week. Companies with fewer than 500 employees reported both expected and actual attendance at 3.4 days per week.
Source: CBRE, 2025 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey. These are survey-reported organizational and subgroup averages, not an employee-level attendance census and not directly equivalent to access-card utilization.
Peak-Day Versus Average Office Occupancy Data
Average utilization can conceal substantial pressure on the busiest days. CBRE’s 2024 global client-office series measured 64% utilization on the peak day against a 39% five-day average, a 25-percentage-point gap.
| Geography | Five-day average | Peak day | Peak-to-average gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global CBRE client offices | 39% | 64% | 25 percentage points |
| EMEA | 46% | 81% | 35 percentage points |
| APAC | 50% | 76% | 26 percentage points |
| Americas | 33% | 56% | 23 percentage points |
Source: CBRE, Regional variation, daily volatility: Global office utilisation trends. The gaps are simple differences between reported measures from the same report series.
CBRE also reported that global peak-day utilization rose 11% from 2023 to 64% in 2024. EMEA peak utilization increased from 62% to 81%, APAC rose from 64% to 76%, and the Americas reached 56%, ten percentage points above 2023.
The 2025 Americas occupier survey used a capacity band rather than a continuous sensor measure: 73% of organizations reported peak-day utilization at capacity, defined as 61%–100% occupied. By contrast, 34% reported average office usage at capacity, up from 28% in 2024, while 66% reported average utilization below 60%.
Source: CBRE, 2025 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey.
Office Utilization by Organization, Building and Seating Model
Utilization differs by the role of a building and by how organizations allocate desks. In 2025, call or support centers outperformed portfolio-average utilization by 29%, headquarters offices by 28%, and client-facing non-headquarters offices by 26% in the Americas survey; these are relative differences, not absolute occupancy rates.
Assigned seating continued to decline in the same survey. Only 25% of Americas companies used assigned seating in 2025, compared with 40% in 2024 and 56% in 2023, while 75% reported unassigned seating for at least some employees.
More than half of companies using seat sharing reported people-to-seat ratios below 1.5:1 in Q2 2025. Looking ahead, 73% expected ratios above 1.5:1 by 2027, a forecast of respondent expectations rather than a realized future ratio.
Source: CBRE, 2025 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey. Partial use of unassigned seating qualifies for the 75% figure, so it does not mean that every seat in those organizations was unassigned.
Kastle’s building comparison offers another view of variation. During June 1–30 in the year reported by Kastle, average daily occupancy was 74.2% in 113 A+ buildings, compared with 52.1% across all buildings in its ten-city barometer.
Source: Kastle Systems, Can a High-End Office Space Drive Up Occupancy Rates? We Looked into It.. Kastle measures access-based occupancy relative to a February 2020 baseline, not physical capacity utilization.
New Zealand Office Occupancy and Workplace-Use Statistics
New Zealand’s 2025 office-occupier survey found broad support for hybrid work alongside relatively high reported weekly utilization. 93% of organizations supported hybrid working in 2025, up from 91% in 2024.
- New Zealand employees spent 3.3 days per typical week in the office in 2025.
- New Zealand office utilization averaged 64% across a typical week in 2025, up from 62% in 2024.
- The 2025 comparison showed New Zealand at 64%, Australia at 52% and the Americas at 51%.
- Rostered anchor days were used by 11.6% of New Zealand respondents as an overcrowding strategy.
- Mandatory office days were used by 9.3% as an overcrowding strategy.
The cross-market figures are survey comparisons whose populations may differ, and the utilization measure is not access-card data. The strategy percentages retain the denominator presented in the report: respondents reporting use of each strategy.
Source: CBRE, New Zealand Office Occupier Sentiment Survey 2025.
Office Occupancy Outcomes, Experience and Measurement Signals
Occupancy alone does not establish whether a workplace supports effective work. Gensler’s 2025 Global Workplace Survey included 16,809 full-time office workers in 15 countries, with data collected from August through December 2024.
Gensler found that respondents spent about 55% of their week in the office but said they needed closer to 65% to perform at their best. Only 26% strongly agreed that their current workplace helped them do their best work, and employees with high choice over where and how they worked were 2.5 times as likely to say their workplace supported individual and team productivity; that is an association, not a causal effect.
Workspace sentiment was also associated with company pride: 90% of employees who liked their workspace said they were proud to work for their company, compared with 47% among disconnected employees. These are self-reported relationships, not productivity experiments.
Source: Gensler, Global Workplace Survey 2025.
Access-based indices provide a different measurement lens. Kastle’s barometer uses anonymized access data from more than 300,000 users across ten major U.S. cities, so it is not a national probability sample.
In the cited weekly report, Kastle’s national all-building peak-day average was 65.3% for Tuesday, September 22, relative to its pre-COVID baseline, while the weekly average was 54.7%; the report noted that a holiday affected the week. Kastle’s percentages represent unique first daily entries relative to a three-week February 2020 baseline, not physical maximum capacity.
Source: Kastle Systems, Data Assisting in Return to Office Plans.
CBRE’s 2025 global workplace dataset reported average peak utilization of 80%, compared with a pre-pandemic average range of 65%–70% for most organizations. CBRE’s utilization and occupancy definitions differ from access-based attendance indices, so this result should not be combined directly with Kastle’s baseline percentages.
Source: CBRE, 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights.