Tracking office occupancy rates across America

Occupancy Barometer weekly report

The Barometer’s weekly report summarizes access control data from our business partners in 10 major metro areas, not a national statistical sample. Charted percentages reflect the number of unique authorized user entries in each market relative to a pre-COVID-19 baseline, averaged weekly and updated every Tuesday.

Class A+ Occupancy

Class A+ building occupancy continued its typical August slide.

• Class A+ buildings nationally averaged 71.3% occupancy, down 3.1 points from the prior week’s 74.4%.
• The peak day across Class A+ buildings in the U.S. was also down on Tuesday, August 11, to 85.0%, from 91.4% the previous Tuesday.
• Weekly occupancy and the peak day are comparable to numbers reported in August 2025.

Peak Day

A Tuesday peak was held nationally, with Austin and Los Angeles again peaking a day later.

• Tuesday, August 11, was the peak day nationally for all building classes according to the Kastle 10-City Barometer, which reported a daily average of 61.3%, down 3.1 points from the previous Tuesday at 64.4%.
• Wednesday was the peak day for Austin at 86.3% and Los Angeles at 54.6%.
• Austin reported Wednesday as the peak day for the fourth time in six weeks, higher than last week’s 85.9%.
• Los Angeles had the fifth Wednesday peak day in the last six weeks.

Weekly Average

The national average eased further as the summer lull continued.

• The Kastle 10-City Back to Work Barometer reported a national average of 52.8%, down 1.6 points from the week before.
• Despite the summer lull, this level is still higher than the three-year average occupancy (51.4%) reported since January 2024.
• All but two cities reported a drop in occupancy, with Los Angeles posting a small 0.1-point gain to 47.7% and San Francisco with no change at 45.8%.
• New York City dropped 5.6 points to 57.7%, followed by San Jose (-4.6 points to 41.1%), Washington D.C. (-2 points to 47.4%), Dallas (-1.4 points to 60.7%), Austin (-1.2 points to 73.6%), Philadelphia (-0.4 points to 40.1%), Houston (-0.3 points to 58.8%), and Chicago (-0.2 points to 55.0%).
• New York City is down 8.9 points from its 2026 high of 66.6%, reached on July 15, and San Jose is down 7 points from 48.1% on July 15. This shows a stronger decline than the 3.8-point drop in the average for the 10 cities over the same time span.

Barometer data science
The most reliable way to measure office return is to count people directly, and daily security card swipes provide the largest sample size for this. For several years, Kastle’s Barometer has tracked weekly office occupancy in ten major metro areas, using anonymized keycard, fob, and KastlePresence app data from over 300,000 Kastle users in those cities (out of 1.8 million Kastle users globally) across 3,400 buildings and 60,000+ businesses in 47 states.
For each cardholder, we count only their first building entry each day, avoiding overcounting from multiple swipes. These daily figures are averaged into a weekly percentage.
That percentage is compared against a pre-pandemic baseline: the average weekly first-swipe activity during a three-week window in February 2020, when office attendance was at its highest. This baseline represents 100%, reflecting normal peak occupancy rather than maximum capacity, which is why some weeks can register above 100%.