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+ occupancy dipped slightly as the seasonal August lull began.

• Class A+ buildings saw a slight dip in occupancy after a strong July, dropping to 77.0% from last week’s 78.4% average nationally.
• This is consistent with the beginning of an August lull measured in the last few summers.
• The peak day in all Class A+ buildings across the nation also dipped slightly on Tuesday, down to 92.7% from last week’s 95.2%.
• A year ago for the same week, Wednesday, July 30, was the peak day at 90.4%, consistent with the 2-to-4-point year-over-year change Kastle has typically reported.

Peak Day

A clear Tuesday pattern continued across most markets this week.

• Tuesday, July 28, was the peak day nationally for all building classes, according to the Kastle 10-City Barometer, which reported a 65.2% average for the day, down slightly from 66.5% the previous Tuesday.
• Eight of the 10 cities reported Tuesday as the peak day, continuing a June and July pattern of Tuesday and Wednesday sharing the top of the charts.
• The two cities that reported Wednesday as their peak were Los Angeles at 55.1% and Philadelphia at 49.4%, close to its Wednesday peak of 49.6% the previous week.
• Austin reported the highest Tuesday peak day at 89.0%.
• New York City metro reported Tuesday occupancy of 79.8% and Wednesday of 79.3%, continuing its new plateau status.

Weekly Average

Nearly every market dipped slightly as the August lull began.

• The Kastle 10-City Back to Work Barometer was down slightly this week, reflecting the beginning of the normal August lull measured and reported for several summers.
• Overall, the national average fell nine-tenths of a point to 55.6%.
• Philadelphia was the only one of the 10 cities that was unchanged, at 41.6%.
• The other nine cities reported slight declines in occupancy, led by Houston, down 1.6 points to 58.7%, followed by San Jose (-1.4 to 46.6%), Dallas (-1.3 to 62.1%), Chicago (-1.2 to 57.1%), Los Angeles (-1.0 to 48.6%), Washington, D.C. (-0.9 to 51.6%), San Francisco (-0.9 to 47.8%), New York (-0.5 to 65.8%), and Austin (-0.4 to 76.0%).

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%.