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+ remains ahead of last year amid holiday slowdown.

• The Fourth of July holiday contributed to Class A+ occupancy falling to 68.9%, marking its fourth consecutive weekly decline (from 72.5%).
• Even with the recent slowdown, Class A+ buildings continue to outperform last year. Over the past six weeks, occupancy averaged 75.8%, compared with 74.7% during the same period in 2025.
• The strongest signal came after the holiday: Tuesday saw occupancy rebound to 90.9%, suggesting summer vacations have yet to meaningfully impact office attendance.

Peak Day
The holiday created an unusual split.

• In a rare pattern, Tuesday and Wednesday tied as the week’s peak days, each reaching 64.6% occupancy nationally.
• Five Barometer markets peaked on Tuesday and five peaked on Wednesday, with no clear geographic pattern, suggesting some cities returned to normal schedules faster than others after the holiday.
• Tuesday leaders: Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, San Jose, and Philadelphia.
• Wednesday leaders: Austin, New York City, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.

Weekly Average
Every market declined, but the holiday’s impact varied.

• The 10-City Back-to-Work Barometer fell from 53.2% to 51.3%, even after accounting for the shortened holiday week.
• Most resilient: Philadelphia posted the smallest decline, followed by Los Angeles and San Jose.
• Biggest pullbacks: Washington, D.C., saw the largest drop, followed by Dallas, New York City, and San Francisco.
• With Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and July 4 now behind us, the Barometer enters a stretch of uninterrupted five-day workweeks before Labor Day, providing a clearer view of underlying office attendance trends.

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%.