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 rebounds strongly for the week ending July 15.

• The weekly average for Class A+ buildings jumped to 78.4%, compared with 68.9% for Class A+ the previous week, following the July 4th holiday.
• This follows a familiar pattern seen in previous July months, with a rebound typically occurring in the second half of the month.
• The peak day across all Class A+ buildings nationwide was Tuesday, with 95.5% occupancy, the highest single-day occupancy since early June.
• In 2025, the peak day of the same week was also Tuesday, at an almost identical 95.8%.

Peak Day
A clear Tuesday pattern emerged across most markets.

• Tuesday, July 14, was the peak day nationally, according to the Kastle 10-City Barometer, which reported an average of 66.0%.
• Eight of the ten cities reported Tuesday as their peak day.
• The two exceptions, which reported Wednesday as their peak day (as they had the prior week too), were Dallas (73.1%) and Los Angeles (56.2%).
• New York City had the largest spread between its peak day, Tuesday (81.5%), and its lowest day, the previous Friday (33.8%), a 47.7-point spread, well above the 29.5-point average spread across the ten cities last week.

Weekly Average
Every market posted gains as offices rebounded from the July 4th holiday.

• The Kastle 10-City Back to Work Barometer reported a strong return to office, with a 5.3-point increase over the prior week to a national average of 56.6%.
• All 10 cities in the Barometer reported increases, a uniformly positive picture.
• This is a typical pattern seen in the second half of July, when office attendance increases sharply before a dip in August due to summer vacations, camps, and family getaways.
• New York City led the revival with a 9.5-point increase to 66.6%, followed by Chicago (+6.7 to 58.8%), Washington, D.C. (+5.9 to 52.6%), San Francisco (+5.8 to 48.5%), Dallas (+5.7 to 66.6%), San Jose (+4.9 to 48.1%), Austin (+4.5 to 76.4%), Los Angeles (+3.7 to 49.4%), Philadelphia (+3.3 to 41.4%), and Houston (+2.9 to 59.9%).

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%.