Occupancy rate barometer: Tracking trends across America

About the Kastle Occupancy Barometer report

Office occupancy is a key indicator of how commercial real estate is performing, offering insight into how businesses are using their space. In many markets, Class A+ buildings have continued to attract tenants and command higher rents, even as the broader office sector adjusts to modern ways of working. The Kastle Occupancy Barometer adds to this picture with aggregated, real-world occupancy data that tracks how buildings are used day to day.

How the data is tracked

The Kastle Occupancy Barometer tracks anonymized keycard, fob, and mobile app access data from over 300,000 Kastle users across 10 major cities to identify trends in how Americans are returning to the office. Over time, the data can assist with return-to-office plans.

Counting daily access control entries is the most reliable way to measure office return, with the largest sample size of its kind. Occupancy is measured against a pre-pandemic baseline established in early 2020, just before COVID-19 disrupted office attendance. Data is updated weekly, with monthly charts available to track trends.

Kastle Occupancy Barometer weekly report

These headlines summarize 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 and updated weekly.

Class A+ occupancy

Class A+ occupancy edged up for the week ending October 21.

• Class A+ buildings nationally averaged 76.7% occupancy, up 0.5 points from the prior week’s 76.2%.
• The peak day across all Class A+ buildings nationwide was Tuesday, October 20, at 92.3%, also up 0.5 points from the prior week.

Peak day

A Tuesday peak held nationally, with four cities peaking a day later.

• Tuesday, October 20, was the peak day nationally for all building classes, according to the Kastle Occupancy Barometer, which reported an average of 66.1%, up 1.9 points from the prior week.
• Six of the 10 cities reported Tuesday as their peak day.
• The four cities that reported Wednesday as their peak day were Austin (92.9%), New York City (85.6%), San Jose (54.0%), and Los Angeles (52.8%).

Weekly average

The national average rebounded from the prior week’s dip.

• The Kastle Occupancy Barometer reported a national average of 56.1%, up 1.0 point from the prior week.
• Six of the 10 cities reported increases, led by Austin (+6.5 to 77.3%) and New York City (+3.6 to 69.9%), followed by Washington, D.C. (+0.7 to 52.1%), Houston (+0.6 to 58.7%), Philadelphia (+0.6 to 42.3%), and San Francisco (+0.4 to 47.6%).
• Chicago was unchanged at 56.2%, while three cities reported declines: Dallas (-1.0 to 64.7%), Los Angeles (-0.9 to 46.6%), and San Jose (-0.2 to 46.0%).

Behind the 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, the Kastle Occupancy Barometer has tracked weekly office occupancy in 10 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 person, we count only their first building entry each day, avoiding overcounting from multiple swipes. Using our occupancy rate formula, we average these daily figures 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% and reflects normal peak occupancy rather than maximum capacity, which is why some weeks can register above 100%.