DWELL
TIME.
A monthly newsletter on how buildings get measured, understood, and managed. From Occuspace.
Each month: proprietary data from 100+ campuses, a sharp take from our founder, one story from the field, and the best writing we’ve found on how buildings are getting smarter.
Corporate offices are half full at their busiest. Most days, they’re well below that.
At the single busiest moment of the week, the average corporate office in our Spring 2026 data was 52.3% occupied.
That’s the high-water mark. Narrow it to Tuesday through Thursday – the days hybrid schedules cluster around – and the busiest moment of a typical day averages 40.3%. The rest of the day sits below that.
The shape of the week tells the rest of the story. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday carry it. Monday and Friday peak at roughly half those levels.
Campus offices tell a similar story. In our Spring 2026 Higher Ed Index, office space at the 100+ campuses we measure was 45% full at its busiest moment of the day. Two different sectors, and in both, more than half the office space sits empty when it matters most.
These latest CRE figures cover February through June 2026 and come from the Spring 2026 Occuspace CRE Space Utilization Index.
More findings will be discussed during a live Bisnow webinar with JLL. Save your seat and get access to the full report afterwards.
Save your seat →The office week is now three days.
Most organizations are still paying for a five-day office. Their people have settled into something much closer to three.
Return-to-office mandates were supposed to close that gap. Our latest data says they haven’t. Even at the busiest moment of the busiest day, the average corporate office is just over half full. Put another way: even at peak, nearly half the space sits empty.
Rent, energy, cleaning, and security are still billed as if every desk fills every day. That’s the old model, and for most portfolios it no longer matches the week people actually work.
This isn’t an argument that the office is finished. A 52% peak means people still come in, and on those days the space has to work for them. The point is knowing which areas are in demand and which ones are only carrying costs.
Once you know when and how your space is used, the decisions get easier: which leases to renew, which floors to consolidate, and how to redesign what stays.
The question worth asking before your next lease renewal: are you sizing based on the status quo, or for the days your people actually show up?
How an insurance company cut its office footprint by 23% – and $3.5M a year.
An insurance company with 40+ offices nationwide had a deadline. More than 60% of its office leases were up for renewal within 24 months, and hybrid work had changed how often its people used those offices.
When a lease comes due, the default is to renew it. This CFO wanted to know which ones were worth renewing first.
The corporate real estate team measured. Occuspace sensors went into 23 corporate offices, tracking utilization floor by floor. Fourteen of those offices averaged under 15% utilization. Even at their busiest, they stayed below 40%.
The data didn’t make the call on its own. The team weighed it against what sensors can’t see: lease renewal dates, how teams were configured, and which locations mattered strategically. Then they chose which leases to let go.
The result: a portfolio footprint 23% smaller over two years. $3.5M in annual savings.
The work isn’t finished. The company is using the same data to rework the neighborhoods in its headquarters around how hybrid teams actually use them.
Read the full case study →Four pieces we sent around the office this month.
A new report highlights the central role that data plays in facility management; FM professionals are increasingly expected to interpret data, spot trends, and apply what they find in their day-to-day work.
New research finds that adding AI to building management systems can cut energy use by 22%.
College campuses carry too much wasted square footage, and institutions under pressure are rethinking how it’s used. Occuspace’s Nic Halverson is quoted.
Office, retail, and industrial buildings in BOMA’s 79 markets contributed $344.4 billion to U.S. GDP in 2025 and supported an estimated 3.9 million jobs, according to the study. At that scale, small gains in how space gets used add up.
Does your organization have a return-to-office mandate?
We’ll share what readers tell us, alongside our data, in Issue 03.
This is issue two. We’re building Dwell Time to be the newsletter we wish existed when we started measuring campus and workplace occupancy nine years ago. If it hits the mark – or misses it – reply and tell us. We read every response.
P.S. Join us and JLL on Bisnow on Oct. 21 at 12:00 pm EDT for the full Spring 2026 CRE findings. Save your seat →
Dwell Time is a monthly publication from Occuspace, the occupancy intelligence platform trusted by 100+ higher education campuses and selected by the U.S. General Services Administration as the utilization data solution for the federal real estate portfolio.
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