It’s here! The Q4 2025 + Q1 2026 Workplace Utilization Index (WUI) edition has just been published and is available to download.
Here are the headlines…
1. Your Peak Days and Your Weekly Average Are Not the Same Problem
The question CRE leaders spent three years on “when are people coming back?” is settled. The question now is whether the portfolio can handle how they are coming back. The XY Sense Workplace Utilization Index for Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, drawn from over 63,000 sensor-enabled workspaces across nine countries, shows the two are not the same problem.
Global average utilization held at 43 to 45% through the period and reached 45% by March 2026 – a nearly 20-point recovery from 2023. But the average is the wrong lens for space decisions. The distribution underneath it is where the operational and financial pressure sits.
2. You Are Probably Undersupplying Two Days and Overpaying for Three
Tuesday reached 52% globally in Q1 2026. Wednesday sat at 51%. Friday held at 30%. The 22-point gap between peak and trough has not closed despite years of rising overall attendance, and it will not. Teams coordinate their in-office days around shared presence. That coordination is rational for each individual and structurally brutal for any portfolio sized to the average.
When space is calibrated to the weekly average, peak days risk running undersupplied. Meeting rooms are unavailable. Neighborhoods that look spacious on a dashboard report feel overcrowded when Tuesday arrives. The experience that is supposed to justify the commute fails at exactly the moment that matters. Size instead to the peak, and the building runs at full operational cost – energy, services, heating, cooling, lighting, lease – on the days that have 30% occupancy.
This is a cost problem on both ends. Resolving it requires understanding demand at the floor and space-type level: which settings are under pressure on peak days, which sit idle regardless of overall attendance, and which are being used for work they were never designed to support.
3. Enclosed Spaces Are Running at Twice the Utilization of Open Formats
Enclosed meeting rooms average 56% daily utilization. Phone booths and small pods reach 52%. Individual focus environments average 48%. Open collaboration areas sit at 30%. Team breakout spaces average 27%.
That 25 to 30-point gap between enclosed and open formats is not driven by proximity or design preference. It is functional. A significant portion of every in-office day is spent on video calls, and calls require acoustic separation. Focus work between sessions requires somewhere quiet with a door. One-on-one conversations require privacy. Open formats offer none of these reliably. In most portfolios, enclosed supply is short relative to peak-day demand, and that is exactly where friction concentrates when the building is fullest.
The couch-and-whiteboard open collaboration zones that characterised a wave of workplace redesigns over the past decade generally sit idle at 27 to 30% utilization in the data. Their problem is not that they are unpopular in the abstract. It is that they cannot support the specific types of work that dominate the in-office day.
The teams delivering real workplace portfolio ROI today are using real-time occupancy intelligence to understand how their offices actually perform. They know which spaces people gravitate toward, which areas are avoided, and what environments genuinely support productive work. The gap is widening between organizations working from live behavioural data and those still relying on booking intent signals or data that stops at the front door.”
4. A Meeting Room Strategy Built Around the Exception Is Failing the Rule
Nearly 40% of all meeting room sessions in the dataset involve a single occupant – a video call, a focused work block, or a private conversation that needs a door rather than a conference table. When groups of three to six are included, 94% of all meetings fall at six or fewer people. That figure has held consistent across multiple consecutive WUI editions.
Most meeting room portfolios are not configured for this distribution. Rooms designed for 10 to 14 people average 3.3 actual occupants per session. Rooms for 20 to 29 people average 4.5. Large rooms are not filling to justify their footprint. Meanwhile, demand for small, enclosed, technology-equipped spaces exceeds supply on peak days. Meeting room strategy built around the all-hands, the board presentation, and the client meeting is systematically underserving the pattern that dominates every working Tuesday.
5. 25% of Desks (Still) Go Unused Daily. That Figure Has Not Moved as Attendance Rose
Despite rising overall attendance, a quarter of desks go unused on any given day. A further 65% are occupied for fewer than three hours, and just 17% see five or more hours of use. Those proportions have held across multiple WUI editions even as utilization climbed – which makes the implication clear. More people in the building is not producing more time at individual workstations.
People are using desks differently: shorter focused sprints of one to two hours between collaborative sessions rather than an anchored workstation for the full day. They move through a wider variety of settings. The dense desk banks that predate hybrid work are mostly still in place, carrying capacity that behavioural data consistently shows is not demanded at the levels they were designed for. CBRE data cited in the report shows assigned seating has dropped from 83% to around 55% of organisations since 2021, while desk sharing has risen to 36%. The physical reconfiguration is running behind the behavioural change.
6. Badge Swipes are Decent at Counting Arrivals. Sensor Data Shows What Happened Next.
Most CRE teams now have some form of occupancy data. Fewer have it at the resolution needed to act on the problems described above. CBRE data cited in the report shows more than half of organizations still struggle with data quality and in-house analytical expertise. JLL research puts the proportion rating their data capabilities as advanced at a small minority.
The gap matters because the decisions are in the behavior, not the headcount. Badge reads at a floor perimeter tell you how many people arrived at that floor. They do not tell you which spaces those people chose, which settings they bypassed despite availability, or which room types were pressed into service for work they were never designed to support. Those patterns are what make targeted intervention possible.
7. From Data to Action: What the Best Teams Are Doing Differently
We didn’t just crunch the numbers. We went to the people managing these challenges on the ground.
The report includes commentary from workplace leaders at Telstra, Roger Communications, NeuroHaven, ReThink Workplace Group, and Queen Mary University of London, each responding to the same questions you’re probably asking yourself right now.
On what’s actually driving people through the door, Cameron Hill, Occupancy Strategist, Global Property, Telstra, said;
People primarily come into the office to collaborate with colleagues, but individual comfort and focus still matter. Today's workplaces need to be seamless, comfortable, and adaptable to support every type of task and workday experience."
On the tension between collaboration space and individual focus, Angela Ferguson, Founder, NeuroHaven, said;
Many organisations are reducing footprint and increasing density, which may improve portfolio efficiency, but can unintentionally create cognitive overload, acoustic stress and competition for suitable work settings, particularly during peak days. The most successful organisations are not treating people and place as separate conversations. They are recognising that workplace performance is directly linked to how environments support human behaviour, sensory needs and different modes of work."
On why uneven demand is the defining challenge for workplace leaders right now, Gareth Gilmer, Assistant Director, Space and Workplace Transformation, Queen Mary University of London, said;
The key challenge now is that demand is highly uneven. Driving utilisation too aggressively can damage user experience and reduce the effectiveness of the workplace, whilst retaining excessive latent capacity is increasingly difficult to justify financially. The focus needs to shift toward understanding which spaces genuinely support institutional outcomes, which are resilient to changing patterns of use, and where flexibility can be built into the portfolio.”
On what separates the organizations getting this right, Katherine Harvey, ReThink Workplace Group, said;
"There is growing recognition that if people are making a deliberate choice to come into the workplace, every interaction with the office needs to feel more purposeful, productive and meaningful than before. The trade-off organisations are navigating is no longer simply about desk ratios; it is about balancing flexibility with confidence in the quality of the experience. While businesses may not be able to guarantee a desk for every individual every day, they can create environments where employees trust that they will have the right setting to support the work they need to do, whether that is focused work, collaboration or learning. The most successful organisations are curating workplaces much more intentionally, designing experiences rather than simply providing space."
On the data gap that most teams are still stuck in, Brian Aman, Senior CRE Business Partner, Roger Communications Inc, said;
Our focus is on strengthening the connection between people and place by grounding decisions in available multi-source data. We are analyzing workforce demographics and home-to-work location patterns to better understand commute friction, while offering some flexibility that must be balanced against portfolio efficiency. We still need to provide choice without diluting workplace performance. A key gap across many organizations is the lack of integrated data ecosystems; while we leverage HR, Wi-Fi, reservation, AV, and badge data, much of the insight generation remains manual or semi-automated, highlighting a significant opportunity for deeper integration."
We’ve also included three practical case studies showing what’s possible when occupancy intelligence is actually put to work:
A Sydney consulting firm was facing a classic peak-day problem: meeting rooms appeared fully booked, but employees couldn’t find space. The issue wasn’t supply, it was ghost bookings. By integrating real-time sensor data with their booking platform, they automatically identified and released no-show rooms, reclaiming over 1,000 meetings per month at a single location. No new space required.
A London bank had a large open collaboration area that sat consistently underused, while employees flagged a persistent shortage of private space for calls and small meetings. Rather than add more square footage, the workplace team converted the space into two enclosed two-person focus rooms. Utilization on the same footprint increased by 93%.
A Hong Kong insurance firm identified that energy systems were conditioning large zones regardless of whether anyone was actually in them. By connecting occupancy data to HVAC systems and desk booking software, they’re targeting a 15% reduction in energy consumption, aligning building operations with how the space is genuinely used, not how it was scheduled to be used.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re the kind of decisions that become possible when you move from portfolio averages to location-level insight.
There’s so much more to uncover inside!
Explore the results or download your copy of the XY Sense WUI now.
Interested in learning more about your company’s own unique workplace utilization profile?
Get in touch to coordinate 1-1 briefing or request a demo of our platform.
