US Marks Post-Covid Milestone: Half of Office Workers Back at Their Desks

by Meir Sternhill

The post-pandemic return to normalcy may be taking much longer than anticipated, but a milestone was crossed when 50 percent of office space around the United States was occupied for the first time in three years.

An index of ten major metropolitan areas by the Kastle Systems shows that more than half of American workers were back at their desks for the week ending on Jan. 25. The 50.4 percent rate marked a 0.9 percent increase over the week before. In an another first, every one of the country's ten top cities reached an office occupancy rate of at least 40 percent. 

The slow return to in-person work has been very uneven, though. While the industrial city of Austin had an occupancy rate of nearly 68 percent, Silicon Valley, with its tech- and media-heavy roster of companies is stuck at 41 percent. 

Kastle, a business security firm, measured office occupancy rates by activity at access cards in buildings. It shows that the flexibility offered by companies for workers to operate remotely is dragging on years after Covid has ceased to be the deadly virus it initially was.

photo credit: Flickr