Office occupancy data has moved a long way since 2023. Measured utilization is up, peaks are sharper, and averages hide both. Turning that into a real service cadence means splitting fixed compliance work from demand driven work. URBI holds the booking, ticket and audit records that cadence runs on.
What do office utilization benchmarks actually say now?
Measured utilization has risen every year since 2023, and peaks faster than averages. That gap is the scheduling problem.
- CBRE, reporting in 2026 across client portfolios covering 303 million square feet, found average utilization of 53 percent in 2025, up from 38 percent in 2024 and 35 percent in 2023. See the CBRE report.
- The same research puts peak use at an average of 80 percent globally, against 65 to 75 percent before the pandemic, as reported by Facilities Dive.
- JLL, drawing on 84 organizations representing 716 million square feet, reports 56 percent global utilization in 2026, up from 54 percent in 2025 and 49 percent in 2024, against a pre pandemic 61 percent. See the JLL benchmark report.
Do not blend those numbers. Different samples, different methods. They show the direction changed, not a target for your building. Real portfolios sit far apart: the United States Government Accountability Office found seventeen of twenty four federal agencies below 25 percent of headquarters capacity in sampled 2023 weeks.
Which occupancy signal should set the schedule?
None of them alone. Badge, sensor and booking data measure three different things, and using one where another belongs is how occupancy programs fail.
| Signal | What it proves | What it does not prove | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Badge and access control | A credential crossed an entrance | Where the person went, or for how long | Attendance trend, day of week patterns |
| Occupancy sensors | Presence, sometimes counts, per zone | Headcount, when the sensor is presence only. Devices drift and fail | Releasing or confirming tasks in one zone |
| Booking data | Intended demand, known before the day starts | Attendance. A booked room nobody used still reads as demand | Forecasting tomorrow's route and staffing |
Two caveats. Kastle, publisher of a widely cited badge benchmark, notes that its report covers partner access control data in ten metro areas and is not a national statistical sample. A 2022 systematic review in Sensors notes that passive infrared, ultrasonic and acoustic sensors can only tell you whether a room is occupied, not how many people are in it.
Booking data is the cheapest of the three, because you already collect it, and the only one that arrives before the work must be scheduled. Treat it as a forecast, then confirm with a check in, a sensor or a quick look before suppressing a task.
How do you set frequencies for low, normal and peak days?
You calibrate them on site. No regulator, standards body or published study sets universal percentages for low, normal and peak office cleaning, so a vendor handing you fixed thresholds is guessing. Split the schedule into two buckets: work that may follow demand, and work with a floor no matter who showed up.
| Band | How to define it | What changes | What never changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low | Your verified low use range, by day, hour, floor and space type | Suppress unused desk and room tasks after confirmation. Redirect hours to deep cleaning and preventive maintenance | Visible soil cleaning, restroom inspection, waste control, water management, fixed maintenance |
| Normal | The recurring middle range where inspection scores, complaints, stockouts and response times stay inside contract | Run the validated baseline route | The same compliance floor |
| Peak | Forecast or live count above baseline capacity, or an event, queue, stockout or complaint trigger | Add intraday restroom, pantry, lobby and waste rounds where the trigger is | The same floor, plus escalation capacity in reserve |
That floor is written elsewhere, not by you. OSHA 1910.141 requires that all places of employment be kept clean to the extent the nature of the work allows. The CDC advises cleaning surfaces when they are visibly dirty and disinfecting when someone is sick. The EPA warns owners to act against water stagnation in low use buildings, so a quiet floor needs more flushing, not less. ASHRAE Standard 180 sets inspection frequency by interval, run time or condition as established in the maintenance plan.
What does this do to staffing and consumables?
Occupancy is not a staffing multiplier. A building at half capacity does not need half the cleaners. Lobbies, restrooms, mechanical rooms and fixed inspections do not shrink with attendance, and everyone who came in may be on one floor.
- Build labor from tasks. Task time by occurrences by zones, then compare planned hours against completed work orders and inspection results. Square footage alone gives a number that looks defensible but is not.
- Hold flex capacity for peaks. A 53 percent average next to an 80 percent peak means a day porter or flex shift is the difference between a normal Wednesday and a complaint thread.
- Set consumables from observed use. Soap, tissue, towel, pantry and waste volumes come from use per occupied person day, plus safety stock. Stockouts are the fastest signal the bands are wrong.
- Check the data first. JLL research published in 2025 found only 7 percent of surveyed organizations rated their data collection as excellent, per Wei Xie, Head of Research and Strategy for Workplace Management at JLL. Duplicate badge identities and stale floor plans do not improve when you automate on top of them.
What happens to tenant experience when the cadence is wrong?
It fails in both directions, and the failures cost different things. Over service burns hours you could have spent on deferred maintenance, and tenants never notice, so you get no credit. Under service is noticed at once, in the three places people judge a building: the restroom, the lobby and the coffee point.
The dangerous failure is the quiet one. A fixed route carries redundancy nobody budgeted for. A cleaner walking a low use floor finds the leak, the odor, the blocked exit, the failed dispenser. Suppress that route on an occupancy reading and you save labor while losing an inspection that came free. Keep an inspection floor on every zone.
Susheel Koul, Chief Executive Officer of Work Dynamics for Asia Pacific at JLL, framed it in a 2024 JLL statement: "Being able to plan and manage fluctuating weekly occupancy patterns will be crucial" to how these workplaces perform.
How do you review exceptions instead of rebuilding the schedule?
You freeze the baseline and run an exception layer on top. Rebuilding the route weekly destroys the thing that makes a schedule auditable: a stable plan to compare actual work against.
- Before the shift. Reconcile bookings, events, badge trend, tenant notices and open tickets, apply overrides, then release the route.
- During the shift. Let stockouts, spills, odors, queues and complaints create or escalate a ticket. Those are exceptions, not schedule changes.
- After the shift. Compare planned against completed. Log response times, inspection failures, and anywhere the data said empty while reality said busy.
- Quarterly, or on a real change. Re baseline the bands when tenant mix, in office policy, layout, season or sensor coverage changes. Review lease and code requirements separately.
JLL research in 2025 noted that nearly half of organizations now mandate specific in office days, roughly double the 2023 share, per Melissa Michalik, Global Leader of Occupancy Planning and Management at JLL. That is the kind of change that should trigger a re baseline, not a weekly scramble.
Where does URBI fit, and where does it not?
URBI is not an occupancy sensor platform and does not do badge access analytics. It holds the operational records the cadence runs on, and connects them so every schedule change is traceable.
- Booking data you already have. Every conference room, board room, training room, hot desk and shared space booked through URBI amenity booking is an occupancy signal that costs nothing extra to collect. Amenities carry maximum occupancy, opening hours, time slots and an optional check in, so you can compare booked against attended.
- Recurring tickets carry the cadence. Service tickets recur daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or on a custom frequency, with two trigger types: fire on the calendar, or fire after the last instance closes. That stops a quarterly inspection piling up when one run went late.
- Contractors need no login. Cleaning vendors get a tokenized work order link by email. They schedule the visit, toggle subtasks and upload completion photos, with no account and no license. Vendor coordination stays in the ticket.
- HERO answers usage questions from live records. HERO is the operator facing AI inside URBI. Ask which shared spaces went unused last month, and it queries the live database and builds the view. HERO proposes, people approve. You can ask your property data directly.
- The audit trail answers the complaint. Check in logs, ticket activity and vendor completion photos show what was done, when, and by whom. That is the record a tenant contact wants when they say the fourth floor restroom was skipped.
See URBI for commercial buildings, the commercial operator guide, or what URBI is.
Frequently asked questions
Can I set cleaning frequencies from a published utilization benchmark?
No. The CBRE and JLL numbers describe different samples using different methods, and neither is a census. They tell you which way the market moved. Your bands come from your own building, measured by day, hour, floor and space type, then validated against inspection scores and stockouts.
Is booking data good enough on its own to schedule cleaning?
It is good enough to forecast, not to release work. A booked room nobody attended still reads as demand, so a schedule driven purely by reservations sends cleaners to empty rooms and misses drop in use. Use bookings to plan route and staffing the night before, then confirm on the day.
Does URBI replace an occupancy sensor system?
No. URBI does not sense occupancy and does not analyze badge access. It holds the booking records, recurring service tickets, vendor coordination and audit trail that turn whatever occupancy signal you have into scheduled, completed, provable work. Many operators run sensors alongside it. URBI is where the cadence lives.
A cadence you can defend to a tenant contact or an asset owner depends more on records than on sensors. Talk to us about how URBI handles bookings, recurring tickets, vendor access, audit trails and tenant communication. Email hello@myurbi.co.
