Global office attendance has pushed past pre-pandemic levels for the first time, and the return-to-office fight that dominated 2023 and 2024 has quietly given way to a different question: how do employers prove people are actually showing up, and why. New data from CBRE puts peak office utilization at 80 percent worldwide, ahead of the 65 to 75 percent range typical before 2020, and the firm’s own read on the shift is not that mandates won. It is that organizations are now building the measurement infrastructure to back up whatever policy they choose.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
CBRE’s report, “The Affiliation Imperative: The Office’s New Purpose, What the Data Shows,” is the fourth installment in the firm’s 2026 Global Workplace and Occupancy Insights series. Average office use rose to 53 percent in 2025, up from 38 percent in 2024, the largest single-year jump the firm has recorded since 2021. Peak utilization, the busiest days and hours, hit 80 percent, exceeding the pre-2020 norm of 65 to 75 percent.
The space itself is changing in step with attendance. Global occupancy rates now sit at 111 percent, meaning more employees are sharing the same desks and offices than the space was originally sized for. Most organizations have moved to an employee-to-desk ratio between 1.01 and 1.49, away from the traditional one-to-one assignment. Shared support spaces, meeting rooms, huddle areas, and informal gathering spots, are up 35 percent across the Americas since 2021, and amenity spaces have grown 120 percent over the same period.
From Mandate to Measurement
The more consequential number for HR is not attendance itself but who is tracking it and how. CBRE found that the share of organizations enforcing in-office attendance policies doubled to 37 percent in 2025, up from 17 percent in 2024, and that 69 percent of workplaces now measure policy compliance, up from 45 percent in 2024. That marks a shift from RTO as a stated expectation to RTO as a data pipeline: badge swipes, desk-booking software, and workplace-analytics platforms feeding dashboards that HR and real estate teams both watch.
Fidelity’s decision to order 21,000 employees back five days a week is the kind of hard mandate that made headlines over the past two years. CBRE’s data suggests that mandate is now the less interesting part of the story. The harder work, and the part landing on HR’s desk, is building the systems that can say with confidence who complied, who did not, and whether the policy is actually producing the outcomes it was written to produce.
That data pipeline creates its own exposure. A badge-and-sensor layer built purely to catch noncompliance reads to employees as surveillance, and HR teams that roll it out without explaining what is measured and why risk trading one morale problem, low attendance, for another, low trust. The employers CBRE describes as succeeding are pairing the measurement layer with visible investment in the spaces people are being measured for using, not deploying tracking as a standalone enforcement tool.
Why Affiliation, Not Fiat, Is Driving Attendance
CBRE frames the driver as culture rather than compliance: “This growth reflects organizations’ rising conviction that culture is cultivated, not assumed.” The firm’s research points to team presence and in-person collaboration opportunities as the strongest predictors of whether employees choose to show up, ahead of policy enforcement itself. That lines up with the investment pattern in the data: employers are not just tracking attendance, they are spending on the spaces that make attendance worth it, more shared and amenity space per square foot than at any point since the pandemic began.
For HR technology vendors, that reframes the workplace-analytics pitch. A dashboard that only reports who badged in is now competing against one that can also show whether the space and schedule people were given actually supported the collaboration that draws them back voluntarily. The 2025 data suggests employers are starting to buy the second kind, and procurement conversations are shifting accordingly from pure occupancy tracking toward tools that connect attendance data to engagement and retention outcomes.
What This Means for the HR Leader
Four practical implications follow from CBRE’s numbers.
First, workplace-analytics procurement is no longer purely a facilities decision. With 69 percent of employers now measuring compliance, HR needs a seat in choosing which desk-booking, badge, and occupancy-sensor systems generate that data, because the numbers will surface in performance conversations, real estate planning, and eventually litigation risk around inconsistent enforcement.
Second, a 111 percent global occupancy rate means many offices are now genuinely oversubscribed on peak days. HR and workplace teams that have not modeled peak-day capacity against actual headcount risk a policy that looks compliant on paper but fails visibly on the floor, no desks, no rooms, no parking, at exactly the moments leadership is watching most closely.
Third, the amenity and shared-space spending CBRE documents, up 120 percent since 2021, signals that employers seeing the best voluntary attendance are treating the office as a product employees choose, not a policy they endure. HR teams building 2027 workplace strategy should budget for that rather than assuming a mandate alone will hold.
Fourth, whatever monitoring system HR adopts needs a data-governance answer before it needs a dashboard: who sees individual attendance records, how long they are retained, and whether they feed disciplinary decisions are questions employees will ask the moment compliance measurement becomes visible, and HR should have the answer ready rather than reactive.
The Bottom Line
The RTO debate that consumed HR bandwidth for three years is resolving less through argument than through infrastructure: badge data, occupancy sensors, and compliance dashboards are becoming as standard to workplace strategy as the policies themselves. HR leaders who treat that measurement layer as someone else’s project, IT’s, facilities’, real estate’s, will find themselves accountable for numbers they never had a say in generating.
Source: CBRE
