How Office Vacancy Compares Across Major US Metros

The US office vacancy rate stood at 18.3% in the second quarter of 2026, but that single national number hides enormous variation between cities. San Francisco's office vacancy sits at 29.2%. Miami's sits at 14.9%. Neither one looks much like the national average, and neither looks much like the other — which is really the point of this comparison. According to CBRE's Q2 2026 US office market data, released for the quarter ended June 2026, the selected markets differ materially from the national figure.

These numbers come from CBRE's Q2 2026 US Office Market Report and the firm's individual metro "Office Figures Q2 2026" pages, all published by the same commercial real estate research firm for the same quarter. That consistency matters more than it sounds — different research firms define and measure office vacancy slightly differently, so comparing a CBRE figure for one city against a JLL or Cushman & Wakefield figure for another would be comparing two different rulers, not two different measurements on the same ruler. Using one firm and quarter improves consistency, but market boundaries, inventory mix and rent conventions can still differ. The availability-versus-vacancy exception is addressed below.

A few other national figures from the same report add context. Leasing activity reached 62.4 million square feet in Q2 2026, up 16% year-over-year. The average asking rent climbed to $37.58 per square foot, up 2.6% year-over-year — CBRE described this as the fastest pace of rent growth in six years, and above the 30-year average. The under-construction pipeline has shrunk to 15.4 million square feet, down 87% from its Q2 2020 peak, meaning very little new supply is coming to compete with existing buildings. And within that 12.3% national prime figure, CBRE singled out Midtown Manhattan's prime vacancy at just 2.2% — a reminder that "vacancy" at the national level blends a lot of empty older buildings with pockets of genuinely scarce, in-demand space.

Four metros, one quarter, four different pictures

The table below uses four selected markets where CBRE's own metro pages report a figure explicitly labeled "vacancy rate" — the same term used for the 18.3% national figure — so the comparison is measuring the same thing in each row. Net absorption and average asking rent are included where each metro's page reported them; “Not reported” means the cited page does not provide the figure; it does not mean zero. Downtown Boston is a downtown submarket, unlike the other broader market geographies, so its figures are useful context rather than a perfectly matched metro-wide comparison.

Notice that each metro's page reported its own change on its own basis: Denver and the national figure both give a quarter-over-quarter move, Boston gives a year-over-year move, and San Francisco and Miami's pages report only the absolute Q2 2026 rate with no comparison figure attached. Rather than force those into a single matching basis, each cell above states exactly what its own source page said — a mismatched-timeframe comparison would create a false sense of precision that the underlying data doesn't support. The national asking rent is a blended figure across the entire country and isn't directly comparable in scale to a single downtown market's rate; it's included here only as a national reference point, not as a fifth "metro" competing on rent.

San Francisco's 29.2% vacancy rate minus Miami's 14.9% leaves a 14.3-percentage-point spread between the highest and lowest of these four selected markets — BestCoworking's own arithmetic on CBRE's reported figures, not a number CBRE itself published. San Francisco and Denver both sit roughly 10 to 11 points above the 18.3% national vacancy figure, while Miami sits more than 3 points below it. The selected markets differ from the national number, which is the practical reason a market-level figure should never stand in for a specific city.

Vacancy and absorption aren't telling the same story

A market can carry high vacancy and still show tenants actively signing new leases in the same quarter — the two figures answer different questions. Vacancy is a stock measure: how much space sits empty right now, reflecting both space vacated by tenants and changes to the stock of office buildings. Net absorption is a flow measure: the change in physically occupied space during a period, net of move-outs; signed leases alone do not count as occupied space until tenants take possession.

San Francisco illustrates this directly. Its vacancy rate is the highest of the four metros here at 29.2%, yet CBRE reported 963,980 square feet of positive net absorption in the same quarter — the market recorded more space becoming occupied than becoming vacant, even while the overall vacant-space total remains historically large. Denver shows the same pattern at a smaller scale: a 28.7% vacancy rate alongside 179,000 square feet of positive absorption and a 20-basis-point vacancy decline. High vacancy from years of accumulated empty space and positive net absorption can coexist in the same market at the same time; one doesn't cancel out the other.

Downtown Boston and Miami sit at the other end of the vacancy range in this group, at 18.7% and 14.9% respectively, and both also posted solid positive absorption — 803,879 square feet and 344,000 square feet. Nationally, CBRE's report frames Q2 2026 as the ninth consecutive quarter of positive demand, alongside the sharpest quarterly vacancy decline the firm has recorded since 2015. Read together, these selected markets recorded positive net absorption during Q2 2026, but a single quarter cannot establish a sustained trend in every local submarket.

How to read the vacancy gap without overstating it

A practical example: what 29.2% vacancy means

Imagine a hypothetical office market with 10 million square feet of tracked inventory. At a 29.2% vacancy rate, 2.92 million square feet would be vacant and 7.08 million would be occupied. This is an illustration of the calculation, not an estimate of San Francisco’s actual inventory or vacant square footage. A vacancy rate alone cannot tell you whether the empty space is in the buildings, neighborhoods, sizes or quality tiers a particular tenant needs.

What office vacancy doesn't tell you about coworking

Everything above describes traditional commercial office leasing — multi-year leases on entire floors or buildings, tracked by square footage that sits empty or gets absorbed. It says nothing directly about coworking or flexible-office inventory, pricing or demand in any of these metros. A market with high traditional office vacancy, like San Francisco or Denver in this data, doesn't automatically mean flexible-space operators there have spare capacity, and a tighter market like Miami doesn't automatically mean coworking memberships are scarce or expensive. Traditional office leasing and flexible/coworking space are different products serving different lease terms and different tenant needs, tracked through entirely separate data. This is also a distinct measurement from the badge-entry occupancy tracking and self-reported work-from-home survey data covered in other BestCoworking Insights coverage — vacancy describes how much office inventory is unoccupied, not how many people show up to work each day or where employees say they're working. None of these measures substitutes for another.

Anyone actually deciding where to base a team, whether that's a full private office or a coworking membership, gets more useful information from checking specific listings and asking operators directly what's available in a given building or neighborhood than from a metro-wide vacancy statistic. Readers can browse current US coworking and office listings and contact operators directly on BestCoworking for that kind of specific, current answer.

Questions to ask before using a vacancy figure for a workspace decision

Bottom line: CBRE’s Q2 2026 figures show that the selected office markets have substantially different vacancy levels, even while each reported positive net absorption. They do not measure coworking occupancy or predict what a specific team will pay. Use market statistics to frame questions, then verify individual buildings, offers and terms before choosing a workspace.