Every CFO knows the mandate: cut costs without cutting capability. And for most organizations, there’s one line item that’s been hiding in plain sight—office space. Not because it’s small, but because nobody’s been looking at it honestly.
For years, companies signed long leases built around a workforce that showed up five days a week. That workforce doesn’t exist anymore. Cushman & Wakefield’s national office data puts U.S. vacancy at 20.5%—and that’s the market-level number. Inside individual companies, the gap between space leased and space used is often far worse and it’s costing these organizations substantial sums annually.
What Empty Space Actually Costs
VergeSense estimates that a company with 100 employees wastes an average of $300,000 per year on office space that goes unused. That’s not a rounding error. For a mid-size 15,000-square-foot office, it’s roughly half the total annual cost of occupancy, gone.
To understand where that money goes, you have to look at how office costs actually stack:
The lease itself runs about $35 per square foot—that’s the base.
Opex costs (maintenance, security, janitorial) add another $6.79 per square foot.
Energy runs about $2.14 per square foot, with 17% of that going to lighting alone.
The problem compounds when you factor in opportunity cost. Every square foot paying $43.93 and sitting dark is a square foot that could be downsized, subleased, or eliminated from the portfolio entirely.
IWG estimates that hybrid working saves companies an average of $14,300 per employee—driven primarily by reduced real estate spend and lower utility costs. For a 500-person organization, that’s over $7 million a year in potential savings that most companies are leaving on the table.
The visibility problem makes it worse.
Many companies don’t actually know how bad the underutilization is. Outdated badge systems can’t distinguish between space that’s “available” and space that’s “actually used.” They’re holding portfolios built for a reality that no longer exists—and they can’t see it.
From Fixed Costs to Variable Ones
Office space has always been treated as a fixed cost—a long-term commitment that you build the rest of operations around. That assumption is being dismantled. CBRE’s 2024–2025 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights found that two-thirds of organizations now cite hybrid work as the primary driver behind shrinking their real estate footprint. It’s not a secondary factor. It’s the reason.
And the contraction isn’t slowing down. JLL’s 2025 Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report found that 55% of companies are actively cutting their real estate footprints, with 73% naming portfolio optimization (not cost reduction) as their top priority.
The shift in language matters.
“Cost reduction” is reactive. “Portfolio optimization” means companies are strategically rethinking how much space they need in the first place. This is where the fixed-cost assumption breaks down. When your workforce isn’t in one place five days a week, committing to a static footprint isn’t discipline. Tt’s waste.
The Utilization Gap No One Talks About
Here’s what actually happens inside most offices. The space isn’t empty all week. It’s empty unevenly, and that uneven pattern is where the real cost lives. CBRE’s attendance data shows a consistent pattern: Mondays and Fridays see significantly lower show-up rates, while mid-week days push toward capacity. Their 2025 survey confirms that 73% of organizations report space is at capacity on peak days, but only 34% say the same on average days. You’re paying for five days of space and reliably using two or three.
Closing that gap isn’t about mandating more days in the office. It’s about redesigning how space is allocated in the first place—matching the portfolio to actual demand patterns instead of theoretical headcount. CBRE’s analysis of hybrid workplace math shows that this kind of optimization can yield 10–50% space savings depending on the organization’s attendance model.
Scale to Demand. Not Square Footage.
The companies winning on real estate costs right now aren’t cutting corners. They’re cutting assumptions—specifically, the assumption that workspace has to be a fixed, long-term commitment tied to a single address. The ones falling behind are the ones still measuring success in leased floors.
The shift from fixed to variable space isn’t a future possibility. It’s happening now, and the companies that move first will carry significantly lower overhead into the next decade—without sacrificing access, culture, or employee experience.
Deskpass turns workspace into a variable cost, giving teams on-demand access across hundreds of cities without long-term leases or static footprints. It’s the kind of infrastructure that lets CFOs stop paying for space nobody’s using, and start investing in space that actually delivers.
