Nordic offices operate at roughly one-third of their capacity — even on the busiest days, utilization stays below 50%.
The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report reveals the patterns behind hybrid work: which days peak, where energy is wasted, and what the data says about the gap between assumptions and reality.
Based on full-year sensor data from hundreds of Nordic workplaces.
Your office hit 46% utilization on Tuesday. Sounds manageable, right? Now ask: what happened at 11 a.m.?
Most facility managers can tell you their building's average utilization. Many can tell you their peak day. But very few can describe the shape of a single day — the morning ramp-up, the midday spike, the afternoon taper, the Friday ghost town. And that shape is where the real planning decisions hide.
Daily peak utilization — the single busiest hour of the day — has become the default metric for workplace planning across the Nordics and beyond. It's easy to measure, easy to report, and easy to benchmark. But as a basis for sizing offices, scheduling services, and justifying leases, it's dangerously incomplete.
The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report uses daily peak as its primary headline metric — and for good reason. It captures the busiest moment of the day and provides a consistent, comparable data point across buildings and weeks. Across Nordic offices in 2025, those daily peaks range from 34% on Fridays to 46% on Tuesdays.
But here's what a single peak number hides: an office that hits 46% at 11 a.m. on Tuesday might sit at 15% at 8 a.m. and 25% by 3 p.m. The peak is real, but it lasts perhaps an hour or two. The rest of the day looks nothing like it. If you size your office — and your services — for that one-hour spike, you're over-provisioning for the other seven hours of the workday.
Recent academic research from Aalto University illustrates this vividly. In one study, the daily average utilization of an office was just 28%, while the peak reached 88%. Even when narrowed to core office hours (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.), the gap between average and peak was still 21 percentage points. Average and peak are both true — but they describe completely different realities. And neither one, on its own, tells you how to plan.
This is the real tension in workplace planning. If you plan for the average, you'll run out of desks every Tuesday. If you plan for the absolute peak, you'll have empty floors every Friday. Both approaches lead to waste — just different kinds.
The smarter question isn't "what's our utilization?" but "how often does our space fall short?" Academic research suggests a practical threshold: size the office so that demand exceeds supply only 1–5% of the time. That means you accept that on a handful of exceptional days — a company event, a full-team week, an end-of-quarter crunch — people might need to flex. But on the other 95–99% of days, space works.
This approach requires something that neither a single average nor a single peak can deliver: a distribution. You need to know not just the highest point but how often each level of demand actually occurs. That means continuous measurement, not a one-week study once a year.
Daily peak also hides variation between buildings. The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report shows that around 17% of Nordic buildings operate at consistently low utilization (0–25%), while roughly 54% sit in the moderate range (26–50%). Only about 3% reach very high levels. A portfolio average of 41% could mean ten buildings all running at 41% — or it could mean three buildings at 70% and seven at 25%. The operational response should be completely different, but the headline number looks the same.
There's also within-day variation that daily peak smooths over. An office that peaks at 46% might have one floor at 80% and another at 12% at the same moment. If you're making cleaning, HVAC, or catering decisions at the building level, you're treating those two floors identically — and getting it wrong on both.
And then there's the seasonal dimension. Nordic offices show a clear annual rhythm: utilization peaks in February and March, dips through spring, hits its lowest point in July (29% in the EG Worksense data), and rebounds through autumn. A daily peak measured in February tells a very different story from one measured in June. Without full-year data, any single snapshot can mislead.
To be clear: daily peak utilization isn't a bad metric. It serves an important purpose as a consistent, comparable benchmark. The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report rightly uses it as its primary indicator, and it's the standard across the industry.
The problem arises when it becomes the only metric informing decisions. When a single number drives lease negotiations, service contracts, and layout redesigns, it carries far more weight than it was designed to bear.
What modern workplace management needs is a richer picture: peak alongside average, distribution alongside point estimates, building-level data alongside portfolio averages, and full-year trends alongside weekly snapshots. The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report introduces complementary metrics like Presence Volatility — the day-to-day variance around the average — precisely because a single utilization number can't capture how predictably or erratically a space is used.
The shift isn't complicated, but it does require a change in mindset. Instead of asking "what's our utilization?", the better questions are: How often does demand exceed capacity? Which buildings are consistently under-served — and which are over-provisioned? What does Monday look like compared to Wednesday — and does our operations reflect that difference? How much does utilization swing from week to week, and can we plan around that volatility?
These aren't questions a single daily peak can answer. But they're exactly the questions that continuous, multi-dimensional presence data makes possible. And they're the questions that separate organizations managing space by habit from those managing it by evidence.
Daily peak got us started. But the decisions ahead — about leases, services, carbon, and employee experience — deserve better than a single number.
This article draws on findings from the Nordic Workplace Utilization Report (full-year data). For Nordic-specific benchmarks and a deeper look at presence-based metrics,
Nordic offices operate at roughly one-third of their capacity — even on the busiest days, utilization stays below 50%.
The Nordic Workplace Utilization Report reveals the patterns behind hybrid work: which days peak, where energy is wasted, and what the data says about the gap between assumptions and reality.
Based on full-year sensor data from hundreds of Nordic workplaces.
