A new survey by the city’s leading business group provides further evidence of just how sticky work from home remains, in spite of exhortations from bosses to return to the office.
The Partnership for New York City said that 57% of Manhattan office workers have returned on the average workday, a scant one percentage-point increase over 2024 and a bit below a 2023 reading of 58%. About 30 of the city’s 125 leading employers surveyed between March 5 and 20 said they would impose stricter office-attendance requirements later this year.
“Momentum is going in the right direction,” said Partnership CEO Kathy Wylde.
Even so, in an ominous sign for office landlords, the percentage of New Yorkers at their office desks has barely changed since September 2023 when the Partnership reported an increase from 52%. Return-to-office rates have flattened nationwide in spite of workers being summoned back by big companies, including Amazon and JPMorgan, neither of which participated in the Partnership’s survey. The Trump administration has demanded federal workers return to the office.
“I think a big explanation is that many of these return-to-office announcements are not enforced properly, or enforced for a few weeks and then ignored,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist and remote-work expert at Stanford University. “We are genuinely in a new stable normal.”
A new stable normal isn’t good news for the city’s office-tower owners, many of whom are struggling to lease up empty floors and refinance debts that can reach into the billions of dollars.
Manhattan’s office vacancy rate of 23.3% at the end of 2024 was slightly higher than the prior-year’s 22.8%, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Shares in the city’s biggest office landlord, SL Green, have fallen by 14% since the year began, and as a group office-building owners are down 10%, according to BMO Capital Markets.
“Rising job cuts and economic uncertainty [are] overshadowing improving office demand,” BMO analyst John Kim said in a client report this week.
Wylde said there’s been “a lot of reticence” among employers to demand workers come back, because companies are focusing more on how Trump administration policies could affect their business.
“It’s a level of uncertainty that’s affected how much energy employers have put into return-to-office,” she said.
Even workers who have returned to office most often are coming in less than before, Partnership data show. In real estate, 85% of professionals are at the office on the average workday but that’s down from 96% before the pandemic. Among lawyers and bankers, 62% are back but in prior times 80% came to the office. Of tech workers, 63% are back, but back in the day it was 84%.
Wylde praised city and state leaders helping office attendance by improving safety on New York’s streets and subways. Ridership on the subway and Metro-North is running at 78% of pre-pandemic levels, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It’s 85% on the Long Island Rail Road.
She said the next step would require shortening commutes that have lengthened in recent years because workers must look farther for affordable housing. She is confident recent law and zoning changes will create more affordable housing in and closer to the city.
“One reason remote work is attractive is people can’t afford to live close to the city,” she said.
