Every Major Company Reducing Office Space: 2020-2025
At Buildremote, we’ve reported a staggering amount of well-known companies that have implemented some form of permanent remote work. Next, we analyzed in-depth the true plans for the Fortune 500’s return to office. As of October 2024, only 10 of the Fortune 100 had declared a full return to the office for all employees. The others planned to never come back in full, come back in a hybrid approach, or delay their returns indefinitely.
Well, as it turns out, if thousands of companies are going remote and thousands aren’t ever going back into the office at full capacity, the demand for office space could crater. It seems that is starting to happen.
In our research, you’ll find every notable announcement from companies reducing, downsizing, or altogether dropping their office spaces.
Here are a few notes about the research:
- I included every public announcement/news story about companies reducing office spaces since March 2020 (as a result of COVID and the switch to remote work)
- I searched every Fortune 100‘s name to see if they had reduced office space: all of the announcements are included here
- I set the minimum number of employees at 1,000 to highlight well-known companies only
- I did not include these companies that reduced office space:
- They actually switched office buildings (ie. no net reduction in space)
- They downsized as a result of layoffs
- I update the research monthly with new announcements
Major Companies Reducing Office Space
Or, access a sample of the database first.
Below, you’ll find 16 notable office reductions over the last few years.
Company | Date | Lease Plan | Story | Remote Policy |
 Lyft | Downsize | "Lyft has renewed its lease for its San Francisco headquarters, signing on to another decade in a space that’s less than half the size of its original hub as the company adjusts to pandemic-era changes." | Hybrid | |
 X (Twitter) | Sublease | "'This is the final straw,' Musk said in announcing that X would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas." | Office First | |
 Cardinal Health | Sublease | "Cardinal Health is seeking a sublessee for the building at 5100 Rings Road through 2029. The company owns another building at 7200 Cardinal Place West, which is now unoccupied, too." | Hybrid | |
 General Motors | Sublease | "The automaker plans to downsize its office space significantly, my colleague JC Reindl reported, taking just two office floors in the new Hudson's building, each about 50,000 square feet." | Hybrid | |
 Amazon | Cancel | "Tech and e-commerce giant Amazon (AMZN) is hatching a plan to save $1.3 billion by significantly reducing its office space and ending leases early." | Hybrid | |
 Bank of America | Cancel | "Bank of America plans to vacate all 13 floors it occupies in a Charlotte, North Carolina, office tower with more than a year left on its lease." | Office First | |
 Verizon | Sublease | "Verizon...plans to sublease the 143,000 square feet at Essex Crossing (which Verizon never built out or occupied)." | Hybrid | |
 Microsoft | Sublet | "Microsoft to vacate 50,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco as tech-xodus continues amid drug and crime 'doom loop'." | Hybrid | |
 Meta (Facebook) | Cancel Let Lease Expire | September 2023 "Meta has paid £149mn to break its lease on a major London development." December 2022 "Meta has listed a 113,585-square-foot building in Fremont for sublease." October 2022 "Meta will take a $2 billion financial hit to close offices and scrap leases as revenue growth slows at the social media giant." | Hybrid | |
 Johnson & Johnson | Sublease | "Johnson & Johnson is slashing its Tampa office space by more than 60%. It will leave behind nearly 90,000 square feet." | Hybrid | |
 Charles Schwab | "The financial services company is hoping to reduce its real estate footprint by 'closing floors or closing offices' at its downtown office space (SF). Similar downsizing efforts are planned for... Boston; Chicago; Henderson, Nevada; and Jersey City, while offices in Atlanta, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis and Tampa are slated to close completely." | Hybrid | ||
 Alphabet (Google) | Sublease | "Google has put more than 1.4 million square feet of office space in Silicon Valley on the sublease market. Reducing its Bay Area real estate holdings is part of the tech company’s efforts to reassess its global real estate footprint." | ||
 Exxon Mobil | April 2023 | Sell | "The campus – a 290-acre masterplanned campus centered around a 379,000-square-foot office building – will hit the market relatively soon now that Exxon Mobil Corp. is moving its headquarters to the Houston area." | Hybrid |
 Walmart | "Walmart plans to close three of its U.S. technology hubs and require hundreds of workers to relocate to keep their jobs, according to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal." | |||
 Chevron | Sell | "Chevron plans to sell its 92-acre headquarters campus in San Ramon, seek smaller office space in the city and move some employees to Houston. The headquarters complex of Chevron Park includes 13 buildings encompassing 1.4M SF and more than 2,000 workers." | Hybrid | |
 JPMorgan Chase | "JPMorgan Chase, New York City’s largest office tenant, cut its commercial footprint by 400,000 square feet last year. The bank, which has said it plans to “significantly reduce” its global office footprint in the coming years, also downsized by 300,000 square feet in 2020." | Office First | ||
See Also:
- Every Fortune 500’s Return To Office Policy
- Every Major CEO Stepping Down
- Every Business Leaving San Francisco
- Why Are Companies Returning To The Office?
- The Companies That Own Everything
Lease Plan Definitions
In the table, you’ll see a few different classifications in the “lease plan” column. That column is where we marked the company’s intention to exit the office space. Here’s how we define the terms you see there.
- Cancel: The company plans to terminate its lease early which usually comes with a penalty fee.
- Downsize: The company let its existing lease expire and renewed with less square footage.
- Let Lease Expire: The company let its lease expire without renewing.
- Sell: The company owns its office building but has put it up for sale (or plans to put it up for sale).
- Sublease: The company is seeking a tenant to take over its existing lease so it can exit.
- Unknown: For cells that are blank, this means the company did not release its plans for exiting the office space.
Remote Policy Definitions
In the table, you’ll see a few different classifications in the “remote policy” column. Here’s how we define remote work policies.
- Optional: Employees have the option to work from home or the office.
- Partial: Some employees, based on role and situation, are able to work from home.
- Remote First: The processes required to work remotely lead the company’s operations, with in-office processes coming second.
- Fully Remote: The company does not have any physical office locations.
- Hybrid: The company plans to have employees working from home part of the time and in an office part of the time.
See Also: Every Company Going Remote Permanently
Statistics About Office Space Downsizing
The statistics and studies tell a mind-boggling story about the drop in demand for office space as a result of the move to remote and hybrid work. Here are a few to highlight the extent to which companies are reducing office space.
- CBRE Group Inc., April 2022: “Commercial vacancy rates in San Francisco rose to 23.8% during the first quarter of 2022, according to a report from real estate services firm CBRE. That’s higher than the levels seen during the peak of the dot-com crash (19% in 2003 and 16% in 2010).”
- Colliers, March 2022: “Just under 94 million square feet of office space is available for rent in Manhattan, according to a report from Colliers. The availability rate reached 17.4 percent last month, up 74 percent since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, even as demand has more than doubled from a year ago.”
- CBRE Group Inc., July 2021: More than a year into the pandemic, demand for office space has decreased significantly. During the first quarter, the amount of U.S. office space that became vacant exceeded the amount of space that was leased by 34.8 million square feet, commercial real-estate services and investment firm CBRE Group Inc. said. The difference between the two figures—known in the industry as net absorption—was the largest in at least two decades, CBRE said.
- Cushman & Wakefield PLC, July 2021: About 16.4% of office space across the country stood empty at the end of the first quarter, up from 13% a year earlier, according to Cushman & Wakefield PLC, a commercial real-estate firm.
- Fortune, June 2021: “74% of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to reduce office space.“
- PwC, June 2021: “PwC predicts that half of the 258 biggest firms in the UK are planning to cut size of their property portfolio.”
- JP Morgan Chase, April 2021: “For every 100 JPMorgan staffers, CEO Jamie Dimon estimated, they would need just 60 desks.”
- Avison Young, September 2020: “Space available for sublease in downtown Toronto nearly tripled to 1.7 million square feet in August of 2020 from the end of last year.”
See Also:
Want to add a notable announcement?
We researched extensively and update the list every month. But inevitably, we’ll miss some notable companies. Fill in this form to let us know who we missed.
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