Americans Are Going Everywhere Except Back to the Office

For nearly two years, pandemic-weary Americans have been pleading for one thing: We want our lives back. And in many ways, we now have our lives back — just not our work lives. Too many employees are still working from home. It’s reached the point where employers need to prioritize returning to the office, an argument President Joe Biden made emphatically in his State of the Union address: “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again.”

Kastle Systems has been tracking America’s return to work since early in the Covid-19 pandemic to gauge where, or whether, people are going back into the office. By scouring key-card and mobile phone-access data in 10 key cities, we can see where office life is getting back to some semblance of normal (as in Texas) and where offices remain largely vacant (as in California). We can even see trends within industries: Law firms have meaningfully higher rates of occupancy than other sectors. The data represent a cross-section of American businesses, with no sector dominating our analyses.