Book | Adaptive Spaces
New Zealand Office Occupier Survey 2026
October 11, 2026 11 Minute Read
A market maturing: What four years of survey data tells us
This year's findings point to a hybrid market approaching equilibrium. Average office attendance has lifted to 3.6 days per week, up from 3.4 days in 2025 and close to organisational leadership expectations. Behind the headline, the lift reflects closer links between attendance and enforcement.
Dealing with growth is becoming an increasingly important consideration. Nearly a third of occupiers now operate above 80% workplace utilisation, up from 24% in 2025 and 18% in 2024. For occupiers approaching the top end of the utilisation curve, the practical questions are becoming more urgent: are current desk allocations, neighbourhoods and shared amenities enough to absorb intensifying demand on peak days? Rising utilisation coincides with a growing share of five-day attendees, and the two together will test the design assumptions of workplaces built for lighter, more flexible use. It also underpins the growing proportion of occupiers looking to increase the size of their office footprint.
We have also introduced a new line of inquiry this year on AI: how occupiers are adopting it, and how they expect it to shape real estate strategies and the workforce. AI is expected to make itself felt through the workforce before it reshapes the space that the workforce sits in. This points to a workplace that continues to serve a similar sized workforce but supports a different mix of tasks: less transactional processing, more collaboration, more skills development. That shift, over time, will feed back into space design, though the pace of that feedback will depend on how quickly AI moves from productivity tool to embedded workflow.
How New Zealand occupiers are fine tuning the office in 2026
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Kirstin Cooper
Associate Director, Workplace Consulting, New Zealand
Campbell Pritchard
National Director, Leasing - Office, New Zealand
