Note: For a complete picture of the New York City office market, this report tracks metrics for both traditionally leased office space (asking rents per sq. ft., vacancy rate) and the coworking/shared office industry (coworking inventory, per-desk asking price). See the methodology section at the bottom for more information.
Key Takeaways
Shared Offices:
- Manhattan’s coworking inventory contracted by 200,000 square feet in Q2, erasing part of Q1’s gains.
- Brooklyn compensated by adding a net 122,600 square feet of coworking space, with gains concentrated in Bay Ridge-Sunset Park as well as Central and Southern Brooklyn.
- After a soft Q1, average private office pricing in Manhattan climbed back to $821 per desk in Q2, whereas Brooklyn desks were up to 30% more affordable in the 11- to 20-desk private office category.
Traditional Leases:
- Average asking rents for traditional office leases in Brooklyn spiked by 6.9% between Q1 and Q2 2026, which was ahead of Manhattan’s 3.2% increase and the 2.7% national average.
- Office vacancies held steady in Manhattan, with June matching the 13.1% vacancy rate recorded at the end of March.
Manhattan’s office market indicators remain strong as investor appetite for office space in the nation’s premier office market remains elevated. Average asking rents are climbing at a rate close to the national average, ensuring that the market retains its lead nationally. At the same time, vacancies steadied around 13.1%.
Meanwhile, the coworking and shared office market is turning to New York City’s undersupplied areas. Brooklyn’s coworking inventory expanded by 6.2% on the quarter to nearly offset a quarterly decrease in Manhattan.
Coworking Office Inventory: Undersupplied Areas Get Coworking Inventory Boost
In 2026’s second quarter, coworking inventory in New York City contracted slightly to 15.2 million square feet from the 15.3 million square feet recorded at the end of Q1.
While the needle barely moved city-wide, several trends emerged at the borough level. Manhattan was the only New York borough to see coworking square footage contract. Here, spaces that closed or scaled down included coworking, creative offices and shared lab space, bringing down total inventory by 200,800 square feet. That being said, the decrease is likely a temporary adjustment rather than a permanent shift, as it was lower than the 328,000 square feet that Manhattan added last quarter and equivalent to just 1.6% of current inventory.
At a granular level, several Manhattan submarkets still posted quarterly coworking inventory gains. Namely, Gramercy Park saw another 27,800 square feet join the market after the 91,900 square feet added in Q1, while Greenwich Village’s coworking inventory grew by almost 62,000 square feet in Q2 to reach 329,800 square feet.
However, gains in these submarkets were offset by losses elsewhere. More precisely, the World Trade Center submarket’s coworking inventory contracted by 61,900 square feet, while United Nations-Turtle Bay lost 64,500 and Times Square-Hell’s Kitchen dropped an additional 73,900. Inventory contractions were mostly concentrated in Midtown and Lower Manhattan, while Upper Manhattan’s more modest shared office composition held steady quarter-over-quarter (Q-o-Q).
Notably, Lower Manhattan gained two net locations compared to Q1 while Midtown added one net location, indicating that the market trended to smaller locations rather than shedding overall location counts.
Otherwise, shared offices continue their Brooklyn expansion as New York’s more undersupplied areas catch up with the traditional coworking core. Brooklyn’s coworking inventory reached 2.1 million square feet in Q2 after adding 122,600 square feet (up 6.2% Q-o-Q). The borough’s total coworking space — largely concentrated in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint and Dumbo areas — now exceeds that of major coworking areas such as Gramercy Park or Times Square-Hell’s Kitchen, highlighting Kings County as a prime growing coworking scene in New York.
Brooklyn was also home to the submarket with the largest coworking space growth in Q2: Bay Ridge-Sunset Park. The 77,800 square feet of coworking space expanded the area’s stock by 74% to 183,000 square feet, boosting flexible workspace capacity for companies in the Upper New York Bay area.
Generally, Brooklyn’s less coworking-dense areas added more space in Q2. The submarket encompassing Central and Southern Brooklyn — home to less than 100,000 square feet of coworking space in Q1 — posted the borough’s second-largest inventory expansion at 31,600 square feet. It was followed by Bushwick-Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 30,600-square-foot addition. Meanwhile, Williamsburg-Greenpoint added 18,000 square feet of coworking inventory (a 2.5% expansion) while stock was mostly flat quarter-over-quarter in Dumbo-Vinegar Hill.
For comparison, coworking offices in Queens expanded by a net 6,200 square feet in Q2, equal to an inventory growth of 1.3%, while inventory remained unchanged in the Bronx.
After these gains, Brooklyn’s coworking and flex office spaces total 4.7% of the borough’s total office market (up 30 basis points), as compared to Manhattan’s 2.5% and a national benchmark of 2.3%.
In Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Dumbo still have the highest concentrations of coworking space out of total office space metro-wide. Greenwich Village, Soho and Harlem hold that distinction in Manhattan.
Private Office Pricing Stats: Manhattan Per-Desk Prices Rebound After Q1 Dip
Average per-desk asking prices for office space in Manhattan rebounded to $821 after a 4.6% quarterly increase. In this indicator, Lower Manhattan extended its lead as the city’s most expensive section on a per-desk basis, with average prices here spiking by 15.7% during the second quarter to rest at $947 per desk.
Meanwhile, Brooklyn prices were almost flat quarter-over-quarter after growing from $716 per desk at the end of Q1 2026 to $720 per desk in Q2.
As expected, Brooklyn retained its affordability compared to Manhattan across all office sizes. Average prices were 20% cheaper in Brooklyn for private offices sized for one to five desks, while the 11 to 20 desks category was 31% more affordable here compared to the Manhattan average.
Traditional Office Pricing: Brooklyn Records Steep Rent Growth, Plaza District Asking Rents Exceed $100 per Sq. Ft.
Asking rents for traditional office leases in Manhattan increased by 3.2% in Q2, resting just above $72 per square foot. In contrast, the national average for office lease asking rates increased by a more measured 2.7% to reach $33.67 per square foot at the end of June.
Likewise, Brooklyn office spaces continued their price appreciation in the second quarter. Asking rates here increased by a significant 6.9% Q-o-Q, now standing at $39.46 per square foot. Asking rents in Queens average $41.52 per square foot after posting a 4.6% quarterly increase, while rates in the Bronx dipped by 0.4%, remaining below the national average.
The Plaza District retained the title of New York’s most expensive submarket for traditional offices with an average asking price of $107.46 per square foot. Next, Chelsea ranked second in this regard with an average price of $94.16 per square foot, followed by Soho’s $88.41. Upper Manhattan’s most expensive submarket was Harlem-North Manhattan with an average asking price of $50.73 per square foot.
Brooklyn Heights remains the borough’s priciest submarket. Its average asking rents were flat quarter-over-quarter at $56.31 per square foot. Then, Queens’ Jackson Heights-Elmhurst was the next-priciest NYC submarket outside of Manhattan, with an average asking price of $50 per square foot of office space.
Conversely, Williamsburg-Greenpoint was the city’s most affordable submarket in Q2 with average rents at $26.29 per square foot. It was followed by South Bronx ($27.20) and Fordham Corridor ($29).
Vacancy Rates: Manhattan Vacancies Hold Steady, Matching National Q2 Trend
Manhattan vacancies continued hovering around the 13.1% mark that was also recorded at the end of Q1. The national vacancy rate was also largely unchanged in the same time period, meaning that the approximately 4.5-percentage point gap between Manhattan and the national average remained in place.
Queens is still the NYC borough with the highest average vacancy rate at 22.8%, even after a 170-basis-point decrease on the quarter. Around 14.6% of Brooklyn offices were vacant at the end of Q2, or 150 basis points higher than Manhattan’s rate.
Methodology
This quarterly report covers shared office space inventory, pricing and traditional office market context across the covered region.
Shared space inventory, asking rents and vacancy data were sourced from Yardi Research. Serviced office desk pricing was sourced from Hubble listing data.
Coworking (or flexible) space inventory refers to office inventory operated by coworking, serviced office and managed office providers. Quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) changes in shared inventory were reported in both absolute and percentage terms. The ratio of shared space out of total inventory is calculated as shared space inventory divided by total office inventory.
Average desk prices represent the average monthly listing price for a private office desk based on active Hubble listings during the reporting period.
To ensure statistical reliability, headline Desk Price figures are reported only for boroughs with at least 10 listings with pricing included and borough divisions with at least five listings with pricing included. Desk Price by Office Size segments average monthly desk pricing by the size of the private office using a lower threshold of at least five listings with pricing per borough and at least three listings with pricing per subdivision. Boroughs and subdivisions that fall below these thresholds are omitted from the corresponding tables.
Asking Rent refers to the average full-service (or “full-service equivalent”) asking rent per square foot per year for traditional office space that was available as of the report period.
Vacancy rates do not include owner-occupied properties.
Reporting periods are defined as follows:
- Q1 2026 — Data as of the end of March 2026.
- Q2 2026 — Data as of the end of June 2026.
