Key Insights
- NYC coworking locations rebounded to 386 in 2025 after a slight contraction in 2024.
- Flex space growth outpaced traditional leases, expanding by 6.34% in NYC between 2024 and 2025.
- Growth in NYC’s outer areas was even stronger at 8.04% over the same period.
- Metro-wide coworking now accounts for 507 locations, reflecting ongoing regional expansion.
In 2025, New York City’s office landscape is undergoing a significant transformation, driven by the rise of coworking spaces.
Flexible work has become a defining feature of the post-pandemic economy, and coworking is meeting this shift head-on, offering ready-to-use environments that let businesses scale quickly, control costs, and respond to evolving work patterns without the rigidity of a long-term lease.
Flex Space Growth: Locations & Trends
The evolution of coworking in NYC over the past three years reflects both market correction and renewed optimism.
In 2023, there were 387 coworking locations across the city, a number that dipped to 363 in 2024 as operators adjusted their footprints in response to shifting post-pandemic demand. The decline reflected a broader phase of consolidation across the industry, as some providers scaled back, merged, or closed underperforming sites.
By 2025, coworking locations rebounded sharply to 386, nearly regaining 2023 levels, and highlighting the push and pull typical of a growing industry still settling into a more stable long-term shape.
In NYC’s outer areas, the growth trajectory has been even more robust. There were 118 coworking locations in 2023, a small decline to 112 in 2024, before rising significantly to 121 in 2025—a net increase representing an 8.04% year-over-year growth rate. Across the larger metro area, coworking space counts rose from 475 in 2024 to 507 in 2025, marking a healthy 6.74% expansion.
This pattern illustrates that while traditional leased offices continue to dominate total square footage, coworking spaces are quickly becoming an essential feature of the office landscape, particularly as businesses seek flexibility, scalability, and lower overhead amid continued economic uncertainty.
Flex vs. Lease: Space, Growth & Allocation
Traditional leases still make up the bulk of New York City’s office market, with more than 530 million square feet allocated to leased space in 2025. In comparison, coworking and flex offices account for about 13.6 million square feet, just under 3% of the total. That’s a big difference, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
While leases dominate in size, flex spaces are gaining ground. From 2024 to 2025, coworking locations in NYC grew by 6.34%, and growth was even faster in the outer boroughs, where flex space jumped by 8.04%. This steady climb suggests there’s still strong demand for flexible setups, especially outside Manhattan’s traditional office hubs.
On average, coworking spaces in NYC are around 34,874 square feet, much smaller than the 253,719 square feet average for leased offices. That 86% gap might seem surprising at first, but it makes sense. Most coworking operators are building smaller, more adaptable environments that can serve startups, hybrid teams, and freelancers—groups that typically don’t need (or want) massive square footage.
Meanwhile, the lease average is pulled up by large corporate offices and long-term tenants with big footprints, many of which were designed years ago when full-time, in-office work was the norm.
Part of this difference comes down to structure. Traditional leases tend to lock tenants into full floors or multi-floor spaces for years. Flex spaces, by contrast, are built to be agile, divided into smaller units, used by multiple teams, and designed for shorter commitments.
The rise in coworking outside the city center also speaks to how work patterns are changing. As fewer people commute into Manhattan five days a week—about 28% below prepandemic attendance—there’s more demand for workspaces closer to where people actually live. This “hub-and-spoke” approach, where businesses use a central HQ plus smaller satellite spaces, has gained traction in the wake of hybrid work trends.
So, while flex space still represents a small slice of NYC’s total office market, it’s playing a growing and increasingly strategic role. Not a replacement for leased offices, but a complement, giving companies more options as they rethink how and where their teams work.
Coworking in Context: Class Matters
Coworking isn’t just about design or convenience; it’s also about real estate class and geographic spread. In NYC, approximately 44% of coworking inventory operates from Class A and A+ buildings, while 46% is located in Class B buildings, with the remainder in Class C properties.
This class distribution reflects distinct patterns of concentration and spread. As of 2025, NYC proper—defined as the five boroughs—hosts 117 coworking locations in Class A buildings and an additional 36 in Class A+ (trophy) buildings, underscoring the concentration of premium coworking environments in the urban core. In contrast, NYC’s outer areas account for 21 Class A coworking spaces, highlighting that premium coworking remains most prevalent in the city itself.
Class B coworking is more evenly distributed but still centered within NYC proper, which hosts 159 Class B coworking locations, while the outer areas account for 54. Class C coworking shows a similar pattern: 32 locations in NYC proper versus 26 in the outer areas.
This distribution illustrates how coworking operators are expanding beyond trophy assets into more value-driven and neighborhood-centric properties, particularly in the Class B and C segments, serving creative professionals and smaller businesses who value flexibility, authenticity, and local character.
Private Office Pricing: What it Really Costs to Work in the Big Apple
If you’re choosing where your team works in New York City, you’re probably weighing more than just location—you’re asking: “What will this actually cost per month, per person?”
Manhattan and Brooklyn are very close in price. A four-desk private office in a coworking space will set you back around $3,040 a month, with twenty-desk spaces at about $15,200. Larger spaces capable of handling 50+ desks come in at roughly $38,000. Prices for these sizes in Queens come in considerably lower – less than half the price of Manhattan and Brooklyn – however there are fewer options as well.
These numbers highlight something important: coworking pricing is easy to understand. There’s no mystery, no extras tacked on later. The monthly fee typically includes utilities, cleaning, Wi-Fi, reception services, community events, and even perks like barista coffee or stocked kitchens. For many teams, that predictability is gold—especially in a city where property-related costs can spiral quickly.
But what about traditional leases? On the surface, leases look cheaper when you break them down to a price per square foot. In Manhattan, average lease rates for Class A space are around $80.71 per square foot annually, or about $6.70 per square foot per month. But this only tells part of the story.
Let’s think about it person-by-person. In Manhattan, leasing 150 square feet per employee in a Class A building comes out to about $4,000 a month for a four-person team, $20,100 for 20, and just over $50,000 for 50. Head to Brooklyn, and those figures drop to around $2,600, $13,400, and $33,600, respectively—still steep, but noticeably less than Manhattan.
In a city like New York, where real estate decisions rarely come down to just one factor, breaking down workspace pricing by office size and building class helps cut through the noise. Per-person, per-month estimates give a clearer view of what teams are actually paying to operate—beyond the headline lease rates or square footage figures. It’s a shift toward thinking in practical terms: how many people need space, how often they’re using it, and what that translates to on a monthly basis.
As hybrid work patterns settle into something more long-term, that kind of detail matters. For tenants, it can make budgeting and planning more grounded. For operators, it provides a framework that aligns more closely with how clients are approaching space today, not just in terms of cost, but in terms of function and flexibility. In 2025, the question isn’t just how much space a company has, but how well it fits the way their team actually works.
Operator Landscape: How It Evolved and Who’s Shaping It
NYC’s coworking scene is no longer dominated by just a few household names—it’s a complex, competitive ecosystem. The top five operators—WeWork (32 spaces), Industrious (28), Regus (25), Convene (13), and Jay Suites (11)—together account for 109 coworking locations, about 28% of the total 386 coworking spaces citywide as of 2025.
That means more than 70% of coworking spaces in NYC are run by smaller, independent operators and niche providers—a striking contrast to the traditional lease market, where major landlords control most inventory.
This fragmentation drives innovation and specialization: from premium, enterprise-ready environments to neighborhood-focused spaces and collectives catering to niche communities like wellness practitioners or creative industries. Suburban operators are also shaping the landscape, with coworking hubs expanding into outer areas like White Plains, Great Neck, Huntington, and Tarrytown to meet demand for flexible space closer to home.
The Future of Leased Offices in a Coworking Era
The persistent vacancies across NYC’s leased office inventory highlight why coworking continues to gain ground. By 2025, vacancy rates in leased offices remain stubbornly high in key boroughs and across asset classes: Class A vacancy in Brooklyn, for example, has jumped to nearly 26% in 2025 from 20.7% in 2024, while Manhattan’s Class A vacancy is holding at 15.3%, a figure well above pre-pandemic rates below 8%. Even more striking, Class C vacancies have surged in the Bronx, reaching nearly 32% in 2025, up sharply from just 16.5% two years ago.
These rising vacancy rates signal that traditional leases are struggling to attract tenants who increasingly value flexibility, scalability, and simplicity. While Class A and B properties in Manhattan continue to attract some demand, vacancy levels suggest that businesses of all sizes are rethinking the long-term lease as their default. Instead, they’re gravitating toward solutions that eliminate capital outlays and enable immediate occupancy.
In this context, coworking isn’t just filling the gaps left by vacant leased offices, it’s redefining tenant expectations altogether. As coworking operators expand into a wider variety of buildings and neighborhoods, they’re not simply competing with traditional leases, they’re increasingly offering a fundamentally different value proposition: one where readiness, cost transparency, and agility matter more than square footage alone.
Methodology:
- Coworking and flex space data—covering location counts, growth, and building class—was sourced from CoworkingCafe’s internal inventory as of May 2023, 2024, and 2025.
- Square footage data for both traditional leased office spaces and coworking spaces in 2025 was obtained from CommercialEdge.
- For the purpose of this study, “NYC proper” refers to the five boroughs of New York City. “Outer areas of New York” include all other municipalities within the state of New York outside the city limits.
