5 Years After Covid, Los Angeles' RTO Lags The Nation

Los Angeles consistently lags the national average on postpandemic office attendance, with two different usage metrics coming in at less than 50% of the city's prepandemic average. 

Nationwide, the average is closer to 60%.

Industry professionals are quick to say that the numbers don’t tell the whole story, and there’s nuance to Los Angeles’ office landscape. 

The sheer size of the city makes it hard to make sweeping statements. Numbers and the realities on the street vary widely between neighborhoods like Downtown and Century City, for example.

“I really do think something's happening with return-to-office that's not being picked up by either Kastle or even Placer.ai — that the return to office is much more robust than the statistics are showing,” said Michael Soto, Savills vice president of research for the West region. 

The numbers are lackluster. Kastle Systems shows that Los Angeles’ office attendance peaked in 2023, when office attendance reached 47.1% of prepandemic levels. For 2024, the average dropped slightly to 46.1%, while the national average among the top 10 highest attended metros was 49.6%. 

Kastle does not share details about the buildings where card swipes are tracked, which makes up the basis of the company's data. That means it's impossible to tell whether they are concentrated in a district that’s closer to Downtown’s attendance or Century City’s. 

But Placer.ai, which uses cell phone data to compile its totals, similarly shows a return-to-office “recovery rate” of 49% for the Los Angeles area across all building types in January 2025 compared to January 2020, while the national average for the same period was about 60%.

Most industry professionals don’t dispute that Los Angeles is behind the curve on bringing people back to the office, whether it’s for three or five days a week. Explanations range from the sprawling nature of the city to the hangover of longer pandemic lockdowns. 

“We are a really, really big geography and the physical constraints of the commute certainly has ranked pretty heavily in why the return to office has been lagging,” Newmark Executive Managing Director Suzanne Lee said. 

“But what we have seen consistently over the last 12 to 24 months is that if the municipality — whatever municipality it may be — and property owners are working collaboratively to create clean, safe districts or environments … people are coming back, and they are coming back in droves,” Lee said. 

Lee held up Century City as an example of the success of this approach, but beyond it, there aren’t many other submarkets in the Los Angeles area that have been able to replicate the success of the Westside office hub. 

Others also blamed the longer lockdown period that Los Angeles and many West Coast cities experienced during the pandemic. Those cities that were slower to open up, they suggest, have been slower to return as well. 

At least one sector that has been visibly slow to return full-time to the office may be making a comeback, and its effect, at least for Los Angeles’ Downtown, could be significant. 

The city could be poised for a change as mandates for various government employees to come back into the office more regularly proliferate. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ordered federal workers to resume working in the office full-time, a change that could mean 10,000 workers returning five days a week to Downtown, although at least one major government worker union has pushed back against the move. 

On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to call workers back into the office four days a week beginning July 1. City employees’ remote work, however, tends to vary based on department, The Real Deal reported. 

The general revival of attention to bringing workers back to the office for a majority of the time, like what’s happening with government workers, is similar to what Soto sees in the private sector as responsible for the boost in office attendance he has anecdotally seen in the first few months of this year. 

Employment numbers, he said, haven’t risen significantly, but he knows brokers at his firm are handling more tour requests and generally seeing an uptick in interest for office space. 

“There's all this anecdotal evidence of things being busier today than a year ago, and intuitively, you'd think it would be driven almost completely by job growth, but it's not, because job growth is pretty weak,” Soto said. “It's that a lot of occupiers have really firmed up their return-to-office plans.” 

As those plans take shape, employers are working to ensure that the return is smooth. The first thing that Kerin Van Andel, executive vice president of workplace strategy at JLL, and her team do for any client is a location analysis to determine where workers are all coming from and ensuring that the office is in a location that’s working for the majority of people.  

Gone are the days when office building owners were trying to provide all the amenities an employee could need, such as a gym and a dry cleaner, Van Andel said.

People usually have their own preferred amenities — their neighborhood dry cleaner or their favorite salad place — and they’re going to go there, Van Andel said. Instead, technology, like WiFi that is faster than what employees have at home, is critical. 

Within offices, Van Andel is seeing a shift away from larger communal spaces like conference rooms into smaller spaces that can be used by a few people or a small team to meet and collaborate in private. Small private spaces like phone booths are also quite popular in office spaces still. 

“‘If you're going to ask us to come into the office, have a plan,’” Van Andel said, echoing employee requests she often hears.

UPDATE, MARCH 11, 4:10 P.M. PT: This story has been updated with additional context regarding data from Placer.ai.