• Suburban areas hold most of the coworking market, accounting for 67% of all coworking spaces nationally, with a total of 6,247 locations, nearly twice those available in urban areas, 3,137
• Suburban coworking expanded 39% between July 2024 and July 2026, adding 1,763 locations, compared to the 22% growth (563 locations) seen in urban areas over the same period
• Suburban coworking locations are 33% smaller on average than urban locations, 15,185 square feet and 22,827 square feet, respectively
• Central Valley saw the largest increase in total coworking locations between 2024 and 2026 (69%)
• Richmond-Tidewater posted the highest suburban location increase, up 96%, from 28 locations in 2024 to 55 in 2026
• New Jersey comes in second for urban location development, with its urban count rising 150% from 2024 to 2026 even as the suburbs still hold the bulk of its market
• By July 2026, the U.S. counted 9,384 coworking locations totaling over 166 million square feet, up from 7,058 locations and over 127 million square feet two years earlier

Suburban coworking has been quietly pulling ahead of the city center, and the latest national data supports this ongoing shift: a growing share of shared office space is opening in the suburbs, closer to where many people already live. Part of this reflects the industry’s own life cycle. Coworking established itself in urban and CBD areas first, before and just after the pandemic, where early demand was concentrated, and with those markets now largely saturated, outward expansion into the suburbs is where the remaining growth opportunities lie. The softening in urban locations likely owes as much to market maturation and consolidation as to any shift in preferences. Even so, the suburbs hold the larger share of the national market, and while city centers remain essential to the industry, the growing number of suburban locations points to a lasting change shaped by hybrid work models, cost pressures and a desire to work closer to home.

This Yardi Kube article analyzes coworking data from proprietary Yardi Research to identify the latest trends in shared workspace growth, compare urban and suburban markets and examine what these shifts mean for businesses, workers and the future of coworking in the U.S.

Coworking Crosses a Tipping Point in Development, with Suburban Space Growing Nearly Two Times Faster than Urban

Suburban locations have commanded most of the shared workspace for some time now, and they continue to expand at a much higher rate than those in urban areas. According to the latest data available, the number of suburban coworking locations expanded from 4,484 in July 2024 to 4,971 in July 2025, then climbed sharply to 6,247 by July 2026. That amounts to a 39% increase across the two-year span, with the pace of growth accelerating in the most recent year.

By contrast, urban coworking grew far more modestly, rising from 2,574 locations in 2024 to 2,793 in 2025, before reaching about 3,137 in 2026, a 22% increase over the two years. The gap is stark: the suburbs added roughly 1,763 locations in this period, while urban areas added just about 563. As a result, the suburban coworking share of the national market grew from 64% in 2024 to 67% by 2026, while the urban share slipped to 33%.

The industry’s overall footprint has expanded considerably. The total number of U.S. coworking locations rose from 7,058 in 2024 to 9,384 in 2026, and total square footage grew from approximately 127.7 million to over 166.3 million. Breaking that growth down by location tells the real story: suburban areas hold most individual locations, a sign that suburban coworking spaces tend to be smaller but more numerous, while urban spaces remain fewer in number but larger in size. As the data shows, the average location size of a coworking space in the suburbs is around 15,000 square feet, while urban spaces average nearly 23,000 square feet.

Taken together, the data points to where expansion is still possible. With urban markets nearly saturated, suburban real estate offers what the core no longer can: space that is cheaper and more readily available. The two markets now reflect distinct models – suburban coworking as the high-volume, lower-footprint, distributed approach, and urban as the fewer-but-larger anchor model. That pull is reinforced by evolving work-from-home policies and demand for flexible office solutions closer to where people live. For operators looking to expand, the suburbs are where most of the location growth is happening.

Central Valley, Richmond-Tidewater and Jacksonville Lead the Nation’s Fastest-Growing Coworking Markets

Nationally, the story of coworking’s expansion is best told through the markets moving fastest. Among metros with both urban and suburban shared space throughout the period, Central Valley posted the largest overall increase in total locations, urban and suburban, between 2024 and 2026, growing 69%, from 36 locations to 61. Richmond-Tidewater followed with 61% growth and Jacksonville with 60%, while Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater (59%) and Philadelphia (58%) rounded out the top five.

What links these otherwise very different markets is not the presence of a booming central business district but the spread of flexible space into the communities around it. In most of them, suburban growth did the heavy lifting: Jacksonville’s suburban locations grew 68% against 55% urban, Tampa’s suburbs grew 87% versus 35% urban and Philadelphia’s suburban count grew 84% against 34% urban. This pattern points to an industry expanding outward, planting workspace where workers already are rather than concentrating on a single central business district.

The Suburban Surge: Richmond-Tidewater, Tampa and Philadelphia Post the Largest Gains Outside the City Core

Ranked by two-year suburban location gains, Richmond-Tidewater leads the nation, with suburban locations growing 96%, from 28 suburban locations in 2024 to 55 in 2026, each averaging around 14,600 square feet. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater follows, its suburbs expanding 87%, from 47 to 88 locations, alongside Philadelphia (up 84%) and Jacksonville, which grew its suburban count 68%.

Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater is a telling illustration among these fast-growing suburban markets. Over the two years, its suburban locations nearly doubled, far outpacing its urban count, which rose more modestly from 40 to 54, an ideal example of activity migrating from the core outward. The average suburban coworking space in Tampa is around 12,300 square feet, while an urban location is around 17,200 square feet, but the larger number of locations in suburban areas place most of the coworking footprint outside the CBD. Across this group, the common thread is the same: suburban supply is growing fast enough to tip what were once urban-majority or evenly split markets firmly into suburban territory.

Urban Cores Aren’t Standing Still: Central Valley, New Jersey and Salt Lake City Post the Strongest Gains

Suburban growth dominates the national picture, but a handful of markets are expanding their urban cores just as aggressively, a reminder that the shift outward is a trend, not a rule. Ranked by two-year urban location gains, Central Valley leads (urban up 200%, from 4 urban locations in 2024 to 12 in 2026), followed by New Jersey (up 150%, from 20 to 50 locations in two years), Salt Lake City (up 75%), Charlotte (up 67%) and Austin (up 58%).

These markets show that urban coworking can still surge where the local dynamics support it. In New Jersey, urban locations more than doubled, going from 20 in 2024 to 50 in 2026, while suburban supply grew a steadier 35%, the mirror image of the national pattern. Here, urban and suburban coworking spaces have about 17,000 square feet, making location count the real difference in shared space availability. Salt Lake City and Austin tell a similar story, with urban growth outpacing their suburbs. Rather than undercutting the suburban narrative, these exceptions sharpen it: coworking is following workers and employers wherever they cluster, and in a few metros that still means the center of the city.

Where the Pattern Flips and Suburban Spaces Run Larger than Urban

Generally, the data points to suburbs holding more coworking locations, while urban spaces tend to be larger, averaging nearly 23,000 square feet against roughly 15,000 in the suburbs. A handful of markets invert that norm and they are worth noting precisely because they run against the grain. In these metros, suburban coworking is not only more plentiful but also bigger on a per-location basis, a reminder that average size depends more on the local real estate available than on whether a market is urban or suburban.

Fort Lauderdale shows the widest gap. Its suburban locations average around 19,800 square feet, roughly 4,300 more than the urban average of about 15,500, and the suburbs hold 85% of the market’s locations. Central Valley follows, where suburban spaces average about 14,500 square feet against 11,800 in the urban area, with 80% of locations outside the core. Southwest Florida Coast comes next, its suburban average near 13,700 square feet versus 12,100 urban across a market that is 77% suburban. West Palm Beach-Boca Raton continues the trend, with suburban locations averaging around 16,300 square feet against 14,800 urban and an overwhelming 91% of its locations in suburban submarkets. The Bay Area and Las Vegas round out the group with the narrowest gaps, both sitting within a few hundred square feet, though suburban locations still make up the clear majority in each.

What ties these markets together is not that they break the national story but that they complicate it in one dimension. Across the country, urban locations are usually the larger footprints even as the suburbs win on count. In these six metros, the suburbs lead on both, driven by the low-density office parks and secondary business nodes where larger floor plates are cheaper and easier to come by. Rather than undercutting the broader trend, they underline how much the size of a coworking space depends on the real estate a given market has to offer.

Companies Are Footing the Bill, Trading Headquarters for Flexible Space Closer to Employees

One factor shaping this suburban demand is corporate. A growing number of companies are treating coworking as part of their real estate strategy, giving staff professional space near home in place of, or alongside, a long-term urban office lease.

According to Bisnow, Allstate sold its Chicago-area headquarters and cut its annual office spending from $382 million in 2020 to $138 million in 2024, shrinking its real estate footprint from 12 million to 4 million square feet, then gave a quarter of its 54,000 corporate employees access to coworking space booked by the day through a flexible-space platform. Tellingly, the company targeted cities where it has between 100 and 1,000 employees, too few to justify a dedicated lease but enough to need a place to gather, including several of the suburban-leaning metros seeing rapid growth in this data. Allstate is not alone: reporting on the trend has named large employers such as Pfizer, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Lyft among those using flexible space for satellite offices, and industry surveys now estimate that about 30% of coworking memberships are paid for or subsidized by an employer rather than the individual using them.

Businesses want space that flexes with headcount, without multi-year commitments or build-out costs, in locations closer to where employees live. And that demand is landing on the suburban markets already leading the industry’s growth.

Traditional Office Construction Is Retreating, and Coworking Is Filling the Gap

The rise of suburban coworking is unfolding against a backdrop of retreat in conventional office development. New office construction has fallen sharply from its pre-pandemic pace, with Yardi Matrix reporting that annual deliveries dropped from approximately 75 million square feet in 2018 to a projected 10 million in 2026. Furthermore, according to NAIOP’s Q2 2026 Office Space Demand Forecast, the amount of office space removed from inventory through conversions and demolitions exceeded newly delivered space by 3 million square feet in the first quarter of 2026, only the second such occurrence going back to 2008. Where traditional office demand has recovered, it has concentrated narrowly in top-tier, mostly urban-core buildings, while average lease sizes have shrunk.

This leaves owners with a growing question about how to put space to work when it isn’t leased conventionally long term. Coworking has become one of the clearest answers, as an alternative use that turns hard-to-lease office floors into flexible, income-generating space without waiting for a single anchor tenant to sign a multi-year deal. Rather than sitting empty or heading toward conversion, these spaces can be reactivated as shared workspace, particularly in the suburban submarkets where demand is already concentrated.

As companies commit to fewer long-term footprints, flexible workspace, particularly in the suburbs, is absorbing demand that once flowed automatically to CBD towers.

Conclusion

The steady growth of suburban coworking tracks a clear change in where and how Americans work. In just two years, the suburban lead widened, with suburban locations moving from a clear majority to an even larger share of the national coworking count and growing meaningfully faster than their urban counterparts. Workers want professional space close to home, and hybrid work has made the suburban neighborhood office a realistic alternative to the CBD commute.

That demand is increasingly backed by employers. As companies trade fixed, long-term headquarters for flexible space near where their people live, coworking has become a strategic tool. Set against a backdrop of retreating traditional office construction, the message is consistent: the office isn’t disappearing, it’s decentralizing.

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“Decentralization was the theme for work and where we work in the first half of the decade. Coworking met that need by bringing the office to the employee as we emerged from COVID and the numbers in suburban growth show that.”

Peter Kolaczynski, Director, Yardi Research

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JLL describes flexible space as entering a phase of strategic adoption in 2026 and beyond, as AI and workforce transformation make portfolio flexibility a core real estate imperative for companies. If that holds, the suburban momentum captured in this data is an early chapter in a longer redistribution of where work happens, and the metros that adapt fastest, planting accessible workspace where people live, are best positioned for the next era of work.

Methodology

• This analysis examines coworking/flexible workspace inventory across 50+ major U.S. commercial real estate markets over a three-year period (2024, 2025 and 2026). The dataset captures property counts at the market level.
• Each property within a market was classified into one of two location types:
  • Urban: Properties situated within the central business district (CBD) or primary urban core of the metropolitan area.
  • Suburban: Properties located outside the urban core, typically in secondary business nodes, suburban office parks or peripheral submarkets.
• Growth rates were computed on a location-count basis across three comparison windows:
  • 2026 vs. 2024 (2-year) – Measures cumulative growth over the full observation period.
  • 2026 vs. 2025 (1-year, current) – Captures the most recent annual change.
  • 2025 vs. 2024 (1-year, prior) – Provides the preceding annual change for trend comparison.
• Single-classification markets: Five markets contain inventory in only one location category as of 2026. Manhattan and Brooklyn are classified as 100% urban, while Orange County, Long Island and Inland Empire are classified as 100% suburban. Urban-to-suburban comparisons and certain growth rate calculations are not applicable for these markets.
• Data was extracted in August 2026 from proprietary Yardi Shared Space Research.