Dive Brief:

• Federal agencies are using a mix of ways to measure how much their buildings are getting used, contributing to a blurry occupancy picture across government buildings, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report says.
• Guidelines from the U.S. General Services Administration and U.S. Office of Management and Budget on how to measure occupancy are contributing to the confusion by leaving large swaths of properties out of the count, GAO says in a report it gave to Congress Oct. 16.
• Even so, some agencies are using their data to make space planning decisions, including decisions about which properties to get rid of. “They expect [these space-planning decisions] to result in significant financial savings based, in part, on this new data,” GAO said. 

Dive Insight:

Congress last year passed a law requiring cabinet departments and major federal agencies to shoot for a 60% occupancy rate in their buildings. If they can’t reach 60% occupancy, the law calls for them to consolidate staff and get rid of the underused space. The Utilizing Space Efficiently and Improving Technologies Act, or USE-IT Act, also requires agencies to track and report occupancy rates so Congress has a picture of how the process is going. 

Despite the new law’s requirements, the federal building occupancy picture is incomplete for several reasons, GAO says in its report. The agencies report that less than a quarter of their owned and leased office space is subject to measurement based on the law and guidance GSA and OMB provided, it says. As a result, “federal agencies are reporting occupancy data for a relatively small portion of their federal assets,” it says. 

Notably, when calculating occupancy, agencies are not including GSA-controlled spaces that are vacant and not covered by occupancy agreements. In other words, if an agency has an agreement to occupy eight floors of a 10-story building, the agency reports its occupancy data for those eight floors. If the other two floors of the building are vacant and not covered by an occupancy agreement with that agency or any other agency, that space does not get reported. Some buildings reported as meeting the 60% occupancy threshold would drop below that if this vacant and unassigned space were factored in, the report says.  

“One federal building in California could see its utilization rate drop from 68 percent to 57 percent if 33,482 feet of the building’s vacant space were included,” it says.

Further, there’s no consistency in how the departments and agencies are measuring occupancy, the report says. Last year GSA gave agencies a list of 11 approved approaches: using badge-reader data, daily check-in surveys, occupancy sensors, video analysis, Wifi and Bluetooth data analysis, building automation system and analytics platform data analysis, reservation system reports, timecard analysis, mobile device data and manual counting. The agencies reported using different individual or combined counting methods, with little consistency from agency to agency. The report also notes shortcomings of some of these methods. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Science Foundation and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for example, reported they are relying solely on data from badge readers. However, the GAO report notes that not all entries to federal facilities have badge readers and, where there are badge readers, employees can enter behind another person without being counted. 

Most of the other agencies are using some data from badge readers, but they’re combining that with data from one or more other methods, the report states. The Department of Defense, for example, is combining data from eight sources. The Justice and Treasury departments are combining data from five sources, but not the same five. 

The U.S. Department of the Interior was not using any of the 11 GSA-approved methods for calculating occupancy as of April 2026. Instead, it was counting the number of employees assigned to individual locations, without measuring whether they’re in the buildings. “Officials cited a lack of badge readers at Department of the Interior facilities and an inability to match timecard data to specific spaces,” GAO says. The department started reporting badge reader data in June 2026, the report states.

For Congress, the picture also is blurred because the agencies are not reporting the buildings that meet the 60% occupancy threshold, just those that don’t, the report states. “Providing this additional context would make it easier for Congress and the public to draw meaningful conclusions about whether federal resources are being used efficiently,” it says.  

GAO recommends that GSA and OMB revise their guidelines to require the reporting of occupancy data for all spaces overseen by agencies, and GSA-controlled vacant space, regardless of whether the spaces have occupancy agreements, as well as building-wide utilization. Agencies should also include in their reporting buildings that meet the 60% threshold or disclose that their data leaves those buildings out. And the guidelines should clarify how agencies are to treat meeting rooms, libraries and other types of space that don’t go into the occupancy calculation.