For years, coworking meant a slick space near downtown, close to transit, restaurants, and the skyline. That picture no longer matches reality. New data from Yardi Kube shows suburban coworking has become the dominant format in the US flexible office market, growing almost twice as fast as urban locations and now accounting for two out of every three coworking sites nationwide. The shift says as much about how companies think about real estate as it does about where people want to work. As hybrid schedules settle into permanent habits and corporate real estate teams keep trimming budgets, flex space is moving to where employees already live, and the numbers suggest this is only accelerating.
Two-thirds and climbing
Between July 2024 and July 2026, suburban coworking locations in the US grew 39%, adding 1,763 new sites and pushing the total to 6,247. Urban locations grew too, but at a noticeably slower 22%, reaching 3,137. That widened the suburban share of the market from 64% to 67%, meaning roughly two-thirds of all US coworking spaces now sit outside traditional downtown cores. Overall coworking inventory across both categories climbed from 7,058 locations in 2024 to 9,384 in 2026, covering more than 166 million square feet combined.
The two formats aren’t identical in shape, either. Suburban coworking sites average around 15,185 square feet, about a third smaller than the 22,827-square-foot average downtown. That points to a pattern of many smaller, neighbourhood-style locations spreading outward, rather than suburbs simply replicating the large flagship centres found in city centres.
The map looks different in every city
The national averages hide some striking regional differences. Richmond-Tidewater nearly doubled its suburban coworking count, up 96% to 55 locations. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater grew 87%, and Philadelphia rose 84%. Central Valley in California posted the strongest combined growth of any market, up 69% across both urban and suburban categories together.
Not every city fits the suburban-growth narrative, though. Central Valley’s urban locations actually tripled, and New Jersey’s urban coworking count grew 150%, suggesting some markets are seeing urban and suburban expansion happen in parallel rather than at each other’s expense. A handful of dense cities don’t fit the comparison at all: Manhattan and Brooklyn have only urban coworking locations, while Orange County, Long Island, and the Inland Empire have exclusively suburban ones. And in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, suburban spaces are actually larger on average than their urban counterparts, flipping the usual size pattern entirely.
Employers are footing the bill
The suburban shift isn’t happening by accident. It’s being pulled along by corporate cost-cutting and a rethink of what an “office” needs to be. Insurance giant Allstate offers a telling example: the company 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. A quarter of its 54,000 employees now have access to coworking space they can book by the day, rather than a fixed desk in a fixed building.
Allstate isn’t alone. Roughly 30% of coworking memberships nationally are now paid for or subsidized by employers, according to industry estimates, letting companies offer workspace close to where staff actually live without committing to long leases. Pfizer, Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Lyft are among the other major employers using flexible space this way, treating coworking centres as satellite offices scattered near residential population centres rather than concentrated in a single headquarters.
Blame the construction freeze
This isn’t only a story about coworking. It’s also a story about traditional office construction grinding to a near-halt. Annual office deliveries in the US are projected at about 10 million square feet in 2026, down sharply from roughly 75 million square feet in 2018. In the first quarter of this year alone, conversions and demolitions outpaced new office deliveries by 3 million square feet.
That leaves landlords with buildings that are increasingly difficult to lease on conventional terms, particularly outside prime downtown submarkets. Flexible operators are stepping into that gap, offering property owners another way to activate space as demand spreads outward toward where workers actually live, rather than staying concentrated in central business districts.
Downtown isn’t out of the race yet
For flex operators, the suburban wave is an opportunity, but not a simple one. Downtown locations, despite slower overall growth, still command larger footprints and, in some cities, are expanding just as fast as their suburban counterparts. The operators and landlords that get this right will be the ones who treat suburban and urban flex as complementary formats rather than a straight substitution, matching site size, amenities, and pricing to how each market actually behaves. As office construction stays subdued and employer-subsidized coworking keeps growing, expect this suburban-first pattern to shape the next phase of the US flexible workspace market.
