Executive Summary

Five Key Findings

1. Well-managed parking is far flatter than the "Tuesday crush" suggests.

Raw office attendance swings hard midweek, but managed parking demand stays remarkably even across the week.

2. When parking is made flexible, people use it.

Nearly seven out of ten flexible parking opportunities are actively booked by employees.

3. Near-full utilisation is achievable.

Managed together, parking runs at 96.5% utilisation - without adding a single space.

4. Ownership is giving way to sharing.

Over 40% of parks are now pooled or shared, mirroring the collapse of assigned desk seating.

5. The whole week is getting busier.

Flexible parking use has grown on every weekday, with Monday and Friday closing the gap on midweek.

The Context: Hybrid Work Has Broken The Office Car Park

Leases were signed when everyone drove in five days a week, but attendance now clusters in the middle of the week - and parking is where that mismatch shows up first.

The independent evidence is striking. VergeSense's 2025 Occupancy Intelligence Index, which analysed more than 200 million square feet across 200+ organisations, confirms that Tuesday to Thursday dominate as the busiest in-office days, while Friday runs dramatically lower. CBRE's 2025 survey captures the operational pain precisely: 73% of organisations say their office is effectively at capacity on peak days, but only 34% say the same about an average day. [vergesense.com] [cbre.com]

The waste is systemic. McKinsey research finds roughly 40% of office space goes unused on a typical workday, and JLL puts global office utilisation at just 54%. Parking inherits this problem - permanently allocated bays sit empty when their owner is at home, even as colleagues circle a "full" car park. [gable.to], [facilities...dvisor.com]

And it's expensive dead space. In the Sydney CBD for example, daily parking runs up to around AUD $70 a day, with monthly bays commonly AUD $500–$1,000+. [parksy.com], [parkhound.com.au]

Finding One - When parking is actively managed, the week is far flatter than the "Tuesday crush" suggests

The dominant industry narrative - backed by occupancy data like HubStar's Tuesday-58.6% / Friday-34.5% split - is that office demand swings dramatically midweek. That's true of raw office attendance.

But across parks actively managed through Flex, booking utilisation tells a much flatter story:

Wednesday and Friday sit only about five percentage points apart - nothing like the swing in raw occupancy indices.

Why it matters

When parking is static and name-on-the-bay, midweek demand overwhelms the car park while Mondays and Fridays sit empty. When it's bookable and shareable, that volatility smooths out. The peak-day problem is real, but it's largely a management problem, not a capacity one.

Finding Two - When parking is made flexible, people actually book it

Across all the open-pool capacity organisations made bookable through Flex, 68.8% of it was actively taken up by staff - nearly seven in ten flexible spaces.

That matters because, with McKinsey finding ~40% of office space unused on a typical day and Sydney bays for example costing up to AUD $70 daily, an allocated space left empty is a costly waste. [gable.to], [parksy.com]

Why it matters

Flexibility doesn't suppress demand - it reveals it. Turn hidden capacity into something staff can book, and they use it.

Finding Three - Made-visible parking runs at near-full utilisation

Managed together, permanently allocated bays plus the flexible open pool reach 96.5% total utilisation.

Set against JLL's 54% average office utilisation and CBRE's 73%-peak / 34%-average split, a car park that feels permanently full can actually run at near-complete efficiency. [facilities...dvisor.com], [cbre.com]

Why it matters

Most organisations don't have a parking shortage - they have a visibility and allocation problem.

Finding Four - Ownership is giving way to sharing

Over 40% of parks are now pooled or shared. This mirrors CBRE's finding that assigned desk seating fell from 56% (2023) → 40% (2024) → 25% (2025) - fixed ownership giving way to sharing, now reaching the car park. With average attendance around 2.8–2.9 days/week, permanent allocation is hard to justify. [cbre.com][flexindex.com]

How Organisations Are Making Shared Parking Work

Hybrid attendance is flexible but rarely random. T2 Systems' 2026 research found three-day-a-week parkers are now the single largest commuter segment, ahead of daily parkers. Most people settle into predictable patterns - so many organisations now align allocation to them:

At Flex Parking, this is supported through Repeating Rosters - a recurring hybrid schedule becomes the baseline allocation, while spaces can still be released and re-booked when plans change. It's an approach that remains under-used across the industry, even where the capability exists.

Why it matters

This is the mechanism that makes the utilisation numbers achievable - the certainty of ownership with the efficiency of sharing, minus the weekly admin.

Finding Five - Flexible parking use has grown across every weekday

Year on year, flexible utilisation is up on every weekday - with Monday and Friday rising substantially, closing the gap on midweek. That aligns with the macro picture: required office days rising to ~2.82/week (Flex Index) and CBRE reporting utilisation climbing to 53% in 2026, up from 38% in 2024. [flexindex.com], [cbre.com]

Note: this view aggregates across a growing customer base, so part of the movement reflects customer mix and growth as well as behaviour. We treat it as directional, not proof of same-organisation change.

What this means for workplaces

1. Stop optimising for one peak day - manage the whole week.

2. Flexibility drives usage, not resistance (~70% of open-pool booked).

3. You probably have more capacity than you think (96.5% achievable without leasing).

4. Permanent allocation is fading (40%+ shared).

5. The whole week is getting busier.

The bottom line

The story emerging from six years of data is consistent: most organisations don't have a parking shortage - they have a parking visibility and allocation problem. When parking is made bookable and shareable, demand smooths out across the week, utilisation climbs toward 96.5%, and permanent allocation quietly gives way to sharing.

The question is no longer "how many parking spaces do we have?" - it's "how well are we using the ones we already have?"

Explore further

• Workplace Parking Management Software - how the platform behind this data actually works.

• Shared Parking Management - the approach driving the 96.5% utilisation figure, including Repeating Rosters.

• Office Parking Booking System - how employees book, release and share spaces day to day.

• Customer Case Studies - see these findings play out in real organisations, from Youthline to Saatchi & Saatchi.

Feel free to reference this research with attribution to Flex Parking. For the underlying methodology or media enquiries, contact info@flexparking.co.nz.