Compared to two years ago, when 78% of Fortune 100 companies were hybrid and 5% were fully in-office, those firms are now 41% hybrid and 54% fully in-office. The stark shift comes as the companies require workers in the office an average of 3.8 days a week compared to 2.6 days in 2023, per the report.

Return-to-office mandates have continued to shake up workplace culture, with Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol requiring more corporate employees this week to relocate to the coffee chain’s Seattle office and to show up in-person four days a week. Google and Amazon are among other corporate giants pushing employees back to the office, citing in-person work as a boon to productivity, particularly in the AI race.

Despite evidence that RTO mandates haven’t always translated to increased office attendance, JLL reported a 1.3% year-over-year increase in office attendance in the first two months of 2025’s second quarter. Busier offices have coincided with record-high rents for high-end offices, primarily “trophy buildings across Miami, New York City, San Francisco and other markets,” the report said. 

Office vacancies, however, continue to persist, hovering above 22%. Inventory declined by 700,000 square feet in the last quarter, indicating demolitions or mixed-use and residential conversions are outpacing office construction.

The Fortune 100’s different RTO reality

Though the U.S.’s largest 100 companies by revenue are reveling in bustling office spaces swelling with workers, the story of the rest of the country’s return-to-office push is much less dramatic.

Compared to the Fortune 100’s mass shift to full-time RTO, U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs have largely maintained the hybrid work status quo over the last two years, with 51% working hybrid in 2025 compared to 52% in May 2023, 28% working exclusively remote compared to 29% in May 2023; and 21% working completely in-person compared to 20% in May 2023, according to recent Gallup Poll data.

According to Mark Ma, associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh, Fortune 100 companies are leading the RTO push simply because they can afford to do so.

“Amazon can lose 1,000 talented IT workers with no problem,” he told Fortune. “There is still a lineup of young college graduates from maybe Carnegie Mellon or other excellent universities who still want to work for Amazon because that’s the Magnificent Seven.

“But the smaller firms, it is harder for them to do it because once they lose some important employees, maybe no one else in their firm can do the job,” he continued. “It’s a completely different story for smaller firms.”

While massive tech companies like Amazon may be employing RTO even as a means to push employees out, small firms have to be more careful with managing their workforce, who continue to prefer hybrid over in-person (or entirely remote) work.

It figures, then, that smaller firms would also be less interested in coughing up rent for an office employees are less interested in frequenting and that present a potential liability, should the company need to look to cut costs in times of economic hardship. Cities like Pittsburgh, where the office vacancy rate is about 20%, are seeing high demand for luxury office buildings with slick amenities—likely favored by larger employers who can afford to offer RTO perks—while older buildings continue to languish.

The future of hybrid work

For the U.S. workforce outside the Fortune 100, the phenomenon of hybrid work is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, Ma argued. He has found that CEOs of companies with RTO policies skew older and more male than the average for executives of U.S. public firms. Younger, scrappier companies, conversely, have executives with the same traits and are more likely to lead remote-friendly workplaces, both because of a generational shift in work attitudes, but also because of the practical advantages of smaller businesses having fewer overhead costs.

“In the long term, with the younger generation taking over, I think the CEOs will be willing to [give more] flexibility,” Ma said.