A Look at Office Buildings
How large are they?
Are they on multibuilding complexes?
How do they use energy and how much does it cost?
How large are they?
The average office building is 14,900 square feet. There is 10.5 billion square feet of office space, which is 18 percent of all commercial floorspace in the U.S.
Over half of all office buildings are less than 5,000 square feet; almost 95 percent are less than 25,000 square feet.
Most office buildings are not towering skyscrapers like you see when you look at the skyline of a big city—a little more than half of all office buildings had only one floor and only one percent of office buildings had more than ten floors.
Number of Establishments
The CBECS is based on the whole building, which can house more than one establishment. For example, an "office condo," considered one building in the CBECS, might contain a doctor, a lawyer, and an architect—three establishments.
The 705,000 office buildings in the U.S. contain a total of 1,600,000 establishments, an average of 2.3 per building. This is slightly more than the average number of establishments in other types of commercial buildings (1.7 per building). Nevertheless, a large majority (70 percent) of office buildings have only one establishment.
Table 1: Number and percent of office buildings and establishments per office building by size category and number of floors
Continue: How many employees are there?
Go to "How large are they?" for other building types:
Specific questions may be directed to:
Joelle Davis Michaels
joelle.michaels@eia.doe.gov
CBECS Manager
Phone:
(202) 586-8952
FAX:
(202) 586-0018
URL: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/consumptionbriefs/cbecs/pbawebsite/office/office_howlarge.htm
Release
date: September 11, 2000
File last modified:
January 3, 2001