Downtown Calgary's Office Vacancy Keeps Falling: What Q3 2026 Actually Shows

Downtown Calgary's Office Vacancy Keeps Falling: What Q3 2026 Actually Shows

Disclosure: We hold no financial position in CBRE or any building named below, and no business relationship with the firms quoted. Nothing here is investment advice. Every figure is attributed to a public source, and where we couldn't confirm an exact number directly, we say so rather than estimate.

Downtown Calgary's office vacancy rate has been the defining statistic of this market for the better part of a decade — the number that gets cited every time someone asks why so many towers look half-empty. That number has been improving. CBRE's Canada Office Figures report for Q3 2026 shows downtown Calgary's vacancy rate declining again this quarter, continuing a run of improvement that CBRE's own coverage describes as building over the last three quarters.

The trend, as far as we can confirm it

We weren't able to pull CBRE's exact Q3 2026 downtown Calgary percentage directly from their report (it sits behind a page that blocks automated access), so we're not going to print a number we can't verify firsthand. What is publicly confirmed: downtown vacancy sat at 30.4% at the end of 2025, per Global News' coverage of CBRE's year-end figures, down from the market's post-pandemic peak. CBRE's Q3 2026 release, as covered in subsequent reporting, describes a further quarter-over-quarter improvement in downtown vacancy — continuing a trend that's now run three consecutive quarters.

That's a meaningfully different story than downtown Calgary was telling in 2021 and 2022, when vacancy climbed past 30% for the first time and kept climbing.

What's actually behind it

Two things, consistently cited by the people tracking this market closely:

Return-to-office momentum. CBRE's own commentary on the 2026 figures points to rising return-to-office expectations as a direct driver of downtown leasing activity. That's a demand-side explanation: more companies bringing people back in means more companies actually needing the space they've been sitting on.

The office-to-residential conversion program. Calgary has spent several years running one of North America's more aggressive office-conversion incentive programs, pulling aging, hard-to-lease downtown towers out of the office inventory entirely and turning them into housing. Brad Parry, CEO of Calgary Economic Development, put it plainly to Global News: the city has "put the right kind of incentives in place to bring in the capital into help convert those buildings." Every tower that converts is a tower that stops counting against the vacancy rate — a supply-side lever that's distinct from, and additive to, any demand recovery.

Michael Hoffman, VP/Managing Director at CBRE Limited, offered the caveat worth keeping in mind here: a meaningful share of the space that has come back onto the market in recent years did so because of "mergers and acquisition activity within the oil and gas sector," which produced a wave of sublease space. That's a reminder that the vacancy number is a mix of several different stories layered on top of each other — new leasing, conversions, and energy-sector consolidation — not one clean trend.

What this means if you're actually looking for space

A declining vacancy rate downtown doesn't mean the deals of the last few years disappear overnight. There's still a wide range of space on the market, at a wide range of price points, in a submarket we track 152 buildings in. It does mean the easiest-to-get concessions — the ones landlords were offering when vacancy was climbing past 30% — are a moving target, and worth confirming current rather than assuming from an article (including this one).

If you want to see what's actually listed downtown right now rather than a market-wide average, browse the Downtown submarket directly.

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Sources: CBRE Canada Office Figures Q3 2026; Global News, "Optimism remains high as downtown vacancies hold steady," January 2026.