Working from home saves a company very little on its single largest fixed cost, because a lease does not shrink when the desks empty. It saves the employee a commute. It might save you a few thousand a year in power, coffee and printer toner. The floor plate, the rent review and the make good clause carry on exactly as signed.
Most Australian founders running a hybrid roster have filed this under solved. Three days in, two days out, everyone happier, overheads down. Two of those three are true. The third is an assumption nobody has priced, which is why Outstaffer publishes what the alternative costs.
What working from home actually saves a company, line by line
Power and consumables. Some cleaning. A smaller catering bill. For a thirty person business that is real money, and it is also rounding error next to rent.
The Property Council of Australia's Office Market Report for the first half of 2026, published on 6 August, put national office vacancy at 16.1 per cent, up from 15.8 per cent six months earlier. CBD vacancy barely moved, from 14.8 to 14.9 per cent. Premium CBD space went the other way, down 1.2 percentage points to 10.2 per cent.
Does the rent fall when half the desks are empty?
No. Vacancy is what the market records after the fact, not a discount applied to your tenancy. JLL's Sydney office data for the June quarter, also published on 6 August, has gross effective rents at $1,135 per square metre a year, up 8.3 per cent over twelve months.
The arithmetic nobody runs before signing the hybrid policy
Take one hundred square metres of Sydney CBD tenancy. At $1,135 a square metre that is $113,500 a year. Twelve months earlier, at roughly $1,048, the same space cost about $104,800.
So the space got $8,700 a year more expensive while your people were at home two days a week.
For scale, Outstaffer's published employer of record pricing starts at $250 per employee per month, or $3,000 a year. That one rent increase covers the platform fee on nearly three employees. It does not cover their salaries and nobody should pretend otherwise. It does show which line on the P&L is moving.
The Property Council also reported 176,303 square metres of new space completed nationally in the half, the lowest since July 2017, with the pipeline subdued until 2029. Supply is not coming to rescue your rent review.
The honest case for the home office
Here is the strongest version of the other side, and it is a good one.
Plenty of businesses in the ten to fifty staff band are not on a ten year CBD lease. They are in a serviced suite, a coworking membership or a two year term that genuinely can be cut. For them the saving is immediate and large. Retention improves. The hiring radius widens past a forty minute drive, which is worth more than the rent either way.
When does working from home genuinely save money?
When the lease can actually be reduced, and when you count the setup a remote worker needs at home against the saving rather than beside it. Laptops, security and support are costs you have added, not avoided.
What actually takes a desk off your floor plate
A role that was never going to sit in it.
Hybrid moves a person between two places you are already paying for. An offshore hire removes the desk from the equation, and the cost that replaces it is contractual and visible rather than buried in a lease signed in 2022. Worth knowing what an employee really costs once compliance and equipment are inside the number before calling either model cheap.
Related reading
Mike Zorbas of the Property Council says the market has moved from correction to recovery and remains a story of quality and location. Read that as a landlord would.
If you want the number rather than the theory, run one role through a model with no floor plate attached and compare it with what that desk costs. Working from home saves a company a little. Where the role sits saves considerably more.
So which was it in your business: did hybrid cut your occupancy cost, or did it move people around inside a bill you were always going to pay?
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