A company shopping for office space in Charleston has fewer empty suites to choose from than in almost any other U.S. market.
Office vacancy in the Charleston area fell to 6.8% in the third quarter, its lowest level since the third quarter of 2019, according to a report Cushman & Wakefield released Oct. 20. The national rate was 19.8%.
Of the 92 U.S. office markets the brokerage tracks, only Savannah, at 4.1%, and Roanoke, Va., at 6.7%, had lower vacancy, according to a Charleston Business Report analysis of Cushman & Wakefield’s national third-quarter tables. Both are less than half Charleston’s size. Cushman & Wakefield calls Charleston the nation’s tightest office market among those with more than 10 million square feet.
The analysis also shows the market is not tightening because of booming demand. Gains in occupied space slowed this year. With no new space added, they still pushed vacancy lower.
Slower gains, no new buildings
Charleston’s occupied office space grew by 100,915 square feet in the first nine months of 2026, the brokerage reported. That is half the 202,194 square feet it gained over the same stretch of 2025.
Over the past four quarters, the market’s net gain in occupied space came to about 98,500 square feet, or about 0.5% of its inventory, the analysis found. Charlotte’s occupied space grew by about 1.2 million square feet over the same four quarters, about 2.1% of its inventory, yet its vacancy rate is 23.1%. Greenville’s grew by about 223,000 square feet, or 1%, and its rate is 8.7%. Charleston’s low rate, in other words, did not come from outsized demand.
Nor does Charleston stand apart on construction this year. Like Charlotte and Greenville, it completed no new office space through September, and its inventory of about 21.1 million square feet was unchanged from a year earlier, Cushman & Wakefield reported. The only office project under construction is Magnolia Landing in downtown Charleston, which accounts for all 128,000 square feet the brokerage lists as underway.
That project equals about 0.6% of the market’s inventory. With no new space delivered, even the modest gains this year pushed vacancy down from 7.3%, where it sat from the third quarter of 2025 through the first quarter of 2026.
“With minimal new development and sustained occupier demand, vacancy is expected to continue trending lower,” the report said.
How Charleston compares
Third-quarter vacancy in Cushman & Wakefield’s tables:
- Savannah: 4.1%
- Charleston: 6.8%
- Columbia: 8.6%
- Greenville: 8.7%
- Nashville: 16.7%
- United States: 19.8%
- Jacksonville: 20.6%
- Raleigh/Durham: 21.5%
- Charlotte: 23.1%
- Atlanta: 25.0%
South Carolina’s three markets all rank among the dozen lowest nationally.
Low vacancy has not made Charleston as expensive as the region’s bigger markets. Its average asking rent was $30.75 a square foot, up 1.2% from a year earlier, compared with $35.45 in Charlotte, $37.29 in Nashville and $38.65 nationally. The brokerage reports average gross asking rents.
Other brokerages measure the market differently. CBRE, which tracks its own set of buildings, put Charleston’s office vacancy at 8.1% in the second quarter, with 11.9% of space available, a measure that includes space coming open.
Where the empty space is
About 1.45 million square feet of Charleston-area office space was vacant in the third quarter, the analysis found. Two submarkets hold two-thirds of it.
North Charleston, the largest submarket with about 6.8 million square feet, had about 654,000 square feet vacant, a 9.6% rate and 45% of the region’s empty space.
Daniel Island had about 299,000 square feet vacant, a 16.4% rate, the highest of any submarket. Most of that, 177,342 square feet, is sublease space, offered by tenants rather than landlords. Daniel Island holds about 69% of all the vacant sublease space in the market.
Daniel Island is also where space is filling fastest. It accounted for 82,651 square feet of the market’s 100,915-square-foot gain this year, about 82%. Its vacancy fell 1.9 percentage points in the third quarter as tenants moved into sublease space leased in the second quarter, the brokerage said. Total Quality Logistics renewed 40,589 square feet at Marshside at Nowell Creek Village in the quarter, and Sonepar signed a new 18,099-square-foot lease there.
Elsewhere, vacancy was 5.2% downtown, 4.1% in the Mount Pleasant and East Charleston submarket, 4.1% in West Ashley and 2.2% in Dorchester County.
Rents climb at the top
The tightest part of the market is its lower-grade, cheaper space. Class C buildings were 0.9% vacant and Class B buildings 6.8%. Class A vacancy was 10.3%, down from 11% in the second quarter.
Rents for the best space are rising fastest. Class A asking rents climbed 8.9% in a year, to $36.65 a square foot, and some Class A space was marketed at $70, the report said. Downtown asking rents rose 5.5% in one quarter, to $41.77.
Suburban asking rents averaged $27.58, largely unchanged for four years, according to the report.
Leasing has picked up. New leases totaled more than 744,000 square feet through September, up 30.1% from a year earlier and the strongest three-quarter total since 2022, the brokerage said. Renewals topped 166,000 square feet, more than 2.6 times all of 2025.
Why it matters
For tenants, the numbers mean fewer options. Cushman & Wakefield expects landlords to keep pricing leverage as vacancy tightens and quality space stays limited, its report said.
For developers, the math cuts both ways. Low vacancy argues for building, but the gains in occupied space have been modest. Over the past four quarters, the market filled less space than Magnolia Landing alone will add.
Nationally, new office construction remains scarce, Cushman & Wakefield said. Deliveries through the first three quarters of 2026 were the lowest for that stretch in more than 30 years.
How we did this
We used Cushman & Wakefield’s third-quarter 2026 MarketBeat reports for Charleston and for the United States, which list vacancy, net absorption, asking rents, inventory, deliveries and construction for 92 markets. We ranked the markets by overall vacancy, added the four most recent quarters of net absorption for Charleston, Charlotte and Greenville and divided by each market’s inventory, compared the three markets’ deliveries and construction, and calculated vacant square feet and shares from the Charleston report’s submarket table. CBRE’s figures come from its second-quarter 2026 Charleston office report. Brokerage figures are estimates based on each firm’s own inventory of buildings, and current-quarter numbers are preliminary.
