'Coworking' gains weight in Barcelona with 20% more hiring in 2024

Coworking is becoming an increasingly widespread option for working in Barcelona. The city's flexible workspaces have maintained an 80% occupancy throughout 2024, during which hiring increased by 20% compared to the previous year.

This increase translated into 11,000 contracted workstations during the year, across a total of 29,700 square meters leased by operators. In total, the stock of flex offices in Barcelona is close to 250,000 square meters, accommodating practically 25,000 workstations, according to data from the real estate consulting and services company CBRE.

With these figures, Barcelona positions itself as a coworking city at a European level. In fact, it is one of the main European markets in terms of flex penetration, with 3.3% of the office park, ahead of Madrid, with 1.9%. Both cities concentrate 90% of the flexible workstations contracted in 2024, with 22,300 out of the 25,500 registered nationwide, and are among the main flex office cities: London, Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona concentrated 45% of European hiring in the first half of 2024.

"This year we have seen how the volume of hiring in Barcelona has increased quarter by quarter," highlights the head of Flex Office in Spain at CBRE, Salvador Aguilar. And Barcelona brings together multiple factors that make the city a good setting for flexible offices, starting with a dynamic entrepreneurial and technological ecosystem: "The city is a hub for startups and technology companies, which seek flexible and collaborative workspaces due to their ease in accompanying the growth or decrease of the company, without strict long-term commitments." In addition, operating from a coworking usually provides access to services and events that promote networking and add value to the user experience.

While Barcelona is a city of entrepreneurship, it also hosts "a large number of companies with international profiles that share a business culture that values innovation and collaboration, and that finds in coworking spaces a place that facilitates collaboration between professionals from different sectors and nationalities." In this context, large corporations in the life science sector stand out, as Aguilar details. Furthermore, she emphasizes that Barcelona offers more competitive rates than other cities for flex offices, which "attracts more companies and professionals." The rates, in addition to being competitive, include multiple modalities, ranging from the use of a flexible desk from about 100 euros per month to the rental of private offices starting from about 400 euros per month per workstation.

"Barcelona is a hub of innovation and attraction for international talent, and companies come here because that's where the talent is," also defends Gabriel Espín, CEO of Aticco, one of the main coworking operators in the Catalan capital. The Barcelona-based company, which invoiced 17 million euros in 2024, has ten centers in the city, although it is not the only one in which it operates: it has a total of 14 coworking spaces distributed between Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia, covering more than 60,000 square meters of surface area.

Barcelona not only sparks the interest of coworking projects, but some of the main operators in the sector at a national level have emerged from the city, as is the case with Aticco. After a year of growth in 2024 that began with a ten-million-euro financing round, the company aims to continue growing in 2025, to exceed 20 million in revenue and reach 100,000 square meters of coworking spaces, with centers in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Malaga, and Lisbon.

Despite coworking being Aticco's main focus, the company founded in 2016 also has coliving residences and a startups accelerator, Aticco Lab. This platform for entrepreneurs, which has a network of 400 mentors and works annually with a dozen emerging companies, also manages innovation programs for third-party companies. Aticco also manages the Barcelona Finance Hub, which operates from the Barcelona Stock Exchange building as a space for the financial innovation ecosystem. The coliving and Aticco Lab areas, which emerged as a result of the pandemic, represent about 10% of the company's turnover, which continues to bet heavily on coworking.

Thus, the flexible office sector continues to grow in the city thanks to coworking companies. These flexible spaces accommodate workers from large companies opening headquarters in the city, as well as freelancers, entrepreneurs, and SMEs, as detailed by Marta Gràcia, CEO of Cloudworks, another leading company in the sector in the city. "The average size of companies operating in our coworkings is between 20 and 30 people," explains Gràcia.

However, they also perceive a high demand for smaller spaces for smaller workforces. For this reason, the Barcelona-based company, founded in 2015, has recently opened a new center in Born focused on freelancers and small businesses, in which they have invested one million euros.

The more than 1,000 square meters of the new center are added to the more than 28,000 square meters of the company's spaces, distributed throughout Barcelona and Madrid. Through its coworkings, the company closed 2024 with a turnover of 11.5 million euros, 11.7% more than the previous year, and with a 24% increase in its workforce, which grew from 47 to 63 employees.

The growth of the coworking model in Barcelona is part of a global trend that has landed in cities to complement the traditional office market, with the highest penetration levels currently in London, where they are close to 10%, as Gràcia highlights: "From the sector, we believe that Barcelona can also reach this 10%, so there is still great room for growth."