Coworking Boom Continues

Last week Deskwanted released their annual global coworking census.  It shows there are 2498 coworking spaces across the globe, up 87% from a year earlier.  The chart below, from Deskwanted, shows where these facilities are located.

 

The U.S. leads with 781 coworking facilities, followed by Germany (230) and Spain (199).  While I didn't crunch through all the countries, Spain appears to be the leader in terms of coworking facilities per capita, which 1 facility for every 236,000 residents.  The U.S. has one facility for every 402,000 residents.

These per capita numbers alone lead me to believe in the continued rapid growth of coworking.

It's important to note that the exponential growth in coworking facilities understates the overall growth of coworking. This is because coworking facilities, on average, are getting bigger and housing more members. This means the number of coworking space members is growing slightly faster than at an exponential rate.   

Looking back, it's been 7 years since our first visit to a coworking facility. At the time we believed it to be an interesting idea and a trend that potentially had legs. But even though we included it our Future of Small Business report in early 2007, at that time we didn't expect it to take off as fast as it has.

It's clear at this point coworking is a trend and industry that will continue to grow. We're at the Global Coworking Unconference Conference this week in Austin, Texas.  We'll report on what we learn in future posts.

See our Coworking Category for more on this topic.

Comments

[Steve King]

I'm seeing the folks that did the census tomorrow. I'll ask about why they have relatively few Dutch spaces (39) in their report.

[Rvandenhoff]

Somehow this survey missed a big number of coworking locations in The Netherlands. We operate over 60 of them and in total there are about 120 coworking locations active...that means about 1 location per 143.000 residents...just for the record!