Office is the quiet turnaround story in Greater Moncton. While the sector remains under pressure across much of the country, the local market has tightened to its lowest vacancy in years — and unlike industrial, the major brokerages largely agree on the picture.
Vacancy: a multi-year low
Greater Moncton office vacancy sits around 9.5% as of mid-2026 — its lowest level since early 2019 — after running near 13% at the end of last year. Both of the national brokerages tracking the market put it in the same low-9% range, so this is a firmer read than the wide spread we see in industrial data. Provincewide, New Brunswick office vacancy is far higher — around 17% — which tells its own story: Moncton is meaningfully outperforming the other New Brunswick cities.
Downtown vs. suburban
The tightening isn’t uniform. Suburban office is the tightest segment at roughly 4.8%, while downtown sits higher near 11.8% — but downtown has now improved for three consecutive quarters, down about 240 basis points year-over-year. The gap reflects tenant preference for accessible, well-parked, amenity-rich suburban space, though the downtown recovery is real and ongoing.
The dominant theme: flight to quality
As tenants consolidate into better space, Class A commands a clear premium — average Class A asking rents have reached about $15.78 per square foot — while older, lower-quality product carries most of the vacancy. Rents for quality space are firm to rising; the discount is widening for everything else.
Why Moncton bucks the national trend
Nationally, office vacancy sits near 16% and the sector is still working through the shift to hybrid work. Moncton outperforms for structural reasons: a tenant base weighted toward services, government, and public-sector users that never emptied out the way big-city towers did; steady population and employment growth; and almost no speculative new office construction, so there’s no oversupply to absorb. Institutional and government demand anchors the market.
What to watch in 2027
Expect continued tightening in quality and suburban space, firm Class A rents, and a slower grind for older downtown stock — some of which becomes a repositioning or conversion candidate rather than competitive office. The variables to watch: whether downtown’s recovery holds, whether any obsolete office is taken out of inventory (a lever that would tighten the market further), and a provincial economy forecast to grow under 1% in 2026 with steady employment.
What it means
- Tenants: quality space is getting scarcer and pricier, and Class A options are limited — plan ahead, especially for suburban requirements, and expect less negotiating room than a year ago.
- Owners: well-located, amenity-rich Class A and suburban assets have pricing power; older downtown space needs repositioning, capital, or aggressive terms to compete.
- Investors: tightening plus negligible new supply supports quality office, but underwrite older stock cautiously — its value increasingly rests on conversion or repositioning optionality.
Looking at office space in Greater Moncton — leasing, buying, or repositioning? ONE.’s advisors can map the quality spectrum and the downtown-versus-suburban trade-offs against your needs. Reach out and we’ll walk you through it.
Figures are third-party published research, supplemented by our internal data, and not derived from MLS® System data.
