Badge scanning systems have been used for decades as a form of access control and building security. More recently, these systems gained an additional purpose: occupancy tracking. Organizations can use badge data to improve their visibility into space utilization, informing real estate decisions, hybrid work initiatives, building automation, and other workplace management processes.
In The 2025 Enterprise Occupancy Tracking Report, we asked real estate and facility management decisionmakers about their organizations’ experience with occupancy tracking. More than three quarters (76%) of respondents reported that they used badge scanning to track occupancy. Most of them (56%) coupled this with reservation data. And 20% indicated that badge data was the only type of occupancy data they collect.
So, does badge data alone provide enough information for organizations to benefit from the cost savings and optimization opportunities of occupancy analytics? Maybe. When a person scans their badge at an access point to enter or exit a building or particular space, this data provides basic visibility into the number of occupants in the space. It’s far from perfect, but for some organizations and use cases, it gets the job done.
In this article, we’ll examine what badge data brings to your occupancy analytics efforts, highlight some of the drawbacks, and discuss whether more data is really the key to more valuable insights.
What badge data brings to occupancy analytics
Badge scanning systems are affordable, scalable, widely adopted, and multi-purpose. So it makes sense that the majority of enterprises we surveyed were using this technology for occupancy tracking. But if you’re only monitoring access points, how can you leverage that data in occupancy analytics?
Track high-level space utilization metrics
When you measure the number of occupants entering and exiting a specific building or space, it lays the foundation for space utilization metrics like occupancy and vacancy levels, peak occupancy level, utilization rate, and demand for space. You don’t get a precise understanding of any of these metrics—unless people scan their badges to use each room or workstation—but you do establish a rough gauge of what your utilization looks like for each access-controlled space.
By bringing badge data into an occupancy analytics platform like Tango Space, you can use these insights for high-level scenario planning, stack planning, move management, and other space management workflows—even if you don’t have the precise information you’d get from space utilization sensors or a sensorless occupancy monitoring solution.
Identify patterns in demand for space
Even without monitoring individual floors, rooms, or workstations, tracking building occupancy over time and integrating this data with an analytics system allows you to see usage patterns—how occupancy typically looks during particular times of day, days of the week, seasons, or operational changes.
Finding these trends will help you forecast future demand for space and more reliably predict how business decisions and initiatives (like changes to your hybrid work policy or RTO) will impact occupancy.
Optimize building infrastructure
Our enterprise occupancy tracking survey found that energy savings and sustainability were among the occupancy tracking use cases most aligned with enterprise needs. The vast majority of respondents (87%) cited energy savings as at least moderately aligned with their needs, and one quarter of respondents indicated that sustainability was highly aligned with their needs.
Whether you collect real-time occupancy data or simply rely on historical patterns, your badge scanning system can help you schedule heating, cooling, lighting, and other building operations around building occupancy. You can ensure occupants are comfortable without wasting energy consumption on times they aren’t in the building.
This is an area where more precise occupancy tracking isn’t always necessary. Trying to optimize energy consumption for every room may generate additional cost savings, but it requires far more data, and runs the risk of creating a poor occupant experience as people move throughout the building.
Improve maintenance schedules
Occupancy data allows you to schedule service and maintenance based on usage. Without this data, you could be paying more for maintenance than needed—or failing to perform sufficient maintenance. Either of which results in unnecessary costs. Reducing these costs was one of just two occupancy tracking use cases in which all of our respondents saw at least “moderate alignment” with their business needs. And 62% saw “significant alignment” or “high alignment.”
With badge data, organizations can create schedules based on a building’s occupancy levels and utilization rate, ensuring that cleaning services, maintenance staff, and specialists are servicing buildings at optimal times.
Limitations of badge scanning
The majority of survey respondents (68%) were tracking occupancy through two data sources—most commonly badge data and reservation data (56%). 12% of firms even used three or more data sources.
But not all enterprises have invested in multiple occupancy data sources. 20% of enterprises rely solely on badge data to track occupancy. If that’s you, here’s how your minimalist approach might be letting you down.
Badge scans cannot provide precise utilization data
Relying solely on badge data means you can’t track movement throughout a space, and you’re typically only able to show occupancy for an entire building (unless you’ve gated additional spaces within that building). This imprecision means you can only understand your occupancy in broad strokes.
Based on your usable square footage and capacity, your badge data may show that you have excess space. But where, specifically? What types of space can you afford to do with less of? Which rooms or floors should you consider repurposing or consolidating? And if you’re nearing max capacity, how should you approach expansion? These are questions that desk booking software, space utilization sensors, or a network-based occupancy solution are better suited to help answer.
It isn’t always accurate
There are some inherent issues with badge scanning systems which organizations may need to address if they want to rely on this data.
If a group of employees is entering or exiting at the same time, can you ensure that each person will scan their badge? It’s common courtesy to hold the door for a colleague, but if this is a regular practice at your workplace, it can significantly skew your data. Company policy and company culture may be enough to resolve this, but you may need receptionists or managers to help enforce consistent scanning. Badge scanning systems can also have intermittent problems reading badges or correctly granting access. If this is a known issue with your system, even if it only occurs occasionally, employees can easily develop a habit of letting each other in and out when a badge doesn’t scan.
Small discrepancies may not be critical, but large differences in tracked or forecasted demand and actual demand can lead to catastrophic real estate decisions.
Increasing access points interferes with the occupancy experience
The only way to increase the visibility badge data provides is by tracking more access points and requiring more scans. Unfortunately, that can negatively impact occupant experience—which is one of the things enterprises are most interested in improving through occupancy tracking.
Badge scanning adds a step before occupants can access a space. And while access control is common and intuitive enough for occupants to simply accept it when entering or exiting buildings or secure areas, if every floor, room, or workstation requires a scan, that’s a disruption people aren’t accustomed to.
Do organizations need more occupancy data?
For most organizations, more data isn’t the key to getting more from occupancy tracking. In our survey, even enterprises that had several occupancy tracking technologies shared that they don’t use it beyond space optimization. And when we asked respondents why they didn’t have occupancy tracking across their entire portfolio, some noted that they would feel overwhelmed by the volume of data.
At Tango, we believe the answer isn’t in more or even better occupancy data. Instead, organizations need to consider how they can better integrate the data they have throughout their workplace management systems, leveraging their occupancy data to inform space management, lease, facilities maintenance, and sustainability decisions. And that’s true whether you only have badge scan data or you have multiple data sources including IoT sensors.
Learn more about the state of occupancy tracking
In The 2025 Enterprise Occupancy Report, we surveyed North American and European enterprises from five different industries about their experience with occupancy tracking. Each of our respondents had significant influence over the organization’s adoption of occupancy tracking technologies, and shared insights including their greatest barriers to investing in occupancy tracking, their organizational priorities, and how their priorities align with use cases for occupancy tracking.
You can access the entire report for free—we won’t even ask for your email.