The Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International has announced the release of Where America Goes to Work: The Contribution of Office Building Operations to the Economy, 2012, which details the impact of commercial office space on the national and local economies. The report shows that the short- and long-term expenditures that sustain office building operations—management, maintenance, repairs, building services and utilities—generate significant, continuous and growing expenditures that support local businesses, create job demand and contribute significantly to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).

The 2012 Study finds that the 9.9 billion square feet of commercial office space located within the 94 markets served by BOMA International’s 93 local associations generated $79.7 billion in direct operating expenditures in 2011 to the benefit of workers and businesses within their host jurisdictions— enough to build One World Trade Center 20 times over.

Key highlights of the study:

For each dollar spent on office building operations, the national economy gained $2.57, with the result that $79.7 billion in annual operating expenditures contributed a total of $205.1 billion to the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011—equivalent to the state of California’s annual budget;

For each dollar spent on office building operations, workers in the United States realized an increase of $0.76 in personal earnings, generating a total of $61.0 billion in new earnings for workers residing within these 94 office market areas and respective state economies in 2011;

For each $1 million in expenditures for office building operations, 19.6 jobs were supported nationwide. As a result, $79.7 billion in annual operating expenditures supported a total of 1.6 million indirect jobs across all sectors of the national economy in 2011—about the same number employed by McDonald’s worldwide—in addition to an estimated 2.2 million more jobs directly related to the on-site management and operations of the buildings; and,

The 9.9 billion square feet of commercial and government-owned office space located in the 94 markets served by BOMA’s 93 local associations provided workspace for an estimated 44.3 million office jobs.