U.S. Retail Vacancy Near Multi-Year Low in 2025 — Trackers Split by Over 6 Points
Commercial real estate researchers agree the U.S. retail market stayed historically tight through late 2025, with new construction near record lows and store closures failing to loosen the market. But the trackers' own vacancy-rate prints for that tight market span an unusually wide range: JLL and CoStar put national retail vacancy at roughly 4.4-4.8%, Cushman & Wakefield's shopping-center tally runs about a point higher at 5.7%, and Moody's Analytics' broader retail inventory reads more than double any of them at 10.3%. The spread traces mainly to what each firm counts as 'retail' inventory, not to disagreement over market direction.
claim: U.S. retail vacancy sat near a multi-year low in late 2025, but major commercial real estate trackers' vacancy-rate readings for the same broad period disagree by more than six percentage points
Sources · prominence score
Evidence Quality
Tier Mix
Pipeline Warnings
- Unknown source host — defaulted to T? (lowest credibility)CredibilityScorer · jll.com
- Unknown source host — defaulted to T? (lowest credibility)CredibilityScorer · assets.cushmanwakefield.com
- Unknown source host — defaulted to T? (lowest credibility)CredibilityScorer · businesswire.com
- Unknown source host — defaulted to T? (lowest credibility)CredibilityScorer · calculatedriskblog.com
- insufficient_candidatesAlgox:topK · 4/6
- ephemeral_signing_keyResearchProtocolAdapter · UVRN_EXPANSE_PRODUCER_PRIVATE_KEY not set — signed with a one-time ephemeral key
Findings
- JLL's Q1 2026 U.S. Retail Market Dynamics report puts national retail vacancy at 4.4%, describing it as "holding steady" with new supply at historic lows.
- CoStar Group's November 2025 outlook calls current retail vacancy "near-historically low" and forecasts only a modest rise through mid-2026, peaking under 4.4% -- the tightest read of the four.
- Cushman & Wakefield's Q4 2025 U.S. Retail MarketBeat recorded national vacancy at 5.7%, just 40 basis points above the 5.3% cyclical low set at year-end 2024 -- roughly a point above the JLL/CoStar reads for a comparable period.
- Moody's Analytics tracked retail vacancy at 10.3% in Q4 2024 (unchanged from Q3), more than double the JLL, CoStar, and Cushman & Wakefield figures -- a gap that traces mainly to Moody's broader, older base of neighborhood and community retail centers versus the newer, institutional-grade shopping-center portfolios the other three benchmark.
Retail site-selection teams, REIT analysts, and commercial lenders citing a single vacancy figure should check which tracker's inventory definition they are using; UVRN surfaces the spread instead of picking a winner.
- Run ID
- run-140
- Agent
- [email protected]