US tech firm Workday has put a fifth of the space it let in a new 21-storey office block in Dublin city centre back on the market a year after choosing the building as its new European headquarters. In April 2025, the company struck a deal to occupy the entire 38,648sq m of office space in the newly built College Square scheme in central Dublin from Pat Crean’s Marlet Property Group. Workday, which is fitting out the building before moving in, has since decided to sublet at least a fifth of the space as it has been deemed surplus to requirements. Agent Cushman & Wakefield has been instructed to advertise the second and third floors in College Square in Dublin 2, which span 8,300sq m, as available to let on “flexible lease terms”.A spokeswoman for Workday said it could not comment on plans to sublease space in College Square but confirmed it still intended to occupy the building. “We are on track to open College Square, the new home of Workday’s EMEA headquarters, at the start of our next fiscal year [February 2027]. We look forward to welcoming our Dublin teams to this landmark new development as we continue to invest, grow, and hire in the region,” she said. Workday’s decision to sublet part of the block will compound the city’s office vacancy rate. At the end of the second quarter of this year, analysis by real estate agency JLL Ireland said 12.2 per cent of the office market was vacant. Based on this level of vacancy, the city has 580,000sq m of empty office space. In recent years, a number of big multinationals have sought to sublet large amounts of office space that has become surplus to requirements.[ Why AI is more likely to fill offices than empty themOpens in new window ]In 2022, Meta-owned Facebook announced it would no longer occupy the new Fibonacci Place campus, which it agreed to lease in 2018. It has sublet 8 per cent of the 34,838sq m development space to date. LinkedIn also announced in 2022 that it no longer required a large amount of office space it pre-let at Wilton Park, a near-40,000sq m campus along Dublin’s Grand Canal, and has since sublet surplus space to Stripe and EY Ireland.In April 2025, when Workday closed the deal to let College Square, it became the biggest single office letting in the history of the State.The deal was also the largest office letting in Europe since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.At the time, news of the transaction’s completion was regarded as a significant vote of confidence in the Dublin office market, which faced lower letting activity levels for several years following the pandemic.College Square was developed by Marlet with its partner M&G Investments, on sites occupied formerly by Apollo House and the neighbouring College House.The mixed-used scheme includes 58 high-end apartments on 12 floors above the 10 floors of offices and 1,580sq m of retail space on the ground floor.