Hyderabad tops GCC destination rankings in Q1 2026

Hyderabad has emerged as the highest-ranked global capability centre (GCC) destination, according to the IIM Bangalore-CRE Matrix GCC Commercial Property Rental Index (GCC-CPRI) for the first quarter of calendar year 2026 (Q1 CY26).

Hyderabad, with a GCC-CPRI of 212.1, is supported by strong occupier demand and a 15 per cent market rental premium over non-GCC occupiers. The index considers Q1 CY14 as the base at 100.

The GCC-CPRI, India’s first dedicated rental index for GCCs, tracks effective office rents paid by GCC occupiers in Grade A and Grade A+ office assets. The index measures effective rent, which is adjusted for factors such as rent-free periods, security deposits and abnormal rental escalations to reflect the underlying economics of a lease.

The pan-India GCC-CPRI stood at 165 in Q1 CY26, while the three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) stood at 0.9 per cent, signalling a stable growth trajectory for India’s GCC office market.

Abhishek Kiran Gupta, co-founder and chief executive officer, CRE Matrix & IndexTap, said, “This index is our attempt to put numbers behind that intuition. The first edition alone throws up findings that should reshape how developers and investors think about GCC-readiness: a 15 per cent rental premium in Hyderabad, and early signs that Bengaluru, Pune and NCR’s GCC demand are driving price-efficient decisions.”

The report also highlighted the growing momentum in western India, with Navi Mumbai recording the highest three-year GCC rental CAGR among major markets at 13.4 per cent.

Among micro-markets, Mumbai’s central suburbs and Chennai’s northern suburbs emerged as the strongest performers over the past three years, each recording a GCC rental CAGR of over 22 per cent, highlighting the growing preference for well-connected, Grade A office clusters.

While Chennai’s headline GCC index (80.6) declined by 37.1 per cent year-on-year, the report noted that effective rents for comparable office stock have remained largely stable, indicating that the movement reflects changes in the transacted asset mix rather than a broad-based correction in rental values.

The index is based on one of the industry’s transaction-level datasets, with CRE Matrix mapping approximately 1 billion square feet of office stock, over 2,000 commercial assets and more than 19,000 lease transactions across India’s leading office markets.

Venkatesh Panchapagesan, professor of finance and chairperson, Real Estate Research Initiative, IIM Bangalore, said, “GCCs are not simply paying more everywhere, nor moving in lockstep with the wider market. A pure premium, a pan-India cooling that diverges from the broader market, pockets of mini-segment volatility we are careful to flag rather than overstate – these are exactly the kind of texture that aggregate indices miss.” Business Standard