diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 28e56e34b3..8b29f3f222 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -15,6 +15,7 @@
 - Fix handling of inputs with OSC ANSI escape sequences, see #2541 and #2544 (@eth-p)
 - Fix handling of inputs with combined ANSI color and attribute sequences, see #2185 and #2856 (@eth-p)
 - Fix panel width when line 10000 wraps, see #2854 (@eth-p)
+- Only start offload worker thread when there's more than 1 core #2956 (@cyqsimon)
 
 ## Other
 
diff --git a/src/bin/bat/app.rs b/src/bin/bat/app.rs
index 6fc853219f..25720cb22c 100644
--- a/src/bin/bat/app.rs
+++ b/src/bin/bat/app.rs
@@ -2,6 +2,7 @@ use std::collections::HashSet;
 use std::env;
 use std::io::IsTerminal;
 use std::path::{Path, PathBuf};
+use std::thread::available_parallelism;
 
 use crate::{
     clap_app,
@@ -125,7 +126,9 @@ impl App {
         // start building glob matchers for builtin mappings immediately
         // this is an appropriate approach because it's statistically likely that
         // all the custom mappings need to be checked
-        syntax_mapping.start_offload_build_all();
+        if available_parallelism()?.get() > 1 {
+            syntax_mapping.start_offload_build_all();
+        }
 
         if let Some(values) = self.matches.get_many::<String>("ignored-suffix") {
             for suffix in values {