From my research with the standard / popular libs this hasn’t been implemented as of 2020 for xlsx / xls but you can do this for xlsb. Either way these solutions should give you vast performance improvements. for xls, xlsx, xlsb.

Below was benchmarked on a ~10Mb xlsx, xlsb file.

xlsx, xls

from openpyxl import load_workbook

def get_sheetnames_xlsx(filepath):
    wb = load_workbook(filepath, read_only=True, keep_links=False)
    return wb.sheetnames

Benchmark: ~ 14x speed improvement

# get_sheetnames_xlsx vs pd.read_excel
225 ms ± 6.21 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)
3.25 s ± 140 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

xlsb

from pyxlsb import open_workbook

def get_sheetnames_xlsb(filepath):
  with open_workbook(filepath) as wb:
     return wb.sheets

Benchmark: ~ 56x speed improvement

# get_sheetnames_xlsb vs pd.read_excel
96.4 ms ± 1.61 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)
5.36 s ± 162 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

Notes: