Discover how renovation passports are emerging as a key Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) tool to help building professionals and owners plan staged deep renovations, aligning individual projects with Europe’s zero emission goals.
(Note: Opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union)
Renovation passports, introduced under Article 12 and Annex VIII of the 2024 recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), are a new instrument providing building owners with tailored roadmaps for staged deep renovation, significantly improving a building’s energy performance. Crucially, this approach helps avoid ‘lock-in’ of sub-optimal improvements, such as oversizing a heat generator before envelope improvements. Each step builds on the previous one, ensuring compatibility and maximising efficiency gains. Positioned as a key enabler of the EU’s Renovation Wave, renovation passports translate the EPBD’s strategic objectives into building-level renovation journeys that can be planned, financed and implemented over time.
This overview outlines the concept and function of renovation passports in line with the European Commission’s official guidance (Annex 4 to the EPBD Communication) and explains how they support deep renovations and the EPBD’s long-term decarbonisation goals by guiding buildings towards zero-emission performance levels. Furthermore, this overview article clarifies EU and Member State responsibilities in rolling out renovation passports, with the EPBD establishing a common framework and requiring national schemes to be in place by 2026, while implementation details and the decision to keep schemes voluntary for owners rest with Member States. Lastly, this overview article highlights available financial and technical support mechanisms for renovation passports, from targeted advice to funding incentives, and showcases key EU-funded projects, under programmes like the LIFE Clean Energy Transition programme and Horizon Europe, and good practices from EU countries that have and are piloting and deploying renovation passport schemes.
Europe’s building stock needs a massive upgrade to meet climate targets, yet most owners cannot afford or manage a full deep renovation at once. As outlined in previous BUILD UP overview articles, National Building Renovation Plans (NBRPs) set out each Member State’s strategy for a zero-emission building stock by 2050 and Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) and progressive renovation trajectories will push the worst-performing buildings to improve in stages by set deadlines. Implementation of these obligations is underpinned by data-driven tools like Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), and Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) standards. Renovation passports, as explored in a recent written interview on ‘An integrated approach of EPC, Renovation Passports and SRI fosters cost-effective, staged, and future-ready renovations’ and a technical article on ‘Smart compliance, staged upgrades and quality indoor spaces’, complement these tools by supporting staged renovation planning. In other words, NBRPs create the enabling framework, MEPS and national renovation trajectories provide the targets, while renovation passports provide individual building-level roadmaps to get there. Renovation passports have the unique potential to translate high-level policy goals into building-specific action plans, helping owners and professionals answer the question of what sequence of improvements will achieve the required performance by 2030 or 2035 and accelerate cost-effective renovations?
Article 12 requires each Member State to introduce a renovation passport scheme by 29 May 2026, based on the common framework set out in Annex VIII. The Commission guidance makes clear that this obligation covers the entire national building stock: all residential and non‑residential buildings, and both whole buildings and individual building units. Unless a Member State decides otherwise, renovation passports are voluntary for building and building unit owners. The directive nevertheless expects renovation passports to be widely available and explicitly reminds Member States that they may choose to make them mandatory at particular ‘trigger points’ in the building life cycle or for specific ownership categories.
A renovation passport must be delivered in a digital format suitable for printing and drawn up by a qualified or certified expert following an on‑site visit. The Commission guidance explains that this visit should include a visual assessment of the building envelope and technical systems, along with a structured discussion with the owner to understand renovation needs, constraints and financial possibilities. In practice, the visit may range from a simplified inspection to a full energy audit, but whatever the depth, it must yield enough information to design a credible deep renovation roadmap adapted both to the building and to the owner’s situation.
Article 12 requires that a discussion with the expert should be offered to the owner, so that the recommended steps and their sequencing can be explained. Member States are encouraged to support this process with clear guidance and assessment templates, ensuring consistency across experts and territories. They are also required to make renovation passports affordable and to consider subsidies or similar mechanisms to cover passport costs for vulnerable households, alongside more general measures that link renovation support to deep or staged deep renovation pathways.
Member States are asked to ‘strive to provide a dedicated digital tool’ for preparing, and where appropriate updating, renovation passports, and may develop a complementary simulation tool for owners and building managers to produce and update simplified draft passports before commissioning a full expert version. Renovation passports must be designed to allow digital upload to the national database for the energy performance of buildings and must be stored in, or accessible via, the digital building logbook where such logbooks exist.
Finally, renovation passports are brought under the same quality umbrella as EPCs and SRI. They must be established by independent, qualified experts, and Member States are required to extend their independent control systems to renovation passports, providing a coherent assurance framework for all EPBD information tools.
Annex VIII provides a detailed list of elements that every renovation passport shall include, alongside a second list of optional elements that Member States may integrate. At its core, each passport must describe the current energy performance of the building, present a graphical roadmap for staged deep renovation, explain in plain language how renovation steps should be sequenced and, for each step, outline the proposed measures, the technologies and materials to be used, and the estimated impacts in terms of primary and final energy savings, reductions in operational greenhouse gas emissions, energy bill savings and expected EPC class after implementation.
Within the wider regulatory context, passports must explain relevant national requirements, including minimum energy performance requirements for buildings and elements, MEPS and renovation trajectories, and national rules for phasing out fossil fuels used for heating and cooling, together with their application dates. They must indicate whether the building can connect to an efficient district heating and cooling system and estimate the share of renewable energy that could be generated and self‑consumed after renovation. Furthermore, Annex VIII requires general information on options to improve product circularity and reduce whole‑life‑cycle emissions, as well as on wider benefits such as health, comfort, productivity (IEQ) and the building’s adaptive capacity to climate change. Finally, passports must embed information on available funding and the advisory ecosystem: they must point owners towards relevant financial support schemes and provide contact details and links for advisory services and one‑stop-shops. The integration of circularity and whole-life carbon considerations marks an important evolution compared to EPCs, signalling the EPBD’s shift from purely operational energy performance to a broader sustainability framework.
Optional elements deepen the technical and financial content where appropriate. Annex VIII allows Member States to include indicative timing of renovation steps; more detailed descriptions of technologies and costs; comparisons of expected performance with national minimum requirements, nZEB and ZEB thresholds; estimates of payback periods and assumptions behind calculations. It also opens the door to independent modules listing trades and qualified suppliers, explaining the technical conditions for low‑temperature heating or describing how measures could improve the building’s smart readiness. Crucially, Annex VIII stipulates that the status of the building before the renovation steps should, as far as possible, be assessed using information from the EPC.
The Commission guidance organises these legal requirements into four practical building blocks:
It emphasises the need for passports to be both technically robust and user‑friendly, with clear graphical representations and concise explanations of the recommended steps, while leaving room for Member States to tailor formats to national practices and existing tools.
The EPBD recognises that there are strong synergies between renovation passports and EPCs. Member States can foster renovation passports to be drawn up and issued jointly with energy performance certificates. Such coupling can reduce costs, because data collected for the EPC can be reused for the passport. Where EPCs already require an on‑site visit, this can feed both documents. When a renovation passport is issued jointly with an EPC, the passport’s recommendations substitute the generic EPC recommendations, ensuring that owners are not faced with two conflicting sets of advice.
At the same time, the Commission stresses that EPCs and passports serve different purposes. While an EPC provides a snapshot of current performance and standard recommendations, the passport offers a long‑term, owner‑specific roadmap that considers preferences, planning and financial possibilities.
Renovation passports are also closely linked to MEPS and progressive renovation trajectories. The guidance explicitly encourages Member States to promote renovation passports for buildings subject to MEPS, so that owners are supported in planning a renovation that not only reaches the minimum required performance but goes further, aligning with deep renovation and ZEB objectives.
For non‑residential buildings facing stepwise MEPS obligations and for residential buildings following national renovation trajectories, passports can position each deep renovation step in relation to regulatory milestones. The Annex VIII requirement to show how each step improves EPC class and approaches minimum energy performance requirements or nZEB/ZEB thresholds makes it easier for owners and financiers to understand how their project fits within national timelines.
NBRPs must describe how each Member State will decarbonise its building stock and reach ZEB status by 2050, including indicative national trajectories for average primary energy use and emissions. Renovation passports can be seen as the micro‑level counterpart of these plans: they translate stock‑level trajectories into individual renovation pathways for specific buildings and building units.
The guidance emphasises that renovation passports should aim to transform buildings into nZEBs before 2030 and ZEBs thereafter, or at least reach deep renovation depth where full ZEB conversion is not feasible. This ensures coherence between long‑term stock targets, national cost‑optimal levels and building‑level advice.
The EPBD also introduces stronger provisions on IEQ, ensuring that energy renovations maintain or improve the health, comfort and productivity of people and smart readiness, through the Smart Readiness Indicator, which assesses a building’s ability to use digital and automated systems to adapt to occupants’ needs, interact with the energy grid and manage energy use more efficiently. Annex VIII requires renovation passports to highlight wider benefits relating to health, comfort, productivity, and climate resilience, and allows optional modules on how renovation steps could improve the building’s smart readiness. This encourages integration of technical building systems upgrades, demand‑side flexibility and digital controls into the renovation roadmap, rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
Member States are required to maintain national databases on the energy performance of buildings, into which EPCs, inspection reports and renovation passports must be uploaded. Passports are linked to digital building logbooks, ensuring that they become part of a broader digital record covering permits, certificates, renovation works and, in the future, possibly metered performance data. Passports shall be drawn up by qualified or certified experts, and the independent control systems are extended to cover not only EPCs but also renovation passports, SRI and inspection reports. In combination with the Commission’s guidance on scoping on‑site visits and data collection, this creates a quality framework that should enable owners, investors and authorities to trust the information contained in renovation passports. To remain useful, renovation passports must be updatable as works are completed or as technologies evolve. Ensuring interoperability between EPC databases, digital building logbooks, and future SRI registries will be essential for maintaining up-to-date information and enabling cross-tool data reuse.
Renovation passports are not a financing instrument in themselves, but the EPBD clearly positions them as a key enabler for mobilising investment. Article 12 requires Member States to ensure the affordability of passports and to consider financial support for vulnerable households wishing to renovate, while the Commission guidance suggests several ways to reduce costs: linking passports to existing EPC schemes, making use of digital tools and aggregating demand in district-scale renovation programmes.
The broader financial framework calls on Member States to make best use of national and EU funding, including the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the Social Climate Fund, Cohesion Policy funds and revenues from emissions trading, and to promote energy‑efficiency loans, green mortgages, on‑bill schemes and pay‑as‑you‑save solutions. It also requires Member States to incentivise deep and staged deep renovations with higher levels of financial, fiscal and technical support, and to link financial measures for renovations to targeted or achieved energy savings and emissions reductions, using EPCs, energy audits or comparable methods as evidence. Financial institutions increasingly require robust evidence of long-term performance improvements. Renovation passports can fulfil this role by offering a transparent sequence of works and quantifiable impacts, thereby reducing uncertainty for green loans and mortgages.
By providing multi‑step, quantified renovation roadmaps that indicate expected energy and emissions reductions, EPC class improvements, costs and payback times, passports can become a standard reference for banks, public funding agencies and energy‑service companies when designing or approving finance for renovations. Annex VIII’s requirement to include information on available funding, one‑stop-shops and advisory services also turns the passport into a navigation tool through a possibly complex support landscape.
From a market perspective, renovation passports can help structure demand and reduce transaction costs. For professionals, they provide a clear, sequenced brief around which design services, construction contracts and maintenance plans can be organised. For owners, they clarify how today’s decisions affect their ability to meet future MEPS thresholds, ZEB requirements and national fossil‑fuel phase‑out dates, helping avoid stranded investments.
While this overview focuses on the EU‑level framework, the implementation of renovation passport schemes is already underway. Several Member States and regions have piloted or are rolling out such tools, often combining digital building logbooks with renovation roadmaps and linking them to EPC databases, regional renovation strategies and financial support schemes (check ongoing national implementation of renovation passports and EU-funded projects in the BUILD UP living news 'Renovation passports in action across Europe'). The Commission guidance on renovation passports draws on these early experiences and on the results of EU‑funded projects to provide practical examples of possible scheme designs, including different institutional setups, integration with EPC schemes and digital tools, and approaches to affordability and owner engagement.
In line with this, the Topic of the Month will be complemented by a set of technical articles that zoom in on mature and newly awarded projects ('Advancing circular deep renovation through Digital Renovation Passports: the CRedIBlE Project approach', 'Anticipation du passeport de rénovation en France avant l'échéance de 2026'). Each will be presented through a common lens, why it is relevant, what added value it brings, what makes it different, and why it can be considered a good or best practice, and will highlight concrete outcomes such as passport templates, digital platforms, financing models and user feedback. This will allow readers to see how the EU-level provisions on renovation passports are already being translated into practice and how early national implementation can inform future scheme design across the Union.
Anchored in Article 12 and Annex VIII and clarified by detailed Commission guidance, renovation passports offer building‑specific, staged deep‑renovation roadmaps that connect national building renovation plans, MEPS and renovation trajectories, EPCs, IEQ provisions, smart readiness and financial support into a coherent journey from today’s building stock to a zero-emission future. By 2026, every Member State must have a scheme in place. Decisions taken now on scope, design, digital tools and financial linkages will determine whether renovation passports become a niche document or a mainstream driver of quality renovation.
BUILD UP’s community has a crucial role to play in shaping this implementation. The BUILD UP team invites you to share articles, technical reports, case studies, tools, news or events related to renovation passports, digital building logbooks, staged deep renovation and their links to MEPS, renovation trajectories, NBRPs, and financial instruments. Your contributions will help turn renovation passports from a promising legal concept into a practical instrument that truly empowers the EU’s Renovation Wave.
