Building certification in Europe is moving beyond energy performance to include renovation planning, smart readiness and sustainability. How are regulatory and voluntary frameworks evolving? How could interoperability support building decisions and the decarbonisation of Europe’s building stock?
(Note: Opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union)
Building certification and assessment tools are playing an increasing role in assessing, comparing and improving Europe’s building stock. Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), Building Renovation Passports (BRPs), the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) and voluntary sustainability schemes help translate complex building performance data into clearer information for owners, investors, professionals and policymakers.
With the recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), the role of certification is evolving. Alongside their regulatory functions, these tools can increasingly support deep renovation planning, smart building integration and longer-term building improvement. This Overview Article explores how next-generation certification frameworks support better design choices, reveal untapped energy savings, evaluate life-cycle impacts and connect energy performance with indoor environmental quality (IEQ), resilience, smartness and real-world performance.
Other EU frameworks provide complementary perspectives on building performance. Level(s) provides a common European approach to assessing the sustainability performance of buildings throughout their life cycle, covering greenhouse gas emissions, resource efficiency, water, health and comfort, climate resilience and life-cycle value. The EU Taxonomy for sustainable activities serves a different purpose, establishing criteria for determining when economic activities, including construction, renovation and building ownership, can be considered environmentally sustainable for investment and reporting purposes. Neither replaces building-level assessment tools, but both can help place their results in a wider sustainability context.
Against this background, the article explores how these different approaches can provide more useful evidence for building decisions and how their findings can be better connected.
While EPCs have been mandatory across EU Member States for years, their consistency, data quality and reliability have varied. Improving EPCs therefore raises two key questions: how accurately does the assessment reflect the building, and how clearly can users interpret and compare the results?
European research projects have addressed these challenges from different perspectives. ePANACEA, EPC-RECAST, SmartLivingEPC and D^2EPC explored ways to improve methodological accuracy and automation through approaches including dynamic building energy simulation, digital twins and automated data collection. CrossCert and U-CERT focused on cross-border comparability by evaluating how EPC schemes function across different European regions, proposing user-centric formats and converged methodologies aligned with modern international and European standards, while E-DYCE and CHRONICLE investigated how calculated energy performance can be better complemented by measured operational data.
Taken together, these approaches seek to make EPCs more reliable and informative while maintaining a clear distinction between calculated and measured performance.
A key evolution in European building policy is the integration of step-by-step renovation planning directly into the certification ecosystem. BRPs complement EPCs by providing a long-term roadmap for staged renovation towards a zero-emission building (ZEB). Early projects such as iBRoad and its successor iBRoad2EPC pioneered modular, step-by-step renovation roadmaps linked to EPC schemes across several Member States. Projects like OneClickRENO and TIMEPAC addressed the challenge of mass adoption by leveraging existing EPC databases, cadastral data and geographic information system (GIS) tools to generate reliable, low-cost renovation passports at scale.
A BUILD UP technical article on OneClickRENO, ‘Bridging the missing link between EPCs and renovation action: scaling up Renovation Passports with OneClickRENO’, presents how existing building information – including EPC databases, cadastral and geospatial data, and building typologies – can be reused through a GIS-based platform to generate a first estimated renovation diagnosis and staged renovation roadmap.
Portugal is also exploring an integrated EPC-BRP approach, building on its existing national EPC scheme. By combining information on current energy performance with a forward-looking renovation roadmap, the approach aims to link building assessment more closely with staged renovation planning while reducing duplication.
As buildings become active nodes in the energy system, evaluating their digital and operational flexibility is as critical as assessing their physical envelope. The Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) evaluates a building’s ability to adapt its operation to the needs of the occupant and the grid.
A cluster of EU-funded projects supports SRI adoption across Member States. For instance, projects selected in 2021 by the LIFE Clean Energy Transition programme (SRI2MARKET, SRI-ENACT, easySRI and SmartSquare) provided Member States, assessors and building managers with practical tools, training and policy guidelines to support the SRI implementation. They contributed to testing the SRI across different building types and national contexts. Their findings, together with those of Member States’ official test phases, will be included in a Commission report to be submitted to the European Parliament and the Council, in compliance with Article 15 of the EPBD. Considering the outcome of that report, the Commission shall adopt new acts requiring the application of the SRI to non-residential buildings with an effective rated output for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems of over 290 kW.
While EU regulatory schemes (EPCs, the SRI, BRPs, and Level(s)) set baseline requirements and harmonised targets, voluntary certification schemes play a crucial role in driving market transformation, rewarding top-tier performance and attracting green finance.
Voluntary schemes like LEED (USGBC) and BREEAM (BRE) assess aspects of building performance that extend beyond operational energy use, including whole-life carbon, circularity, water management and site ecology. These areas also feature in the EU Level(s) framework for sustainable buildings. As green building expert Gianluca Padula (R2M Solution) notes in an interview with BUILD UP, certifications are now heavily tied to environmental, social and governance (ESG) compliance and real estate valuation; it has to be ensured that green certifications remain rigorous tools for assessing environmental impact. Systems like DGNB (Germany) or HQE (France) demonstrate how national schemes can push building stock performance beyond standard compliance through rigorous life-cycle assessments and life-cycle costing. Therefore, the focus on a building's impact is shifting from the short term (construction) to its entire life cycle—not only to calculate its carbon emissions impact but also to evaluate its economic cost, thereby identifying the best solutions or typologies.
Alongside the EU’s regulatory SRI, private and market-led certification frameworks are playing a pivotal role in quantifying digital infrastructure and operational intelligence. Standard-setters like WiredScore and its dedicated smart building rating SmartScore evaluate robust digital connectivity, system resilience, cybersecurity and tenant-facing technological services. Similarly, initiatives such as France’s Smart Buildings Alliance (SBA) Ready2Service (R2S) framework emphasise interoperability, open application programming interfaces and an internet protocol backbone (‘Smart Network’) that seamlessly connects HVAC, lighting and fluid control equipment. Specialised indicators like SPIRE (UL Solutions and the Telecommunications Industry Association) further assess smart-building maturity across health, sustainability and connectivity metrics. Together with the SRI, these private schemes bridge the gap between building management systems and user outcomes, transforming real estate into dynamic, grid-interactive and occupier-centric digital assets.
Concerning health and well-being, schemes such as WELL and Fitwel put human health, air quality, lighting, and acoustics at the forefront, complementing the IEQ metrics now being integrated into next-generation EPCs. Furthermore, European initiatives are pushing health metrics into social inclusivity. Through projects like Homes4LIFE, partners such as CERTIVEA (France) have helped pioneer certification frameworks tailored to an ageing demographic, ensuring IEQ directly addresses vulnerability, comfort and energy poverty prevention. BUILD UP’s Expert Talk with CERTIVEA International Development Director Cosmin Cotora explores the need for a comprehensive approach, incorporating all issues of sustainable development in a balanced way.
EPCs, BRPs, the SRI and voluntary sustainability frameworks originated from different policy and market needs. Rather than operating in silos, these tools complement one another: a building’s baseline energy rating (EPC) informs its long-term decarbonisation path (BRP), while its digital readiness (SRI, WiredScore, R2S) enables real-time optimisation, and holistic frameworks (Level(s), LEED, BREEAM and WELL) capture broad health, circularity and ESG metrics. When fed into unified digital building logbooks, these combined frameworks provide a complete 360-degree view of an asset, streamlining data collection for assessors, unlocking green finance and guiding building owners towards truly future-proof decisions.
Several European initiatives are exploring how these frameworks and their underlying data can work together more effectively.
Building certification in Europe is evolving towards a more connected ecosystem for assessing and improving building performance. EPCs, BRPs, the SRI, Level(s) and voluntary certification schemes fulfil distinct but complementary roles, extending assessment from energy performance to smartness, whole-life carbon, resilience, comfort and broader sustainability.
The priority is not to create a single certification scheme, but to improve interoperability, data quality and consistency across existing frameworks. Better coordination can reduce duplication, facilitate the reuse of reliable building data and strengthen links between regulation, renovation planning, building performance and sustainable finance.
As these connections develop, certification can move beyond documenting current performance to provide more useful evidence for renovation decisions and support the long-term decarbonisation of Europe’s building stock.
BUILD UP invites its community to contribute by sharing knowledge, good practices and insights on building certification and its role in improving building performance and supporting decarbonisation.
