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What determines the cost of a Commercial Energy Performance Certificate (EPC)?

Unlike their Domestic equivalents, Commercial EPC’s are subject to a much wider range of information gathering and input, requiring more time and consideration from the assessor. Travel to and from the site, time to gather the necessary data and complete the survey, time for the calculations required and time to input all the data into the software, will go towards determining the final cost of the EPC. There is also the lodgement fee, which must be paid when the EPC is lodged with Landmark, making it official and legal.

There is no direct comparison between the size of the building and the cost of the EPC, the comparison is in the time taken to produce the EPC. This is due to a number of reasons as outlined below:

The assessor must divide each building into zones. This involves producing a plan of the building with each room type and use clearly identified. Some adjacent rooms may be joined to form one zone if they share the same attributes, however, if the construction in any of the walls, the ceiling/roof or floor differs, they will remain separate zones. Likewise, a room is determined as its own zone if the heating, lighting or amount of daylight is different from an adjacent room, where similar they may be joined to form one zone.

Every zones wall, floor and ceiling/roof areas must be measured, the more zones there are the more measuring will need to be done. The construction of each will need to be ascertained, and also what type of space it connects to – heated, external or unheated internal.

All external windows and doors must be measured to gain their area as a proportion of the wall/roof in which they are placed. Again, the more windows there are the longer it will take on site.

Each zones heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting plus their associated controls need to be noted. As much data as possible regarding the buildings energy use is useful, Operations Manuals, Health & Safety Manuals and schematic drawings are useful documents for the assessor to have access to in order to gain the most accurate output for the EPC.

A large warehouse with 1 warehouse space, and an office block at one side with just 2 or 3 offices, 2 toilets and a small tea making area could result in only 4 or 5 zones, with the only difference between the heating and lighting systems being between the warehouse and the office block containing all the other rooms.

By comparison, an old Victorian building currently used as retail space on the ground floor with offices above over 2 floors, although a much smaller floor area, could have odd shaped rooms, differing constructions due to many alterations over the years, varying heating and lighting types resulting in any number of zones. 

The price of an EPC will not be determined by the size of a building on its own. The time spent understanding the building services and construction and the time spent on surveying and analysing the combination of size, the number and shape of the zones and the openings in each, how each of those zones are heated, cooled, ventilated and lit, and the availability of building services and construction data will be the determining factors to likely cost.