2024 DC Benchmarking Overview

Overview

Benchmarking helps building owners, investors, and tenants track and compare energy and cost performance year-over-year across similar buildings. Through this process, they can identify energy saving opportunities to reduce operating costs and prioritize investments. Benchmarking and disclosure of results to Washington, DC’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) is a precursor to compliance with DC’s Building Energy Performance Standards (BEPS).

2026 is the last year of the DC BEPS Compliance Cycle 1 (Cycle 1). 2026 is also the evaluation year for Cycle 1, which means that energy being used in buildings subject to BEPS in 2026 will be used to determine compliance with BEPS. In anticipation of this, building owners and managers have been implementing performance improvements at their buildings during BEPS Cycle 1. The DC building industry is curious as to how buildings will succeed with these requirements.

While we do not have public 2025 or 2026 benchmarking data, we do have public 2024 benchmarking data. The Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington (AOBA) and the Building Innovation Hub (Hub) are interested in this data to help advise our stakeholders and members on how DC building stock are doing with respect to this current BEPS, similar to the 2023 benchmarking data series published last year. This 2024 benchmarking data series expands the breadth of last year’s series and will seek to provide insight a few questions:

1. What additional BEPS relief options might be introduced later this year or early next year for buildings struggling to their BEPS requirements.
2. What are the current median ENERGY STAR scores for major building types like offices, multifamily buildings, hotels, and worship facilities?
3. How are buildings that did not meet the BEPS making progress on the primary compliance pathways—that is, the Performance and Standard Target Pathways?
4. What additional details and insights might we be able to glean from benchmarking data for offices, multifamily, hotels, and worship facilities?
5. What should buildings under 50,000 square feet be thinking about in the next year?

The data used in this analysis was based on publicly available disclosures with supplemental information provided by DOEE to enable the series’ methodology to be based on the evaluation metrics used by DOEE.

All observations in this series apply generally to the building typologies included in the dataset. Specific buildings will have their own unique challenges and may have different experiences.

Upcoming DC BEPS Relief Options

As the District approaches the end of BEPS Cycle 1, DOEE has been considering updated guidance to help buildings meet the technical requirements. While this series will look at 2024 benchmarking data, it is also important to understand what changes may be coming and what their impact may be. These updates are a result of collaboration between DOEE and multiple building industry partners such as the BEPS Task Force and AOBA. As of today, this series cannot speak to the specific details of each of these relief options since these details haven’t been finalized yet. Additional resources will follow once updated guidance is finalized, so please stay tuned for updates.

Data Analysis Appendix

Public data used in this analysis was pulled from DC’s Energy Benchmarking OpenData and DC’s Building Energy Performance website on February 5, 2026. These databases were provided in .csv formats.

Supplemental data was provided by DOEE on April 2, 2026. The supplemental data included the following:

Retuning your building will help save money on energy costs. It might also make the building healthier by improving indoor air quality and make the temperature more comfortable.

Participation in the program is free and includes recommendations for longer term improvements as well as a customized operations and maintenance manual to help with ongoing operations. The project team will also share information about incentives and financing for longer term improvements beyond the scope of this pilot.

Note that small year-over-year changes in the datasets were observed when comparing last year’s benchmarking series reviewing 2023 data (where data was pulled on March 19, 2025) to this series.

Analysis for the series was done in R by AOBA. Year-over-year building property was tracked by assuming a property keeps the same suffix square lot (SSL) across the BEPS Cycle.

Buildings were filtered based on:

• The EPA calculated primary property type, including offices, multifamily, hotels, and worship facilities.
  • For certain articles, an additional filtering criterium was applied: if the primary property type of the building was multifamily, buildings were additional classified on if they were condominiums, affordable housing, or market-rate housing (where market-rate housing was classified based on if the property was neither a condominium nor affordable housing).
• If DOEE listed the benchmarking reporting for the property as “In Compliance”, which indicates DOEE has accepted the benchmarking submission.
• If the building is privately owned.
• If the property has an ENERGY STAR score, which filters out properties unable to obtain an ENERGY STAR score for whatever reason.
• In general: if the reported gross floor area of the building was over 25,000 square feet. In certain instances, if the reported gross floor area of the building was over 50,000 square feet or if the reported gross floor area of the building was between 25,000 and 49,999 square feet. (Tax record square footage data was considered but not used, as benchmarking submissions and corrections that impacted gross floor area would propagate as changes in reported building gross floor area.)
• For buildings over 50,000 square feet:
  • If the reporting year of the energy data was 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, or 2024.
• For buildings 25,000 to 49,999 square feet:
  • If the reporting year of the energy data was 2023 or 2024.
• For buildings where progress toward BEPS was evaluated:
  • Building pathway status of Standard Target Pathway or Performance Pathway and their pathwayf submission was marked “Completed”.
  • If the property is on the Performance Pathway: Adjusted Site EUI was greater than zero.
  • If the property is on the Standard Target Pathway: DC BEPS score between 1 and 100.