Large D.C. buildings use less energy, but 801 properties miss the city's standard

Large buildings in the District now use less energy for every square foot of floor space than they did before the pandemic. Whether that is enough will soon matter. The first cycle of the District's Building Energy Performance Standards has a deadline of Dec. 31, 2026 (Building Innovation Hub).

District benchmarking records tracked 1,318 large buildings that filed reports marked In Compliance in both 2019 and 2024. Measured building by building, the median cut in weather-normalized energy use intensity over those years was 11.2%. The group's median fell from 61 kBtu/sq ft to 52.7 kBtu/sq ft.

That is real progress. But the rules judge each building on its own record, not on the median. A building that misses its standard can still comply through the performance pathway, which requires it to show a set cut in site energy use intensity (Building Innovation Hub).

Across the full pool of large buildings, the direction holds. Among all large buildings with In Compliance reports, the median was 61 kBtu/sq ft in 2019. In 2024, across 1,659 buildings, it was 50.4 kBtu/sq ft.

Many properties still sit on the wrong side of the line. In the District's Building Energy Performance layer, updated in October 2026, 801 properties are marked as not meeting the standard. Another 1,038 are marked as meeting it.

Which buildings use the most

Energy use varies widely by type of building. The records include 11 property types with enough large buildings to rank. The median for the top-ranked type reached 91.7 kBtu/sq ft in 2024, and the second-ranked type came in at 80.1 kBtu/sq ft.

Offices and apartment buildings, the places most residents work and live, are nowhere near the top. Office buildings had a median of 45.1 kBtu/sq ft. Multifamily housing came in at 48 kBtu/sq ft. Both sit below the median for all large buildings that year.

When regulators set the standards, multifamily housing was among the property types measured against local District buildings (doee.dc.gov). For tenants and owners, the ranking shows where energy use per square foot is most concentrated.

A deadline the Council left in place

According to the District's energy agency, the program's purpose is to improve energy performance in existing buildings (doee.dc.gov). It is tied to the District's goals of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and reaching carbon neutrality by 2045 (Building Innovation Hub).

Council members have adjusted the rules but have not loosened the schedule. On Dec. 17, 2024, they voted unanimously for a set of technical amendments to the standards (Building Innovation Hub). When the Council approved legislation on July 28, 2025, the current timelines stayed in effect with no extensions (Building Innovation Hub).

For owners who cannot show compliance, the stakes are set in law. Maximum penalties are charged per square foot of gross floor area, up to a fixed cap (Building Innovation Hub). Changes to the program's guidance include exemption flexibility for owners facing financial distress (Building Innovation Hub).

Owners still short of their target have little time left in this cycle, and the next one is already scheduled. The program's second period starts Jan. 1, 2028 (Building Innovation Hub).

About the data

We used the District's building energy benchmarking disclosures and the Building Energy Performance layer updated in October 2026, limiting the analysis to large buildings with reports marked In Compliance. For the 1,318 buildings that reported in both 2019 and 2024, we calculated each building's change in weather-normalized site energy use intensity and took the median of those changes, and we also compared the group's median in each year. We ranked the 11 property types with enough large reports in 2024.

• The trend stops at 2024; reports for 2025 are still incomplete.
• Medians describe the typical building and can hide large differences among individual properties of the same type.
• Benchmarking records measure how much energy buildings used, but they do not record what owners did to change it.

Site energy use intensity (EUI): the energy a building uses on site in a year, measured in thousands of British thermal units (kBtu), divided by its floor area. Weather-normalized: adjusted to remove the effect of an unusually hot or cold year, so different years can be compared fairly. Building Energy Performance Standards: District rules that set energy performance targets for large existing buildings and require owners who fall short to improve or pay penalties.

Sources

• The publisher's ArcGIS open-data service (named with each dataset): Building Energy Benchmarks, latest period 2026-10-13; retrieved Oct. 16, 2026. Data
• The publisher's ArcGIS open-data service (named with each dataset): Building Energy Performance Data, latest period 2026-10-11; retrieved Oct. 16, 2026. Data