ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager: A Complete Guide

Nearly a quarter of US commercial building space is benchmarked in Portfolio Manager, according to ENERGY STAR. EPA launched the tool in 1999, according to the Portfolio Manager introduction to web services, and since then it has become the reference format for building energy data in the United States. Benchmarking ordinances are written around Portfolio Manager, building performance standards set their targets in its metrics, and the ENERGY STAR score appears in leasing materials, loan documents, and sustainability reports.

Portfolio Manager is a measurement tool: it records what buildings consumed, converts that consumption into comparable metrics, and ranks the result against national peers. The accuracy of every metric depends on the data entered, and none of the metrics explains why buildings perform as they do.

How does Portfolio Manager work?

Portfolio Manager builds each property record from a description of the property and a set of meters, then calculates its metrics from the consumption logged against those meters.

Property details: The property type, gross floor area, and use details that drive energy demand. For an office these include weekly operating hours, number of workers, number of computers, and the share of floor area that is heated and cooled. Mixed-use properties are entered as several property uses within one property, each with its own floor area and details.

Meters: One record for each energy source the building buys or produces, such as grid electricity, natural gas, district steam, district chilled water, and fuel oil, along with optional water and waste meters. Each meter holds a series of consumption entries, typically monthly, taken from utility bills or interval data.

Data reaches those records through the following methods, according to the ENERGY STAR overview of Portfolio Manager:

• Manual entry through the web interface
• Single-meter spreadsheet upload, pasted from Excel
• Multi-meter spreadsheet templates for larger portfolios
• Portfolio Manager web services, an interface that lets utilities and approved software providers exchange data with Portfolio Manager accounts automatically

Account holders can share a property with other users at full or limited access, so a property manager, an owner, a consultant, and a city benchmarking office can all work from the same record. An owner can also send data requests to collect information from tenants or managers in a structured format.

Metrics Portfolio Manager calculates

Portfolio Manager reports hundreds of metrics, and the following carry the most weight with benchmarking laws, certification programs, and investors.

Metric	Measures	Typical use
Site energy use intensity (EUI)	Annual energy recorded at the meters, per square foot	Tracking one building over time
Source EUI	Site energy plus generation and delivery losses, per square foot	Comparing buildings with different fuel mixes
Weather-normalized EUI	Site or source EUI adjusted to a long-term average climate	Year-over-year comparison that removes weather effects
ENERGY STAR score	Percentile ranking against similar buildings nationwide, 1–100	Certification, leasing, some performance standards
Greenhouse gas emissions	Direct, indirect, and total emissions, in metric tons of CO2e	Carbon disclosure and emissions-based standards
Water use intensity	Water use per square foot	Water benchmarking ordinances
Waste and diversion rate	Waste generated and share diverted from landfill	Sustainability reporting

Why does Portfolio Manager use source energy?

Portfolio Manager uses source energy because it puts buildings with different fuel mixes on equal terms. The Portfolio Manager technical reference on source energy calls it "the most equitable unit of evaluation". A building heated by an onsite gas boiler and an otherwise identical building heated by electric resistance record very different site energy, because the electricity arrives after the power plant has already lost most of the fuel's energy as heat. Source energy adds those production, transmission, and delivery losses back in, expressing every fuel as the raw energy consumed to deliver that fuel.

The conversion uses a single national source-site ratio for each fuel: 2.80 for grid electricity and 1.05 for natural gas, both last revised in August 2018, according to the same technical reference. Because the ratios are national, no building gains or loses points because of its local utility's generation mix.

Site energy remains useful for managing a single building: it matches the utility bill and tracks operational changes month to month. Portfolio Manager reports both, and ENERGY STAR's explanation of the difference recommends source energy for comparisons between buildings.

How is the ENERGY STAR score calculated?

The ENERGY STAR score ranks a building's energy performance against similar buildings across the country, on a scale where 50 is the median and 75 marks the top quartile. The method, set out in the ENERGY STAR score technical reference, works through the following steps.

1. Actual source EUI: Portfolio Manager converts twelve full calendar months of metered or billed consumption, for every fuel, into source energy and divides the total by floor area.
2. Predicted source EUI: A regression model predicts the source EUI of a typical building with the same property type, operating hours, occupancy, equipment, and climate. Each property type has its own model, built with weighted ordinary least squares on national survey data.
3. Efficiency ratio: Actual source EUI is divided by predicted source EUI. A ratio below one means the building uses less energy than its prediction.
4. Percentile lookup: ENERGY STAR fits a gamma distribution to the efficiency ratios of the buildings in the national survey and converts the curve into a lookup table. The building's ratio maps to a score from 1 to 100.

The national survey behind most models is the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), conducted by the US Energy Information Administration, which samples more than 5,000 buildings, according to the technical reference. Where CBECS data is insufficient for a property type, ENERGY STAR uses other datasets: the hospital score, for example, draws on 2015 survey data from the American Society for Health Care Engineering, according to ENERGY STAR's record of score updates.

The score compares a building with the national building stock as surveyed, rather than with other Portfolio Manager users, so a score of 75 means better than three quarters of the country's comparable buildings. Because the regression already accounts for operating hours, workers, and climate, buildings cannot raise their scores by running longer hours or adding staff. Scores move when buildings use less energy for the same work.

Which property types can earn an ENERGY STAR score?

Only property types with a statistically sound national reference model can receive a score. The eligible list includes offices, K-12 schools, hotels, hospitals, retail stores, supermarkets, warehouses, multifamily housing, senior living communities, worship facilities, bank branches, courthouses, residence halls, and data centers, among others. ENERGY STAR maintains the full eligibility list. In the US, K-12 schools, multifamily housing, hospitals, hotels, and senior living communities made up of several co-located buildings serving one function earn certification as a campus, according to the Portfolio Manager glossary.

Properties outside the list still benchmark every other metric. Laboratories, many industrial facilities, and mixed-use properties dominated by an unscored use receive EUI, emissions, and water metrics without a score. Several benchmarking ordinances account for this by setting requirements in EUI or emissions intensity, which apply to every property type.

How does weather normalization work?

Portfolio Manager handles weather in two separate places: inside the ENERGY STAR score, and in a weather-normalized EUI reported for each building.

Inside the score, the regression models include heating degree days and cooling degree days, calculated against a 65°F base, as variables. A building in Minneapolis is compared with what a similar building in the Minneapolis climate would be expected to use, and the score technical reference reports that humidity and average temperature add no significant explanatory power once degree days are included.

The weather-normalized EUI works on the building's own history. Portfolio Manager regresses the building's monthly consumption against the degree days recorded at its assigned weather station, then estimates what the building would have used under average climate conditions. For US buildings, those averages are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate normals, and the most recent set covers 2006 to 2020, according to the Portfolio Manager technical reference on climate and weather. Managers comparing buildings with their own previous years should use weather-normalized EUI, because a mild winter can lower raw EUI with no operational change at all.

How does a building earn ENERGY STAR certification?

ENERGY STAR certification recognizes buildings that score 75 or higher, confirmed by a licensed professional. ENERGY STAR's application instructions and the Licensed Professional's Guide set the following requirements.

Score: 75 or higher, based on twelve consecutive months of measured data for all fuels.

Timing: The owner must submit the application within 120 days of the period ending date. From January 2026, a building that receives certification must wait 11 months before applying for its next certification of either type, according to ENERGY STAR.

Verification: A Professional Engineer or Registered Architect licensed in any US state or territory, or in Canada, visits the building while it is occupied and operating normally, verifies floor area, use details, and energy data, and signs and stamps the application.

Indoor environment: The licensed professional confirms that the building meets ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 62.1 for outdoor air ventilation, ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55 for thermal comfort, and the IES Lighting Handbook for illumination. The criteria prevent buildings from earning high scores by under-ventilating or under-lighting their spaces.

Certification covers one year of performance, and buildings reapply annually. ENERGY STAR estimates verification for an average building at around $1,500. The 11-month rule changes how a certified portfolio schedules its applications, as ENERGY STAR recertification deadlines in 2026 sets out.

Standard certification and NextGen

ENERGY STAR NextGen is an optional higher tier for US commercial and multifamily buildings that adds emissions and renewable energy criteria to the standard requirements.

Requirement	ENERGY STAR certification	ENERGY STAR NextGen
ENERGY STAR score	75 or higher	75 or higher
Onsite emissions	No requirement	Direct greenhouse gas intensity at or below a property-specific target
Renewable energy	No requirement	At least 30 percent of total energy, or 100 percent of electricity if lower
Licensed professional verification	Required	Required
Recertification	Annual	Annual

Which laws require Portfolio Manager?

As of 2024, more than three dozen US benchmarking laws required covered buildings to report through Portfolio Manager, according to ENERGY STAR. They include New York City's Local Law 84, Boston's Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO), and Washington DC's benchmarking program. Covered owners typically submit annually by sharing their Portfolio Manager property with the jurisdiction or generating a jurisdiction-specific report from the property record.

Building performance standards go further, setting minimum performance that buildings must reach over time, and several express those targets in Portfolio Manager metrics. Washington DC's Building Energy Performance Standards, for example, set each threshold no lower than the local median ENERGY STAR score for the property type, or an equivalent metric. DC BEPS Cycle 1: What Building Owners Can Still Change Before December 31 covers the practical consequences. Other standards use site EUI, source EUI, or emissions intensity, each calculated in Portfolio Manager from the same consumption data.

The global guide to building energy regulations maps the benchmarking and performance laws in force, with dates and thresholds for each, and the 2026 regulatory roundup summarizes the year's changes.

Is ENERGY STAR still running?

Yes. As of 2026, ENERGY STAR and Portfolio Manager continue to operate, with the Department of Energy replacing the EPA as lead agency.

In May 2025 the administration proposed eliminating the EPA office that runs ENERGY STAR. Congress instead mandated at least $33 million for ENERGY STAR in fiscal year 2026, which the US Green Building Council described as the first time Congress had set a mandatory annual spending level for the program. On March 3, 2026, the EPA and the Department of Energy signed a memorandum of agreement making DOE the lead federal agency for ENERGY STAR.

The transition plan, finalized on August 28, 2026, organizes the move into workstreams for knowledge transfer and consolidation of program leadership at DOE, legal transfer of the ENERGY STAR trademark and partnership agreements, and migration of the program's IT systems and data. The plan targets moving Portfolio Manager, the energystar.gov website, and the program's data assets to DOE hosting before July 2027, and gives DOE access to the existing systems to run program processes before the migration completes. The plan aims for minimal disruption to stakeholders and does not announce changes to the score, certification, or reporting workflows.

ENERGY STAR is funded through annual appropriations. The fiscal year 2026 law, P.L. 119-74, directed EPA to spend not less than $33,024,000 on the program, according to the Congressional Research Service, and funding for later years depends on each year's appropriations. The program also has fewer staff assigned to it than before the 2025 cuts, with losses in leadership and across the team, NPR reported in February 2026.

The transition plan also records that EPA has not worked on updating specifications, a term the plan applies to the ENERGY STAR score, since early 2025, and that outstanding issues pass to DOE for review. A future update to the score models is therefore possible. What Happened to ENERGY STAR covers the steps portfolio managers can take during the transition, including keeping an exported copy of their benchmarking history.

Data quality in Portfolio Manager

A Portfolio Manager record is only as accurate as the data entered, and the most common errors come from routine data collection.

Missing meters: A tenant-paid electricity account, a backup generator's fuel, or a district steam connection left out of the record understates consumption and can inflate the score. New York City's Local Law 84, for example, requires owners to report the consumption of the entire building, including tenant consumption.

Floor area errors: Gross floor area is the denominator of every intensity metric. A figure taken from a leasing schedule often measures rentable area instead, and the error shifts every intensity metric by the same proportion.

Gaps and estimates: A month missing from any meter prevents a score, and estimated bills carried forward without a true-up distort the twelve-month total.

Stale use details: Operating hours, occupancy, and computer counts entered once at setup and never revised skew the prediction behind the score.

Lag: Monthly utility bills arrive weeks after the consumption they record. Building managers reviewing Portfolio Manager see performance from one to two months earlier, which is adequate for annual compliance and too late to catch equipment that started wasting energy this week.

Utilities that deliver aggregated whole-building data through web services close the tenant-meter gap in multi-tenant buildings. 3 Reasons Your Utility Bills Are Inaccurate covers billing errors in more detail.

Scope and limits of a benchmark

Portfolio Manager reports how buildings performed and how that performance compares with their peers. It cannot report which equipment caused the result, because its inputs are whole-building totals measured monthly. A score of 62 places a building ahead of 62 percent of its national peers and gives no indication of the cause of the gap to the top quartile: a chiller plant sequencing poorly, air handlers running outside occupied hours, or simultaneous heating and cooling across a floor.

Owners raise a score through work done outside Portfolio Manager. Operational changes alone can reduce energy use substantially: a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory study estimated that 34 control measures, led by setpoint adjustment, reduced minimum airflow, and occupancy-based scheduling, could cut energy use across US commercial buildings by about 29 percent. The conditions those measures correct include setpoints that have drifted, schedules that no longer match occupancy, overrides left in place, and control sequences that fight each other. Engineers find those conditions in equipment-level data from the building management system, through periodic retro-commissioning or continuous fault detection and diagnostics. Agentic AI for building operations covers software that carries those findings through to completed changes.

Operational fixes reach the benchmark through the meters: consumption avoided this month lowers the twelve-month total behind the next score.

Where Noda fits

Noda is an agentic AI platform for commercial building operations that works as an always-on virtual building engineer, scaling engineering team capacity across every asset in a portfolio.

Portfolio Manager measures the annual energy performance of buildings from utility and meter totals, and its metrics show performance moving without identifying the equipment or operating changes that moved it. Noda works on the day-to-day operations that drive energy use.

Each site connects through a Noda LaunchPad, an on-premise gateway that reads the building management system over open protocols such as BACnet/IP and Modbus. Noda analyzes BMS trend data, meter data, and weather continuously, traces faults to their root causes, and tests each finding against historical data before raising it. Each confirmed issue becomes a proposed change to a setpoint, schedule, or control sequence, with the evidence and an estimate of the annual savings, for an engineer to accept or decline. Changes of this kind typically cost little or nothing to make.

Noda tracks the savings each completed change returns, and the lower consumption carries through to the next Portfolio Manager submission, in source EUI, in the ENERGY STAR score, and in the metrics that benchmarking laws and building performance standards set. The Intelligence Layer page describes the approach in more detail.

Related reading

• What Happened to ENERGY STAR: Full Funding, the Move to DOE, and What Portfolio Managers Should Do
• ENERGY STAR Recertification Deadlines in 2026
• Building Energy Regulations: A Global Guide
• DC BEPS Cycle 1: What Building Owners Can Still Change Before December 31
• Fault Detection and Diagnostics: A Complete Guide

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