Not one of the thirteen Canadian commercial energy firms we reviewed offers support for this. It is an open federal programme, with a clearly defined threshold and a clearly defined deliverable, and it is the only recognised mark a Canadian commercial building can put on its door based on measured performance.
ENERGY STAR certification recognises a building whose measured energy performance places it in roughly the top quartile of comparable buildings. It is not a design rating and not a checklist. It comes from twelve months of actual metered consumption, normalized for weather, size, occupancy and use, expressed as a score from 1 to 100.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Score | 75 or higher on the 1–100 ENERGY STAR scale |
| Building type | One of 16 currently eligible types — including banks, hospitals, hotels, ice rinks, K-12 schools, libraries, offices, retail stores, supermarkets, warehouses and worship facilities. Restaurants, pre-schools and daycares, and vehicle dealerships are listed as coming soon. |
| Data | Twelve months of consumption in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, complete and correctly configured |
| Verification | A Licensed Professional must conduct a site visit, verify the application and sign off before submission to NRCan |
| Renewal | Annual. Certification must be maintained, not earned once |
Verified 3 October 2026 against Natural Resources Canada's ENERGY STAR certification for buildings in Canada page.
If you file under EWRB, your building already has an ENERGY STAR score — assuming the property record is correct, which is a real assumption. Checking it costs nothing and tells you immediately whether certification is a short conversation or a multi-year project. We will look at your existing record and tell you where you stand.
NRCan requires a Licensed Professional — typically a Professional Engineer or architect — to conduct the site visit and sign the application. No firm can submit a certification without one.
So ask any firm offering this service, in writing: "Who is the Licensed Professional who will visit the site and sign our application?" Ask us the same. Where the signature sits with a partner rather than with us, we will name them in the proposal. Where it does not sit anywhere on the team, we will tell you that the honest scope is certification readiness — the data, the score and the gap analysis — and not the sign-off.
Often, and sooner than owners expect. A thirteen-point gap in an existing building is usually a mix of record errors, scheduling, controls and a handful of operational measures rather than a capital programme. A Level 2 audit will tell you which, and what it costs.
Then certification is not available to you today, and we will say so rather than scoping work around it. Portfolio Manager benchmarking and energy use intensity comparison still apply, and three more types are listed as coming soon.
Not directly — they are separate obligations. But they share the same Portfolio Manager account and the same underlying data, so the work overlaps substantially and doing them together is cheaper than doing them apart.
Related
Request a proposal
A compliance deadline, an incentive application, a financing requirement, or a capital plan. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need and what it will cost — as a fixed fee, before any work starts.
If you do not need an audit, we will say so.