Why do commercial EPCs cost so much more than domestic ones?

OK, so you can get an EPC for your house for £70-£100.

So why are you being quoted so much for an EPC for your office? Anything from £300 up to £2000!!

Well, commercial properties are much more varied and complex. The survey could take a whole week and could need a team of assessors!

When you ask us for a quote, the first thing we'll ask you for is the approximate total floor area of the commercial property. From this we'll be able to work out roughly how long the survey and the EPC creation will take.

Our assessors need to examine the heating & hot water systems and controls, air conditioning units, lighting and controls, the building construction, insulation. Each area of the building will need to be surveyed, the floor areas and windows all need to be measured as well as the floor heights. So it really does help if you have scale floor plans available for your building.

All of this data then needs to be input into the EPC software (Simplified Building Energy Model SBEM). In order to do this, each floor of the building is drawn to scale on a CAD system. The areas of the building are then 'zoned' and their characteristics are defined. These zones are then individually inserted into the software to build up a complete 'picture' of the building's construction.

This whole process could take anything from 3 hours for a small, simple commercial property, right up to a week for a highly complex, large building.

So you can see that Commercial EPCs are not as straight forward as their Domestic counterparts. Therefore, there can be no set fee for a Commercial EPC, each one must be quoted individually.