BREEAM In-Use product update
Yesterday all the accredited BREEAM Assessors have been invited to one of the regular scheme updates which take place every quarter, and we want to share the key messages that Alex Markides, the product manager for BREEAM In-Use (BIU), delivered during this technical meeting.
New Asset Energy Calculator (v.6)
The most significant matter that has been addressed is about the new Asset Energy Calculator (credits ENE01-09 in Part 1 “Asset Performance”), more specifically a critical piece of maintenance undertaken in August 2025 to the current version of the scheme (v.6) to ensure the assessment’s technical robustness, absolutely needed to ensure that the scoring was correct and that there was consistency in the various certifications.
This was not a single fix, but there were a few different things that were changed in the current v.6 of the BIU International scheme. The main cause of the previous challenges the software had was that some of the blank answer fields, or zero fields, weren’t working as intended (e.g. where the answers are left blank, default figures should have been used). This would have resulted clearly in a different outcome than if you gave an answer of zero, because the default values are usually worse performing.
Other issues where more significant changes occurred were ENE 03, for example, which is a fabric performance issue. In this case, when the U-value was left blank, it was assumed that the figure was “zero” instead of the default benchmark value, which was the worst performing benchmark. This meant that when the blank value was used, there was an overperformance of the score. So, the score clients were receiving was higher than what it should have been.
Also ENE09a (district cooling) and ENE09b (district heating) had similar issues: where questions were left unanswered, the calculator assumed a “zero” value instead of the default benchmark value, which incorrectly resulted in a higher score. This has been amended, and now the resulting scores would be lower than what they used to be in the past.
BRE is now confident that the calculator is now performing accurately and as was intended, with certain features affecting the final score such as the year of construction, the location of the asset and the number of blank issues that were left blank as answers.
In the spirit of giving a bit more clarity and maybe trying to explain things a bit further, BRE is going to be releasing a new BREEAM Academy CPD related to the BIU New Asset Energy Calculator in the next few months. There will be also a new Knowledge Base item to try to explain the changes in a bit more detail, to support accredited BIU Assessors in their business planning going forward and to explain all the details to our Clients.
Version 7
Changing subject, as announced a few months ago here the new version 7 update is being carried out in the same context as the BREEAM New Construction (NC) and Refurbishment & Fit-Out (RFO) updates are, to better align all products across the whole asset lifecycle. This should result in less duplication of work, simpler evidence collection and easy performance tracking for Clients and for accredited Assessors when we’re managing these certifications.
BRE is now updating the energy and carbon modules to increase the standard for the operational carbon performance and how the assessments interchange along the asset’s life cycle. For example, the new BIU calculators that are being developed will be based on the ones used in ENE01 and ENE02 for NC and RFO.
BRE is making all this effort to increase the standards and really drive change within the built environments. And in addition to this, a closer alignment between the BREEAM products will measure and close the performance gap of assets, and also support the tracking of assets pathway to net zero using tools like the CRREM trajectory pathways.
BRE will also be aligning issues like Resilience and updating other categories, take into account the market changes and also align with the rest of the BREEAM suite of products. They are also going to do some other alignment pieces e.g. carrying out approved innovations similar to how it’s currently carried out with the NC and RFO.
A really important thing is that BRE is going to put more emphasis on measured data. This is because the market is shifting and frameworks like GRESB as well as institutional investors in many Countries are increasingly valuing measured operational performance over the assumptions.
So BIU v.7 will facilitate and encourage real data measurements and support a greater uptake of Part 2. By strengthening the use of measured data and integrating the data into the reporting requirements, BRE hopes that in BIU will become a more useful tool to facilitate reporting and driving good, sustainable decision-making for our Clients and for investors.
In addition, they’re also investigating how the updates can support different ways that sites are organised, especially large outdoor sites, hence how the scheme considers multiple buildings on the site, as well as site-wide assessments for those sites that may benefit from having larger areas where the certain common issues can be assessed once for the entire site.
Hence site-wide assessments have been piloted for version 6 already, and they’re thinking about including them in the imminent version 7’s update, depending on the launch complexity and the feedback they get from the accredited BIU Assessors involved in this stakeholder engagement phase.
BRE is planning for the summer of 2026 to officially launch the new scheme!
