How to Read a Commercial Building Energy Audit (2026)

Reading a commercial building energy audit report comes down to answering three questions: how much energy does the building waste, which fixes would recover it, and what do those fixes cost. That is exactly what a good report gives you, buried in forty pages of tables, charts and abbreviations. Here is how to read a commercial building energy audit in the order the document actually presents itself, so the numbers that matter come out first and the rest stays available for later.

The whole read takes about an hour the first time, and fifteen minutes for every re-read once you know where to look.

Table of Contents

• What You Need
• Step-by-Step
• Start With the Executive Summary
• Understand the Building and Energy-Use Baseline
• Read the End-Uses and Energy Performance Charts
• Separate Findings From Recommendations
• Evaluate Savings, Costs, and Payback
• Check Measurement and Verification Requirements
• Prioritize the Next Actions
• Common Mistakes
• Frequently Asked Questions
• How do I know which ASHRAE level audit I received?
• What does EUI mean in an energy audit report?
• What is a good ENERGY STAR score for a commercial building?
• Is an A or E energy rating the best one?
• What does simple payback mean in an energy audit?
• What should I do after receiving an energy audit report?
• Conclusion

What You Need

Gather four things before you open the report. Without them you will accept the auditor’s baseline instead of checking it.

• The report itself. The final PDF, not the cover letter or slide deck. Many firms send a summary deck that omits the assumptions and the detailed recommendations.
• Twelve to thirty-six months of utility bills, ideally including any interval or half-hourly data you can pull from the utility portal.
• Building records: square footage by floor, occupancy counts, operating hours, tenant changes, and any equipment replaced in the last few years.
• Equipment and control information: chiller and boiler make and model, air handler schedules, building management system details, lighting counts and wattages.

Also keep a glossary open. Energy use intensity (EUI), energy conservation measure (ECM), simple payback, net present value, baseline, weather normalization, M&V. Every one of those appears in a typical report, and most readers lose the thread of an argument when a term appears undefined three pages before it matters. The short version: an ECM is one recommended improvement, EUI is annual energy divided by floor area, and M&V is how savings get confirmed after the work is done.

Step-by-Step

Start With the Executive Summary

Open to the executive summary and read it properly, because it tells you what you are allowed to do with the rest of the document. Six things matter here: the scope of work, the baseline period, which systems were analyzed, the headline findings, the total savings potential, and the priority recommendations.

If the summary does not name a baseline period, stop and ask for one. Every savings figure downstream depends on it.

Understand the Building and Energy-Use Baseline

The baseline section tells you how the auditor calculated current performance. Check the floor area used, the occupancy assumptions, the operating hours, and whether the twelve or twenty-four months of utility data were adjusted for weather.

Then find the EUI, reported in kBtu per square foot per year. You can verify it yourself: take total annual energy in kBtu from the bills, divide by the gross floor area in square feet, and compare. If the auditor’s number is materially lower than yours, the difference is usually weather normalization, occupancy adjustment, or a floor area measured net of a big atrium.

Benchmark that EUI against similar buildings of the same type and climate. In ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, a score of 75 or higher out of 100 puts an office building in the top quartile nationally. Mid-range scores are ordinary for older stock. A very low EUI with a poor ENERGY STAR score often means the building is underoccupied rather than efficient.

Read the End-Uses and Energy Performance Charts

The charts break total consumption into end uses: heating, cooling, lighting, plug and process loads, and sometimes water heating and ventilation. Read them in that order of magnitude, not pixel by pixel. The useful question is whether the split is plausible for a building like yours.

An office with roughly half its energy in cooling and lighting is normal. A building showing three-quarters of its electricity as plug load usually means the auditor could not separate HVAC from tenant equipment, and the recommendations built on that split will be shaky. Look for the monthly load profile too, since it shows whether the plant runs overnight and on weekends.

Separate Findings From Recommendations

Findings describe what exists today: an air handler delivering supply air outside the design range, a boiler at part load most of the year, lighting operating on a schedule nobody has updated since a tenant left. Recommendations are what the auditor proposes to do about it.

Keep them apart in your notes. Findings are evidence you can verify on site; recommendations are opinion carrying a savings estimate. Only the second kind should appear in a capital request.

This distinction matters most for controls work. Facilities staff on forums like r/BuildingAutomation consistently point to occupancy schedules and space temperature setpoints as the first thing they check, because a controls recommendation with a bad schedule produces a control recommendation with no savings.

Evaluate Savings, Costs, and Payback

Now the recommendations table, which is where the actual decision lives. Most reports use columns like ECM number, description, scope, estimated cost, annual energy savings, simple payback and, on deeper audits, net present value or internal rate of return.

Simple payback is the simplest calculation in the whole document: implementation cost divided by first-year annual savings. If a measure costs six times what it saves in a year, it pays back in about six years. Do that division yourself on two or three rows before you trust the column.

Here is the shape of the calculation on one row. Suppose a control retrofit is costed at 24,000 and modeled to save 6,400 a year in electricity and compressed air. Twenty-four thousand divided by 6,400 gives 3.75 years. Now ask what the 6,400 assumes: that the space stays occupied, that the current tariff holds, and that the equipment it serves was not already scheduled for replacement. If that equipment is being replaced next year regardless, subtract the replacement cost from the measure and the payback collapses toward zero, because the savings arrive with a project you were going to fund anyway.

A short payback is not automatically a good project. A control logic change with a two-year payback beats a chiller replacement with a two-year payback on risk, disruption and resale value. Longer-payback envelope work can still win when it also cuts carbon for decades and the building has no plans to sell.

Watch the energy price assumption underneath the savings. Auditors often use a flat rate across the year. If your electricity price moves seasonally, the annual dollar figure shifts.

Check Measurement and Verification Requirements

Some recommendations need verification before anyone gets paid for the savings, which usually means a performance contract or a rebate. ASHRAE Guideline 14 and the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP) are the two frameworks you will see named, and the report should say which approach it assumes.

For a quick read, look for whether savings are calculated from whole-building data or from a modeled baseline. A modeled baseline needs sub-metering to be trustworthy. Without it, the savings estimate is a projection with a number attached, not a measurement.

Prioritize the Next Actions

Convert the report into a ranked list of your own. Split the recommendations into two buckets first: no-cost and low-cost operational changes on one side, capital projects on the other.

Operational items usually include schedule changes, setpoint resets, damper repairs, filters, steam trap maintenance and reporting corrections. They cost nothing but staff time and often deliver a meaningful share of the modeled savings. Get those done and measured before committing capital to a project whose economics depend on the operational fixes already being in place.

Then rank the capital measures against your own constraints: the capital cycle, the lease terms, whether the space will be renovated anyway, and which equipment is near end of life. A report ranked by the auditor’s preference is not a plan for your building.

Common Mistakes

Comparing unlike baselines. A 2009 building and a 2018 building in the same portfolio cannot be judged on raw EUI alone. Compare within vintage, type and climate, or use Portfolio Manager to normalize first.

Treating an estimate as a guarantee. Savings in a Level I or Level II report are modeled. The only guarantees come from a measured baseline and an M&V plan agreed before installation.

Ignoring the caveats section. Limitations belong with the findings, not in an appendix. Assumptions about occupancy, hours, weather and equipment performance all flow straight into the savings column.

Accepting recommendations with no scope of work. “Upgrade HVAC” cannot be bid or priced. Ask for equipment counts, model numbers and the work included, or the measure cannot survive a contractor’s estimate.

Reading recommendations that conflict with your capital plan. An audit written three years before a planned renovation may recommend equipment you are about to replace anyway. Fold the recommendations into the existing plan rather than tracking them separately.

Implementing everything. Selective implementation is normal and sensible. Facilities teams report following most of a report’s recommendations while skipping a few, which is fine as long as the decision is deliberate rather than accidental.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Four things get you most of the value from an energy audit report. Find the baseline and confirm the period and normalization, read the findings and priority recommendations in full, test the savings assumptions on two or three rows yourself, then fund the operational items and price the top capital measures with real scope of work attached. If you do nothing else, do those, and keep the rest of the document for when the capital cycle comes around.