Does this apply to your building?
Two tests have to be met together — size and use.
| Test | Threshold |
|---|---|
| Size — net floor area | Over 1,000 m² if owned, operated or occupied by an organ of state. Over 2,000 m² for privately owned buildings. |
| Use — occupancy classification | A1 entertainment and public assembly · A2 theatrical and indoor sport · A3 places of instruction · G1 offices |
That scope catches a great deal of the country's office stock, schools, colleges, university buildings, municipal offices, community halls, cinemas and sports venues. It does not, on its face, catch shopping centres, warehouses, hospitals or hotels as such — a point worth checking carefully against your building's actual classification rather than its everyday description, because a mixed-use property can contain a qualifying G1 component. Where classification is genuinely unclear, that is a question for your accredited inspection body, not for a website.
What the certificate actually is
- A measured rating, not a design rating. It expresses the building's energy use as kilowatt-hours per square metre of net floor area per annum, calculated in accordance with SANS 1544:2014, and grades it from A (very efficient) to G (not efficient).
- Issued only by a SANAS-accredited inspection body. This is not something an owner, a consultant or a service provider can self-certify. SANEDI publishes the list of accredited bodies, which has grown but remains finite — which matters for timing, below.
- Valid for five years, then repeated.
- Displayed and lodged. The certificate must be displayed in the building, and the certificate together with the data used to determine it is submitted to SANEDI and carried on the National Building Energy Performance Register. Registration of building type and size on that register was itself a requirement following the August 2023 amendment.
Where we actually are: the deadline passed, and the next phase began
The original compliance date was December 2022; a three-year extension moved it to 7 December 2025. That date has now passed, and it is not being extended again in the way the first one was. Instead, the Department has moved to implementation: an EPC compliance monitoring, verification and enforcement framework, applied in a graduated sequence across roughly a twelve-month period:
- Non-compliance notices issued to building owners.
- Acknowledgement required from the owner.
- A compulsory EPC compliance plan — in other words, being late stops being passive and becomes a documented commitment with dates.
- Municipal partnerships for inspection and monitoring.
- Public listing of persistent non-compliance.
- Prosecution under the National Energy Act where necessary, carrying penalties of up to R5 million, up to five years' imprisonment, or both.
For most owners the meaningful item on that list is not the criminal penalty at the end — it is the public listing in the middle, and what a compulsory compliance plan does to a portfolio's due-diligence position when a building is sold, refinanced or let to a tenant with its own reporting obligations.
Why compliance has been so low
Reporting around the deadline put certification at a small fraction of eligible buildings — in July 2025 the department reported 3,884 certificates registered against a registration target of 60,000. The public sector has been notably slow: in Limpopo, according to a SALGA letter reported in June 2026, as of May 2026 — five months after the deadline — nine of the province's twenty-seven municipalities had registered buildings on the register, four had obtained certificates, and five certificates in total had been issued across the province.
Three causes, in rising order of how much they should worry you:
- Awareness. A significant number of owners still do not know the obligation attaches to them, particularly where a building is managed by an agent and the obligation sits with the owner.
- Assessor capacity. A finite number of accredited bodies now faces a backlog created by years of deferral. Queueing is a real risk, and it lengthens as the enforcement notices go out.
- Data. This is the one that quietly delays projects. An assessment needs a defensible twelve-month record of energy consumption together with an accurate net floor area. Many buildings have one municipal account, estimated readings in some months, a generator whose fuel is bought but not metered, and tenants whose consumption is apportioned by area rather than measured. The certificate can still be produced, but the process becomes slow, contested and expensive — and the resulting rating is a number the owner cannot do anything with.
What to do this quarter
- Establish whether each building qualifies — size and occupancy class, per building, not per portfolio. Mixed-use properties need this done properly.
- Register on the National Building Energy Performance Register if you have not. Registration is separate from certification, and it is the cheapest thing on this list.
- Get into an accredited body's queue now. Capacity, not paperwork, is the binding constraint for many owners this year.
- Assemble twelve months of consumption data and confirm your net floor area figure. Find the gaps early: estimated readings, unmetered generator fuel, sub-tenant supplies, and any shared or landlord-recovered accounts.
- Decide whether you only want a certificate, or also want a better one next time. These are different projects. The first needs a year of totals. The second needs to know where the kWh actually go.
Where addanode fits — and where we don't: we do not issue Energy Performance Certificates and cannot; that is the accredited inspection body's role under SANS 1544, and it is right that it stays independent of anyone selling equipment. What we do is the measurement layer underneath: submetering by floor, tenant, plant and end-use, water alongside energy, continuous and exportable in full. That is what turns an assessment from an archaeology exercise into a data pull — and, more usefully, what makes the rating something you can improve before the five years are up. Our LoRaWAN building management system exists largely because retrofitting that measurement into an occupied building used to cost more than it was worth.
The part worth saying out loud
An EPC is a compliance obligation, and most owners will treat it as one — get the certificate, display it, move on. That is a defensible response to a rule. But the metric behind it, kWh per square metre per year, happens to be the single most useful number a building owner can have, and almost none of them have it today. A building that measures its own consumption by floor and by system finds things worth money in the first month: the floor conditioned all weekend, the plant that never shut down after a setpoint change, the tenant whose apportioned share bears no relationship to their actual use. The certificate is the deadline. The measurement is the point.