California Building Energy Benchmarking Program (AB 802)

Who's covered

AB 802 (2015) is California's statewide energy benchmarking law, administered by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and replacing the older AB 1103 point-of-sale disclosure regime. It covers two distinct populations, and the thresholds are stricter than they first look:

Commercial buildings over 50,000 sq ft, with no residential utility accounts. The word "over" matters -- a building of exactly 50,000 sq ft is not covered; you need to exceed it. Coverage began with annual reporting on June 1, 2018.

Multifamily buildings over 50,000 sq ft with 17 or more residential utility accounts. Both conditions have to hold -- a 60,000 sq ft apartment building with only 12 metered units is not covered under this rule (though check whether it clears the accounts threshold under a different count, since the account number, not the unit count, is the actual gate). Coverage began June 1, 2019.

Two exemptions worth knowing in detail, both confirmed directly from the CEC's own benchmarking FAQ:

Industrial and manufacturing buildings are exempt -- but the bar is specific. The exemption applies to buildings where more than 50% of gross floor area is devoted to manufacturing or industrial purposes. The CEC's FAQ draws a sharp, non-obvious line here: "Industrial purposes include manufacturing and assembling goods. Warehouses and distribution centers are not considered industrial and are required to comply." If your building is a warehouse, don't assume the industrial exemption covers you -- it doesn't.

New buildings get a certificate-of-occupancy grace period. A building is exempt for a reporting year if it did not hold a certificate of occupancy (or temporary CofO) for more than half of that calendar year -- in effect, brand-new buildings don't owe a report until they've been substantially occupied for most of a year.

Local-ordinance-exempt cities are the single biggest scoping question for most owners. The CEC maintains an official "Exempted Local Benchmarking Ordinance" list, currently seven cities: Berkeley, Brisbane, Chula Vista, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. If your building is in one of these cities, complying with that city's own local benchmarking ordinance satisfies AB 802 -- you do not file separately with the CEC. The exemption runs one direction only: filing with the CEC does not satisfy a local ordinance, and if you somehow get exempted from the local program (an EBEWE sound-stage exemption, say) that does not automatically exempt you from AB 802 if your building still clears 50,000 sq ft -- LADBS's own FAQ warns LA owners of exactly this trap.

Unlike LA's local EBEWE ordinance, AB 802 is energy-only -- there's no water benchmarking requirement in the state program.

Key dates

June 1, every year, for the prior calendar year's data. That's the entire deadline structure -- there's no phase-in cohort by building size or ID digit the way some other jurisdictions run it. Data is publicly disclosed by the CEC after the deadline passes.

June 1 is not a quiet date on the calendar -- it's the single busiest compliance deadline in the country, shared with LA EBEWE, San Diego BEBO, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, and dozens of other programs nationwide. If your building sits in a non-exempt California city, plan your data gathering the same way you would for any of those: utility enrollment done well before spring, not scrambling in late May.

If a violation notice is issued, the CEC provides a 30-day cure period before penalties can be assessed -- see Penalties below for what happens if that window closes without a fix.

Penalties

This is a case where the honest answer is that the exact numbers are not settled, and we're not going to invent precision the state hasn't published. The CEC's own program materials confirm the mechanism -- after a violation notice and a 30-day cure period, the CEC has the authority to impose civil penalties for continued non-compliance -- but the CEC's public FAQ does not disclose specific dollar figures. Secondary sources (compliance consultants, not the CEC itself) commonly cite a range of $500 to $2,000 per category of missing data, per day the violation continues; we're passing that figure along because it's the number circulating in the market, not because we've confirmed it against a CEC regulation or enforcement record. In practice, the CEC has emphasized outreach and correction over fines, and documented penalty assessments are scarce.

There is no registration fee to file under AB 802 -- a real point of contrast with LA EBEWE's $61 local registration fee, and one reason a non-exempt California building outside the seven CEC-exempt cities is one of the cheapest compliance obligations in the entire national benchmarking landscape to automate.

Step-by-step: how to comply

1. Confirm you're not in a CEC-exempt city first. If your building is in Berkeley, Brisbane, Chula Vista, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, or San Jose, stop here -- comply with that city's local ordinance instead, and skip the CEC filing entirely. We run this check for every building automatically before doing anything else, since filing the wrong program wastes your time either way.
2. Set up (or confirm) your property in ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager with the "California Benchmarking Reference Number" (BRN) as its Standard ID. The CEC has required a BRN, assigned once and reused every year, since 2023 -- it's what ties your ESPM property record to the state's tracking system. Buildings in the CEC-exempt cities don't need one, since they're not filing with the CEC at all. We assign and validate the BRN as part of property setup; you don't need to know it exists.
3. Enroll with your utility for aggregated whole-building data. California's investor-owned utilities (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E, SoCalGas) and local public utilities like LADWP provide whole-building aggregated data, generally auto-uploaded through ESPM web services. Consent-free aggregation is the default unless your commercial building has 2 or fewer active accounts, or your residential building has 4 or fewer accounts -- below those counts, the utility needs signed tenant authorization before it will release aggregated data. We handle the ESPM-side enrollment and data mapping; you (or your property manager) are the one who has to actually hold the utility account and, if you're under the account-count threshold, chase down tenant consent forms.
4. Enter all 12 months of whole-building energy data for the prior calendar year, then respond to the CEC's annual ESPM data request/report link before June 1. This is the part we fully automate once your utility feed is live -- data entry and the data-request response itself don't require anything further from you.

How this interacts with local ordinances (the LA case, specifically)

If you own property in Los Angeles, this is the most consequential fact on this page: a building that complies with EBEWE does not also need to file separately with the CEC. Los Angeles is one of the seven CEC-exempt cities, so one filing (through LADBS, with its own $61 fee and portal) covers both the local and state obligations. That's a genuinely useful thing to know, because it means an LA building owner who's already set up for EBEWE shouldn't be paying a consultant a second fee to "also handle AB 802" -- there's nothing separate to handle. See our LA EBEWE guide for the full local mechanics. Outside the seven exempt cities, though -- everywhere else in California, including large non-exempt cities like Sacramento -- AB 802 is the only benchmarking law on the books, and it's a clean, fee-free, ESPM-only filing.

What we handle

AB 802 is about as automatable as building compliance gets: no city portal, no registration fee, one ESPM data-request response per year. Run the compliance checker below to confirm your building's square footage, use type, and city actually put it in scope (the exempt-city list and the industrial exemption both catch people who assume they're covered when they're not, or vice versa), then join the waitlist. What we can't do for you: hold the utility account in your name, or produce tenant consent where your building falls under the low-account-count threshold above.

Frequently asked questions

Do I report directly to the CEC, or through my city?

It depends entirely on which city the building is in. If you're in Berkeley, Brisbane, Chula Vista, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, or San Jose, you report to that city's own local benchmarking program and never file with the CEC directly -- the local filing satisfies AB 802 by itself. Everywhere else in California, you respond to the CEC's own ESPM data request every year.

What's the deadline?

June 1 every year, covering the prior calendar year's energy data -- the same date whether you're filing with the CEC directly or satisfying AB 802 through a CEC-exempt local ordinance (though some local ordinances, like San Jose's, actually run their own different local deadline while still satisfying the state).

How is the multifamily 17-account threshold actually counted?

It's residential utility accounts, not units and not square footage -- a multifamily building has to clear both the 50,000 sq ft size test and the 17-or-more-residential-account test to be covered. A large building with fewer than 17 separately metered residential accounts (common in master-metered buildings) falls outside AB 802's multifamily trigger, though it's worth double-checking whether it's picked up as a commercial building instead if it has no residential accounts at all.

What happens if I miss the deadline?

The CEC issues a violation notice and gives you a 30-day cure period before penalties apply. The CEC's public materials confirm it has fining authority for continued non-compliance but don't publish a fixed dollar schedule; the $500-$2,000-per-data-category-per-day figure you'll see quoted by compliance vendors is a market estimate, not a number we've confirmed against a CEC regulation. What is confirmed: penalties require a notice and cure period first, so a late filing made promptly after a notice is a meaningfully different situation than ignoring one.

Which California cities are exempt from filing with the CEC directly?

Seven, per the CEC's current list: Berkeley, Brisbane, Chula Vista, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. Every other California city and county, including large ones like Sacramento that have no local benchmarking ordinance of their own, falls under the state program directly for any building that clears the size thresholds.

Is there a fee to file under AB 802?

No. The CEC does not charge a fee to submit a benchmarking report -- a real point of difference from local programs like LA EBEWE, which charges $61 per building per year on top of the ESPM submission. If you're filing directly with the CEC (i.e., you're not in one of the seven exempt cities), the entire cost of compliance is the labor of gathering and entering the data, not a government fee.