Building Performance Standards and the States That Don't Have One

A general contractor with a project in Nashville and another in Phoenix this year is working under two different regulatory realities, even though neither Tennessee nor Arizona has a statewide Building Performance Standard. More than thirty U.S. cities have committed to passing one by 2026 or shortly after, and thirteen already enforce benchmarking and emissions rules with real financial penalties attached. If your firm has work sitting in both kinds of markets, that difference isn't background noise. It shows up in decisions made at the design table, and some of those decisions are hard and costly to unwind later.

What a Building Performance Standard actually requires

A Building Performance Standard, or BPS, is a local or state rule that sets a target for how much energy a building can use, usually measured as Energy Use Intensity (EUI), and requires the owner to report progress against that target on a set schedule. The standards are built around compliance pathways, not a single pass-or-fail line, but they do carry financial consequences for buildings that fall outside those pathways without an approved plan.

Washington's Clean Buildings Performance Standard (CBPS) is a good example of how these rules actually land on a project. Its first compliance tier kicks in June 1, 2026, and buildings have to either hit their EUI target outright or follow an approved investment path that shows they're working toward it. San Francisco takes a different angle: buildings over 250,000 square feet have to source their electricity from 100% renewable sources, with documentation due by May 1, 2026. New York, Colorado, and California all have their own benchmarking and reporting deadlines active this year.

None of these rules look identical. That's part of the problem for anyone building outside a single city. There's no one federal standard to design against. There's a patchwork, and it's getting denser.

Where the mandate doesn't exist yet

Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida don't have a statewide Building Performance Standard right now. All four also have state laws on the books that limit how far a city or county can go in restricting natural gas use in new construction, which puts them among more than twenty states with this kind of energy-choice protection. Texas is currently the most active example: in June 2026, the Texas Attorney General issued an opinion finding that parts of Austin’s “electric-ready” building code conflict with state law. Meanwhile, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso continue to challenge Texas’ broader municipal preemption law in court.

For a firm working in these states today, this means the applicable requirement is the adopted energy code, whether that's a version of ASHRAE 90.1 or the IECC, and nothing more. That's not a gap in the sense of something missing. It's simply a different regulatory stage than markets like New York or Washington are in right now.

The relevant question for anyone planning a multi-state portfolio isn't whether these states will eventually adopt something similar. Nobody can answer that with certainty, and plenty of proposed mandates have stalled or been walked back, including a widely covered case in New York itself, where the state agreed to pause its all-electric buildings law pending an appeals court ruling. The relevant question is more practical: if a building is designed today to the current code minimum in a state without a BPS, how much does it cost later to bring that building up to a stricter standard if one shows up in five or ten years?

Designing for regulatory trajectory, not just today's code

To be clear about something first: designing to the current code in a market without a mandate is the correct call. It's simply matching the project to what's actually required today, which is exactly what a responsible engineer should do.

The additional layer worth thinking through, especially for developers and GCs running portfolios across several states, is how much flexibility that design leaves for the future. A mechanical system, a metering setup, or an envelope assembly can meet today's code in two very different ways: one that has some room to adapt if reporting requirements show up later, and one that's built as tight to the minimum as possible with no slack either way. Both are code-compliant. They're not equally exposed to future risk.

This is a practical design conversation more than anything else, and it's one a PE can actually help with, because it comes down to specific choices: what gets metered separately versus lumped together, what equipment has room to add controls later without a full swap, and whether the building's data infrastructure could support benchmarking reporting if it were ever required. None of that requires designing to a standard from another state. It just means not painting the project into a corner.

What this looks like in practice

A few concrete examples of what "leaving room" actually means at the design stage:

Submetering

Installing separate meters for HVAC, lighting, and plug loads costs very little more during initial construction. Adding it after the building is occupied is a different story, and it's the first thing any benchmarking requirement asks for.

Equipment headroom

Selecting mechanical equipment that can accept additional controls or a BMS upgrade later, without replacing the unit outright, keeps a future retrofit from turning into a capital project.

Envelope decisions

Slightly better performance on insulation or fenestration than the strict code minimum often costs little at the time of construction but changes what's possible for the building's lifetime energy profile.

Electrification-ready infrastructure

This doesn't mean going all-electric ahead of any requirement to do so. It means leaving conduit paths and panel capacity that would make a future partial conversion straightforward instead of a full re-wire.

None of this means a project in Scottsdale needs to be built to New York's standard, or that a building in Nashville should carry the cost of compliance it doesn't legally owe. It means the design decisions made today can either support a longer useful life across a changing regulatory picture, or they can lock the owner into whatever the code said on the day the permit was pulled. That distinction is where an engineer with PE-stamped deliverables adds real value beyond checking a compliance box, particularly for owners and GCs managing buildings in more than one state at a time.

If you're planning a project that spans markets with different regulatory timelines, Ardebili Engineering can help you think through where it makes sense to build in flexibility and where the code minimum is genuinely the right call.