The Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation is hitting the brakes on its own energy code math with a formal Request for Information titled "Updating and Improving the Methodology for Assessing Affordability and Cost-Effectiveness of Building Energy Codes."
Public comments on this data-gathering exercise are due by August 3, 2026.
The agency is finally acknowledging on paper that stringent building energy codes have significantly driven up the cost of building a home and extended the payback periods for average consumers.
This notice is a direct attempt to overhaul how the federal government calculates the financial pain of regulatory compliance before forcing new standards onto state and local jurisdictions.
For years, the federal government has relied on generalized data and fragmented sources to estimate how much energy efficiency mandates actually cost.
Now, they are asking the public and the construction industry to provide hard data on real market costs, including the price of labor, raw materials, and localized regulatory friction.
The agency explicitly wants data on how municipal permitting delays, impact fees, and local land use requirements bottleneck development and drive up the final price tag for buyers.
The goal is to establish a more transparent baseline for construction expenses and to stop pretending that materials and labor in the Midwest cost the same as they do in the Southeast.
If you pour concrete or frame houses, the federal government is attempting to figure out exactly how much local red tape is eating into your operational margins.
This sweeping methodology review impacts the entire construction landscape, targeting both residential and commercial development.
Residential scope is strictly limited to one- and two-family dwellings, townhouses, and low-rise multifamily buildings of three stories or less.
By rule, anything larger, including high-rise residential properties, is explicitly carved out of the residential definition and subjected to commercial building standards.
Current commercial models cover standard development like offices, healthcare facilities, and warehouses, but the agency is looking to aggressively expand its scope to include the booming data center construction market.
They are even evaluating the cost benefits of industrialized, offsite construction methods like prefabricated or modular housing.
Because this is an assessment of the underlying math that dictates future codes across all building types, there are no true operational exemptions yet.
