In June 2026, the UK government moved the commercial EPC deadline back to 2031. Here’s what changed and what it means for facilities teams.
What changed
After two consultations dating back to 2019, the government has published its interim response on the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) regime. The key change here is that, from 2031, every commercial building over 1,000 square metres in England and Wales will need a minimum Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of B to stay legally lettable, subject to exemptions and to secondary legislation passing through Parliament. Buildings under that threshold stay on the existing EPC E minimum, with no new deadline attached to push them further. Just as significant, the interim EPC C milestone originally pencilled in for 2027 has been dropped entirely, not just delayed.
Why the softer commercial EPC deadline still matters
On paper, this reads like good news for anyone managing a facilities capex budget: one less step, and an extra year on the clock compared with the original 2030 target for EPC B. In practice, the softer commercial EPC deadline changes the shape of the problem more than it removes it.
Before this announcement, CBRE estimated that around 58% of office stock by square footage in Central London sat below an EPC B rating — and that’s just the capital’s office sector, not the wider mix of retail, industrial and mixed-use commercial buildings this regime covers nationally. Dropping the 2027 interim milestone removes a forcing function that would have pushed a chunk of that upgrade work forward. Without it, there’s a real risk that landlords and facilities teams treat 2031 as distant enough to deprioritise for another two or three years, then find themselves competing for the same contractors, materials and specialist assessors as everyone else racing the same deadline at once.
The compliance mechanics haven’t gone away
The existing flexibility mechanisms remain in place alongside the new commercial EPC deadline: the seven-year payback test and existing exemptions still apply, so only improvements that are genuinely cost-effective will be required. But the government’s response is explicitly interim — enforcement powers, penalty levels, and whether tenants pick up any statutory duties are all still open questions working through secondary legislation. That’s a live compliance picture to keep tracking, not a settled one to file away.
What this means for your facilities capex plan
A few things follow for anyone running FM across a commercial portfolio.
First, an EPC audit is worth doing now rather than waiting for legislation to formally land — particularly for any EPC issued before 2022, when the calculation methodology changed; a fresh assessment can sometimes improve a rating without any capital spend at all.
Second, with the commercial EPC deadline now sitting in 2031 rather than 2030, the buildings furthest from a B rating are still the ones worth prioritising first, since they’re also the ones most likely to need the most contractor time — and that time gets scarcer the closer the market gets to the deadline.
Third, aligning retrofit schedules with routine maintenance cycles or lease breaks, rather than treating this as a standalone project, tends to be the more cost-effective route in practice.
None of this is urgent in the way a 2027 deadline would have been. But “not urgent” and “safe to ignore” aren’t the same thing, and the facilities teams that treat this as a multi-year programme starting now will have considerably more room to manage costs and contractor availability than the ones who wait until the back end of the decade.
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