LEED V5 Explained: What Changed And What It Takes To Certify

This guide covers the LEED v5 impact areas and how the points are weighted, exactly what moved between v4 and v5, the complete v5 scorecard, the three assessments, the Platinum requirements, the registration deadline and what it means for a project choosing a version, and how LEED Zero fits. It closes with a tracker of the projects that have certified under v5 so far, updated with each export of USGBC’s public directory, and a list of the milestones ahead.

If LEED itself is new to you, start with what LEED is and how certification works and come back. This guide assumes the basics and covers only what version 5 changed.

Which LEED v5 impact area is weighted most heavily?

Decarbonization. Of the 110 points available in LEED v5 BD+C New Construction, 73 are attached to credits and prerequisites USGBC links to decarbonization, against 39 for quality of life and 38 for ecological conservation and restoration. Counted as items rather than points, 27 of the 49 credits and prerequisites address decarbonization.

Some sources describe this as a 50/25/25 split. That is close for credits and wrong for points, and the reason is worth understanding.

The three columns do not add up to 110 because the impact areas are not three buckets a point falls into. USGBC assigns every credit and prerequisite to one or more impact areas, and many are assigned to two or three. Heat Island Reduction counts toward all three. Compact and Connected Development counts toward all three. Enhanced Water Efficiency counts toward decarbonization and ecological conservation. Add the three lists together and roughly fifty points are counted twice or three times.

So the correct statement is that about half of LEED v5’s credits address decarbonization and that decarbonization touches around two thirds of the available points, not that fifty five points sit in a decarbonization pot. Any table that carves 110 into three exclusive shares is describing a structure the rating system does not have.

USGBC’s own wording for the three, from its LEED v5 page:

Quality of life is also where LEED overlaps most with the WELL Building Standard, which certifies the effect of a building on the people inside it and carries its own credential, the WELL AP; teams pursuing both should map the two before documenting either.

A note on the name. These are frequently called the LEED v5 “system goals”, and searching that phrase will find them, but USGBC calls them impact areas throughout the rating system and the reference guides. The third one is also written as “ecosystem conservation and restoration” in places, including once inside USGBC’s own fact sheet, but the official name on the fact sheet title, the diagram and the LEED v5 page is ecological conservation and restoration.

What actually changed from LEED v4 and v4.1?

LEED v5 has the same 110 points and the same four thresholds as v4 and v4.1. Almost everything underneath is different. For how the versions got here, from the 1998 pilot through v2009 and v4, the history of LEED covers the timeline; this guide picks up at v4.1.

The credit categories

Both columns are BD+C New Construction. Core and Shell differs: Integrative Process carries 7 points there rather than 1, because Tenant Guidelines becomes a fourth prerequisite and Green Leases adds a 6 point credit.

Two things in that table are worth more than they look.

The first is Materials and Resources gaining five points while Indoor Environmental Quality loses three. Those five points are largely embodied carbon: Reduce Embodied Carbon is a 6 point credit in v5 and Quantify and Assess Embodied Carbon is a new prerequisite. Embodied carbon accounting did not exist in LEED before v5 in any form.

The second is Energy and Atmosphere holding at exactly 33 points, which is the single most misread fact about LEED v5.

Energy and Atmosphere kept all 33 points and spent them differently

Every article about LEED v5 leads with decarbonization. Almost none of them mention that the energy category did not gain a single point. It was 33 in LEED v4 BD+C New Construction and it is 33 in LEED v5.

What changed is where those 33 points sit.

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The headline is in the middle of that table. The energy modeling credit lost eight points. Optimize Energy Performance was worth 18 points in LEED v4, which is 16 percent of the entire rating system and by a wide margin the largest single credit in LEED. Its successor, Enhanced Energy Efficiency, is worth 10, which is 9 percent.

Those eight points, plus two more, went to Electrification and Reduce Peak Thermal Loads, neither of which existed in LEED v4 in any form. LEED v5 did not make energy worth more. It moved the reward from modeling a percentage improvement to not burning fuel on site and to reducing the loads in the first place.

Four other changes inside the category matter in practice:

The baseline standard jumps from ASHRAE 90.1-2010 in v4 to 90.1-2019 in v5, and to 90.1-2022 for any project registering on or after 1 January 2028. That is a nine year jump now and a twelve year jump in 2028, applied to a prerequisite every project must meet.

Fundamental Refrigerant Management in v4 said do not use CFCs. In v5 it requires a complete inventory of refrigerant-containing equipment with global warming potential and quantities, bans hydrochlorofluorocarbons in new equipment, requires the team to evaluate alternatives for anything above 700 GWP, and requires leak checking and repair before substantial completion.

Advanced Energy Metering was an optional point in v4. In v5 that metering sits inside the EAp4 prerequisite, and the project commits to reporting monthly energy data to USGBC annually for five years.

EAp1, the new prerequisite, has USGBC generate a twenty five year business as usual carbon projection for the project from the team’s own submitted energy estimate, and requires the building owner to attest in writing that they have read it. Nothing comparable exists in any earlier version of LEED..

There are four more prerequisites

LEED v4 BD+C New Construction has 12 prerequisites. LEED v5 has 16. Integrative Process went from zero prerequisites to three, Energy and Atmosphere from four to five, and Indoor Environmental Quality from two to three, while Water Efficiency dropped from three to two.

Prerequisites carry no points in either version. They are the floor. Raising the count from 12 to 16 raises the cost of the cheapest possible certification without changing what Certified is worth, which is a quieter but more consequential change than any credit reshuffle.

What is on the LEED v5 scorecard?

The complete LEED v5 BD+C scorecard, New Construction and Core and Shell, from the April 2025 Launch Edition of the reference guide. Sixteen prerequisites and thirty three credits for New Construction.

Project Priorities replaces the two categories that closed every earlier scorecard. Innovation and Regional Priority together were 10 points in v4; Project Priorities is 10 points in v5, earned through regional priority credits, project type credits, pilot credits, innovation strategies or exemplary performance, all drawn from USGBC’s project priority library, plus one point for having a LEED AP with a relevant specialty on the team. Legacy LEED APs without a specialty do not qualify for that point.

What are the three new LEED v5 assessments?

The three new assessments are IPp1 Climate Resilience Assessment, IPp2 Human Impact Assessment and IPp3 Carbon Assessment, and all three are prerequisites, so every BD+C project completes them regardless of the level it is targeting. They sit in a category that barely existed before. In LEED v4, Integrative Process was a single optional credit worth one point. In LEED v5 it is a named category, Integrative Process, Planning and Assessments, and its prerequisites come first in the scorecard because they are meant to come first in the project.

IPp1 Climate Resilience Assessment. The project completes a climate and natural hazard assessment and identifies at least two priority hazards from a list that includes drought, extreme heat, extreme cold, flooding, hurricanes and high winds, hail, landslides, sea level rise and storm surge, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfires and smoke, and winter storms. For each, the team documents the hazard level and risk rating, exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, vulnerability and overall risk, the potential impact on the site and on building function, and the potential impact during construction. The analysis is run against Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios with a stated socioeconomic pathway, over the projected service life of the project.

IPp2 Human Impact Assessment. A structured assessment of the project’s social context across four categories: demographics, including ethnicity, gender, age, income, employment rate, density and nearby vulnerable populations; local infrastructure and land use, including transportation, diversity of uses and accessibility codes; human use and health impacts, including housing affordability, availability of social services and community safety; and occupant experience, including daylight, views, operable windows and the environmental conditions of air and water. USGBC publishes a template.

IPp3 Carbon Assessment. This one is widely misunderstood as a fourth separate study. It is not. USGBC runs a twenty five year carbon assessment on the project using data the team is already submitting for other prerequisites: EAp1 Operational Carbon Projection and Decarbonization Plan, EAp5 Fundamental Refrigerant Management, MRp2 Quantify and Assess Embodied Carbon, and optionally LTc4 Transportation Demand Management. The project team’s obligation is to submit the required data for those prerequisites. The assessment itself is generated.

What makes the carbon assessment new is not the paperwork but the scope. Carbon footprint accounting across operational energy, refrigerants, embodied carbon and transportation appears nowhere in LEED v4 or v4.1. Earlier versions rewarded energy efficiency and treated carbon as a consequence of it. LEED v5 measures the carbon directly and projects it forward twenty five years.

What does LEED v5 Platinum require?

LEED v5 Platinum requires 80 points, every prerequisite, and four named achievements: five points in EAc1 Electrification, eight points in EAc3 Enhanced Energy Efficiency, 100 percent of site energy from renewable sources under EAc4, and a 20 percent embodied carbon reduction under MRc2. It is the change with the largest practical consequence and the least coverage.

In every previous version of LEED, the certification levels were pure point thresholds. Meet all prerequisites, earn 80 points by whatever combination of credits suited the project, and the project is Platinum. In LEED v5 BD+C, that is no longer true. Platinum carries four specific requirements printed inside the credits themselves.

USGBC’s own summary of this on the LEED v5 page is a single line: “New requirements for Platinum certification have been created addressing energy efficiency, carbon emissions and renewable energy use.” The specifics are in the credit language in USGBC’s credit library, which is why they rarely appear in explainers.

Read together, they say something clear. A LEED v5 Platinum new building does not burn fossil fuel on site, buys or generates renewable energy equal to all of its site energy use, and has cut its embodied carbon by a fifth. Those are decisions made in early design, not points accumulated late, which is why Platinum in v5 is best treated as a commitment a project makes at the start rather than a total it discovers at the end.

Two qualifications. These four requirements are BD+C requirements; Core and Shell, ID+C and O+M carry their own. And EAc1 matters well below Platinum: EAp1, the prerequisite every project must satisfy, offers a design for electrification path that requires four or five points in EAc1, so electrification is a live question at Certified level too.

LEED v4.1 or LEED v5: which should a project register under?

For most new projects, LEED v5. LEED v4 and v4.1 stay open to new registrations until 30 June 2027, so the choice is real until then, and the case for each is set out below.

The mechanism is simple and the dates have already moved once, so check them rather than trusting any article, this one included.

LEED v4 and LEED v4.1 close to new registrations on 30 June 2027. From 1 July 2027, LEED v5 is the only version available for new registrations of the commercial BD+C, ID+C and O+M rating systems, as USGBC’s LEED v5 help center article states. Projects already registered under v4 or v4.1 have until 30 June 2033 to submit their initial certification application, and projects on a split review get a further 18 months after that date to submit the construction review.

Three things sit outside that table. LEED Zero is unaffected, because it is open to any previously certified project. Residential, Neighborhood Development and Communities are not included, and USGBC has said transition plans for those will follow, so those projects continue on v4 and v4.1. LEED v5 for Cities is under development.

A note on the dates. These deadlines were extended by a full year during 2026. Guidance published before the extension states registration closing 30 June 2026 and certification sunsetting 30 June 2032, with volume prototypes at 30 June 2029. Those dates are superseded, and some of that guidance is still online. If a source gives you 2026 and 2032, it predates the extension. The current table is maintained by USGBC on its LEED certification deadlines page, and it is the only version worth quoting. The extension itself was announced by USGBC.

So which one?

The consultant’s consensus through 2025 was to register under v4.1 while it was still open, on the grounds that the requirements were known, the documentation was familiar and the reviewers had a decade of precedent. That advice has aged.

The case for registering new projects under LEED v5 now is that v5 addresses the issues the market is actually being asked about, carbon and resilience and occupant health, and that a v5 plaque will read as current for years after a v4.1 plaque reads as legacy. A building certified under v4.1 in 2027 carries a certification issued against a 2010 energy standard, in a market where regulators, lenders and tenants are asking carbon questions that v4.1 was never designed to answer. Certification is a long-lived asset. Choosing the older version to make the next eighteen months easier trades away the following ten.

The case for v4.1 is real and worth stating fairly. The requirements are settled, the project team probably already knows them, and there is not yet a certified v5 BD+C project to point at, which means limited accumulated reviewer interpretation and a real chance of being among the first projects to discover what a given credit means in practice. For a project on a tight program, with a team that has never run a carbon assessment, and a client who wants certainty, that is a defensible choice.

The honest summary is that v5 is the better long-term answer for most new projects, and v4.1 is the safer short-term answer for teams who need predictability more than they need currency. What is not defensible is drifting into v4.1 by default because the deadline is still two years away.

For fees, timelines and the mechanics of registration under either version, see LEED certification requirements. For which reference guide to buy, see the LEED reference guide guide; a project still deciding should read that before buying the LEED v4.1 reference guide for a registration that may end up under v5.

On the exam, briefly: the LEED credential exams have their own version timeline, separate from the project rating systems, and it is covered on the LEED exam page rather than here. The LEED Green Associate exam prep and the LEED AP BD+C course are both built on the v5 content in this guide.

Does the 2027 deadline affect LEED Zero?

No. LEED Zero is the one program the registration close does not touch, and it is worth understanding for exactly that reason.

LEED Zero is a separate certification that verifies a building has actually reached a net zero outcome in operation, measured over twelve months of real data rather than predicted at design. There are four categories.

Eligibility runs through prior LEED certification rather than through registration, which is why the version deadlines do not apply. USGBC’s eligibility rule is that LEED Zero “is applicable only for whole buildings previously certified under a LEED BD+C, LEED O+M, or Homes rating systems”, and a project does not have to recertify or keep its certification current to pursue it. The building also needs average occupancy of 50 percent or more across the twelve month reporting period.

The practical reading for a project team is that LEED Zero remains open indefinitely to any building that has ever been LEED certified, under any version, including v4 and v4.1 projects certified long after v5 becomes the only route for new registrations. It sits on top of a certification rather than replacing one.

It is also the clearest expression of where LEED v5 is heading. LEED v5 moved the rating system toward measured carbon outcomes, EAp1 projects a building’s emissions twenty five years forward, and LEED Zero certifies against twelve months of what actually happened. A team pursuing v5 with a serious decarbonization plan is already assembling most of what LEED Zero asks for.

How are the first LEED v5 projects certifying?

Twenty-eight projects had certified under LEED v5 by September 2026, in twelve countries, seventeen months after the rating system launched. They are the projects that chose to go first, which is the right way to read everything below: a first cohort, self-selected for commitment, and the projects everyone registering later will learn from. USGBC’s public project directory, filtered to LEED v5 and to certified projects, is the complete record, and it is the source for all of this.

The first wave is existing buildings

This is exactly the sequence the calendar predicts. USGBC opened LEED v5 O+M to an early adopter group ahead of the general launch, and the earliest certifications, from October 2024, are that cohort. An existing building can be assessed against an operations standard and certified within months. A new building has to be designed, permitted, built and occupied before it can certify, which under LEED has historically taken two to four years from registration. LEED v5 BD+C launched in April 2025, so the first certified v5 new buildings are due somewhere between 2027 and 2029, and that milestone is tracked below.

It also means the first cohort is doing the work an operations standard exists to do: proving in occupied, running buildings that the v5 requirements can be met and measured. Two of those buildings are among the most recognized in the world. The Empire State Building certified LEED v5 Platinum in October 2025 at 82 points, and Taipei 101 in June 2025 at 95. International Commerce Centre in Kowloon reached 91. Landmarks choosing a new rating system in its first year is the strongest endorsement a version can get.

They set a level and hit it

Fifteen of the first twenty-eight are Platinum, nine are Gold, three Silver and one Certified. The median score is 80 and the range runs from 40 to 96.

The pattern worth noticing is how precisely the cohort landed. Every Gold project sits between 61 and 64 points. Every Platinum sits at 80 or above. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight certified within five points of the threshold they were aiming at, and no project scored between 65 and 79. That is a cohort that set a target early and delivered it with very little effort spent above the line, which is what disciplined LEED management looks like.

It also fits how v5 is built. Platinum in v5 rests on decisions made at the start of a project, so teams tend to know early which side of 80 they are on, and the ones that are not pursuing Platinum bank a strong Gold rather than chasing points that would not change their level.

Two caveats for anyone reading these figures as a benchmark. Twenty-eight is a first cohort, and a Platinum share above fifty percent reflects who chose to go first rather than what a typical building will achieve once thousands have certified. And because the cohort is existing buildings and interiors, it describes the O+M and ID+C rating systems, not BD+C.

Twelve countries in the first seventeen months

Seventeen of the twenty-eight are outside the United States. For a rating system in its first year and a half, that is a wide footprint, and it includes the highest score in the world so far: 96 points for an 803 square meter project in Madrid, which says something about what a small project with a single decision maker can do under v5.

When they certified

Eight of the twenty-eight carry certification dates before the April 2025 launch. That is not a data error. They are USGBC’s LEED v5 O+M early adopters, featured on USGBC’s own LEED v5 page, and the earliest, from October 2024, is Portobello Shop Jardim Social in Curitiba at 84 points. The quarterly figures beyond that describe a first cohort clearing, with the BD+C pipeline registered in 2025 and 2026 still working toward its first certifications.

The full list, September 2026

Median floor area 363,000 square feet, with projects ranging from under 6,000 square feet to over three million. Floor area and points achieved are effectively uncorrelated across the cohort, so size is not what drives the score under v5.

What to watch in LEED v5

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