Guidance

EPC Statistics Work Programme

Published 17 April 2026

Applies to England and Wales

1. Introduction

Official Statistics on the Energy Performance of Certificates (EPC) are released quarterly. We are committed to improving the way we produce and disseminate our statistics, to provide trusted, high-quality and highly-valued data insights, in line with the T4.2 of the Code of Practice for Statistics to ensure that we are open and transparent about our progress towards meeting our priorities and objectives while ensuring users and stakeholders can help us prioritise our statistical plans in line with their needs.

This work programme outlines the developments we made in 2025 as well as a high-level overview of upcoming planned changes to our work in 2026.

2. Our development work in 2025

Throughout 2025, we carried out a large piece of work to improve the methodology of the new dwellings EPC dataset, by cleaning and de-duplicating certificates to provide a more accurate count of new dwelling EPCs. For more details on this see our Technical Note.

3. Our priorities for 2026

The following priorities reflect our focus at the time of publication. However, we remain responsive to emerging needs, meaning this plan may evolve during the year. Any updates will be reviewed and shared in next quarter’s publication.

In 2026 and 2027, major changes will impact the EPC statistics, which will require development work and modifications to our outputs:

• The Office for National Statistics (ONS) will discontinue their annual Energy efficiency of housing in England and Wales release, based on EPC data (last published in October 2025)
• The Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP), the methodology used to calculate the energy efficiency rating of a home, will be replaced with the Home Energy Model (HEM) (2027)
• The planned reforms to the EPC regulations and information displayed on certificates (2027)

To address these, we are proposing an iterative approach to amendments, rather than one large overhaul and addressing each change in turn starting with the discontinuation of the ONS publication.

Discontinuation of the ONS release

We are aware that the information ONS publish based on EPC data annually is of value to users and we want to ensure the continuation of this, where possible. Given the release will no longer be updated since October 2025, we are proposing the following steps:

Stage 1: User engagement – we will actively engage with ONS and internal and external users on requirements for new statistics (approximately April to June 2026).

Stage 2: Processing – we will engage with our data engineers to check the feasibility of proposed changes (approximately June to July 2026)

Stage 3: Confirmation – approved changes will be confirmed with users and feedback sought (by end of July)

Stage 4: Publication – development of new outputs and publication on gov.uk (August to October 2026)

Replacement of the Energy Efficiency Rating methodology and reforms to EPC regulations

We are actively engaging with policy teams within MHCLG and the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) on the progress of the reforms and will continue to invest time and resource to ensure future iterations of the release reflect these upcoming changes, while still maintaining a time series, where possible.

4. Feedback

We welcome any feedback you may have on this plan, email EPBStats@communities.gov.uk to get in touch with the team.

We will aim to publish another update alongside the quarterly EPC release in July 2026, to outline progress made against the current plan.