National Buildings Database phase 2: understanding Great Britain’s buildings
Research on the National Buildings Database (NBD), with a focus on non-domestic premises and the building stock.
Documents
Details
The National Buildings Database (NBD) brings together a range of existing data sources on buildings:
- construction
- geometry
- energy end uses
- targeted sector-specific survey data
The database features a one-to-one representation of every building in Great Britain and provides a step-change in the evidence available for analysis of decarbonisation across the building stock.
Phase 2 is the most recent phase, completed in 2025, and the details of this are available in the reports and data tables.
Previous phase
An early phase (Phase 1) was known as the Non-Domestic Building Stock (NDBS). This piloted the data modelling approach to combine existing data with targeted sector specific surveys to produce a complete record of the building stock and its energy use.
The Phase 1 pilot study was carried out by University College London Consultants and focused on the hospitality sector, chosen for its highly varied activities and energy uses. As part of the study, they created a national database of every hospitality building. Read the reports from this Phase 1 work, outlining the approach, methodology and results from this first phase of the project.