The best buildings use LEED
LEED v5 builds on LEED鈥檚 25-year legacy and global impact, championing solutions to align the built environment with critical imperatives, including decarbonization, quality of life, and ecological conservation and restoration. It maintains the rigorous standards that have established LEED as the most recognized and influential standard in the building industry.
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What's new in LEED
LEED v5 isn't just about today鈥檚 buildings; it's about building a better future. It's a comprehensive framework designed to drive the market towards a near-zero carbon reality that is equitable, resilient, and promotes the wise, safe use of all resources. At its core, LEED v5 focuses on three key impact areas:
Decarbonization by targeting reductions in operational, embodied, refrigerants, and transportation emissions.
Quality of life by improving health, well-being, resilience, and equity for building occupants and their communities, making spaces not just environmentally friendly but also people friendly.
Ecological conservation and restoration by emphasizing strategies that limit environmental degradation and contribute to the restoration of ecosystems, ensuring that our built environment exists harmoniously with nature.
The LEED program is being updated to provide greater flexibility for projects and more opportunities to evolve rating system requirements in response to a rapidly changing market.
Moving to a five-year development cycle provides increased predictability for the market. This cadence will start with the 2025 release of the balloted LEED v5 rating systems.
Continuity across the building life cycle by aligning performance indicators and data needs from design and construction to operations and maintenance through performance monitoring.
New requirements for Platinum certification have been created addressing energy efficiency, carbon emissions and renewable energy use.
Building Design and Construction (BD+C)
- Credit library: New Construction and Major Renovations and Core and Shell Development
- Scorecard: New Construction and Major Renovations and Core and Shell Development
- Reference guide
Interior Design and Construction (ID+C)
Building Operations and Maintenance (O+M)
LEED v5 tools and resources
The newest version of the LEED standard was developed with input from thousands of green building professionals to respond to today鈥檚 most pressing challenges and key drivers at the intersection of sustainability and buildings. LEED v5 is focused on addressing climate and human health to bolster communities worldwide.
The new version redefines what it means to be a high-performance building. A built-in set of tools and resources are available to support project planning.
The Innovation and Regional Priority credit categories from previous versions of LEED have been merged to form the Project Priorities credit category. The possible number of points increases from 6 to 10. Credits offer greater flexibility to address unique project contexts and priorities, including typology, culture, location, areas of innovation and individual performance objectives.
LEED v5 introduces assessments to the rating system as prerequisites focused on climate resilience and human impact.
- The Climate Resilience Assessment evaluates climate-related hazard risks at the project level, focusing on factors like service life, emissions scenarios and hazard exposure risk levels.
- The Human Impact Assessment鈥痚valuates health, equity and quality of life at the project level, helping you ascertain real, tangible outcomes.
Scorecards have been updated to highlight how each credit and prerequisite aligns with the impact areas of decarbonization, quality of life, and ecological conservation and restoration, in addition to the traditional categorization by credit type. The updated scorecards allow you to better convey your unique sustainability story.
The April 2025 launch editions of the LEED v5 reference guides are free for all users globally and have built-in interactive functionality. Content for the initial guides explains rating system requirements, documentation and standards, helping project teams better understand how to prepare their applications.
LEED v5 projects are registered and managed in the new Arc experience, which offers fluidity and flexibility for users. All performance, certification and reporting will be delivered in one place.
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The Summary of Changes provides a clear and concise overview of the progression of each LEED rating system from LEED v4 and LEED v4.1 to LEED v5. Each document details changes at the credit and prerequisite levels, providing side-by-side comparisons and key highlights.
Education
Explore LEED v5 on-demand courses in the course catalog to learn more about the next iteration of LEED.