Energy certificate

The energy efficiency certificate rates a home with a single letter — A to G — and sets out where that letter comes from. It is the Spanish counterpart of the certificate your own country asks for when a property changes hands, and it is the one a sale or a letting in Spain needs.

Almost nobody orders one for its own sake: it is asked for by somebody else. The notary before a sale is signed, the agency or the portal before a letting is advertised, the administration when the property is going into tourist use, and the building evaluation report if one is under way.

What you call it at home

Most of Europe issues this certificate under the same European directive, so you have almost certainly met it already under another name:

• United Kingdom — Energy Performance Certificate, the EPC.
• Belgium — EPC in Flanders, PEB in Brussels and Wallonia.
• Netherlands — energielabel.
• Germany — Energieausweis.
• France — diagnostic de performance énergétique, the DPE.
• Italy — attestato di prestazione energetica, the APE.
• Denmark — energimærke.
• Norway — energiattest, from the energimerking.
• Sweden — energideklaration.
• Poland — świadectwo charakterystyki energetycznej.
• Switzerland — the GEAK, CECB in French. Outside the directive and voluntary in most cantons, but the same idea and the same A to G.

Two countries our clients often come from have nothing that matches. The United States has no national certificate at all: the ratings that exist — the HERS Index, the Home Energy Score — are voluntary and attach mostly to new build. In Russia the energy passport belongs to the block rather than to the flat, and it is not something a seller hands a buyer.

Where an equivalent does exist, it is not interchangeable with this one. They measure the same thing on the same scale, but each is issued under its own country's rules and registered there, so a property in Spain needs the Spanish certificate however recent the one you hold at home.

Somebody has to come to the house

It is the part of the process most often skipped and the one part that cannot be. Royal Decree 390/2021 requires the technician to visit the property no more than three months before the certificate is issued — article 6.5 — and the visit record you sign comes from that: it is not studio paperwork, it is the proof that the visit happened. A certificate issued without anyone setting foot in the house breaches the regulation, registered or not.

The visit is short, around ten minutes in an ordinary home. We measure the external walls and roof, note the windows and doors, identify the heating, cooling and hot water systems, and check the orientation and what shades the house. The official software takes that, works out demand and consumption, and the letter follows.

The person collecting the data is an architect, and although the job in hand is the certificate and not a survey, those ten minutes usually turn up things nobody asked about: damp that is spreading, a window that no longer closes, a gutter discharging against the wall. We tell you. It is not what you commissioned, but it is what we saw.

What you get

The signed certificate, registered, which is what makes it valid: without the regional register — held by the IVACE in the Valencian Community — the document is no use for any of the reasons you needed it. We file it, using the authorisation you sign at the start.

With it come the energy label, the one that goes on the listing and the one a buyer looks at, and the recommended improvements: what could be done to this particular house and how far each measure would move the rating. That is the part of the document worth having, and the part almost nobody reads.

The letter itself is calculated from the data. A stone house from the sixties with no insulation will rate as what it is, and no technician can — or should — shift that.

How long it lasts

Ten years, or five if the rating is G. Article 13 of Royal Decree 390/2021 sets both, and the gap is intentional: the worst rating is asked to come back sooner. Nothing needs doing before it expires unless the house changes — new windows, insulated roof, a heat pump — in which case redoing it is worth it, because the letter you hold is no longer the one you have earned.

It is not the second occupancy licence

The two are asked for together so often that many owners take them for the same errand, and they have nothing in common. The energy certificate describes how the home performs: it authorises nothing, no council grants it, a technician issues it and it is registered. The second occupancy licence authorises the home to be lived in again, and the council resolves it by checking the property is still fit to live in.

There is a reason they travel together: the occasion that forces you to get one — selling, letting, bringing back into use a house that has been shut for years — is usually the same one that forces the other. They can be handled at once, on a single visit.

Timings

The visit is arranged by phone and takes about ten minutes; the registered certificate is usually with you in two or three days. We work out of Altea and cover Alfaz del Pi, La Nucía, Polop, Calpe, Benissa, Moraira, Finestrat and Callosa d'en Sarrià, among others.