What it takes to reach BREEAM Excellent
BREEAM ratings explained, and a practical look at what a project has to get right early to reach Excellent rather than settling for Very Good.
“BREEAM Excellent” turns up in a great many briefs. It makes a sensible target, though it often gets written down long before anyone has worked out what it actually commits the project to. Reaching Excellent rather than Very Good does not come down to a bit more effort towards the end of the job. It comes down to a whole set of decisions that need to be made right at the start, and those are the decisions we spend most of our time helping clients get right.
What BREEAM is
BREEAM (the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) is a third-party framework for assessing and certifying the sustainability of a building against an agreed standard. A licensed assessor evaluates the project against the requirements of the relevant BREEAM scheme and version, gathering evidence across a number of categories. Credits are earned within those categories, each category score is then adjusted by its environmental weighting, and the weighted scores, together with any innovation credits, produce the overall percentage. That percentage maps to a rating, and almost everything worth understanding about the process follows from it.
The ratings, and where Excellent sits
The ratings run Pass, Good, Very Good, Excellent and Outstanding. Excellent needs an overall score of 70% or more, a level BREEAM has historically associated with roughly the top 10% of new UK non-domestic construction. Outstanding needs 85%, associated with around the top 1%. Below those, Very Good sits at 55%, Good at 40% and Pass at 25%.
These bands are broad benchmarks of performance within new non-domestic construction, not a live ranking of certified projects. Pass is associated with roughly the top 75%, Good the top 50% and Very Good the top 25%. So when a planning officer or an investor asks for Excellent, they are asking for a level of performance BREEAM has historically put in the top tenth of new non-domestic construction. That is a demanding place to be, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it before the target goes anywhere near a brief.
The percentage is only part of the picture. Each rating also carries mandatory minimum standards, meaning individual credits you have to achieve regardless of your overall score. A project can exceed 70% and still fall short of Excellent if it has not met every minimum standard for that rating. Its final rating is limited to the highest level for which both the score and the applicable minimum standards are met. This is easy to overlook because it is not captured by the percentage alone, so it needs tracking separately from the headline score from the very start.
What it scores
Credits are spread across categories that include energy, health and wellbeing, management, water, materials, waste, transport, land use and ecology, and pollution, with further credits available for innovation, though the exact issues and weightings vary by scheme and version. The breadth is deliberate. BREEAM is designed to reward a building that performs well across the board, so a scheme cannot lean entirely on strong energy figures while neglecting the rest of the assessment.
Version 7 changed the route to the rating
BREEAM New Construction Version 7 launched in 2025, with registrations opening in September of that year. A transition period allowed projects to keep registering under earlier New Construction versions for a limited time, and older versions may still apply in certain cases, including where an existing contractual obligation can be shown.
The top three rating thresholds did not change. Very Good, Excellent and Outstanding still sit at 55%, 70% and 85%, and Excellent still requires all of the minimum standards that apply to it. Pass and Good were each lowered by five points, to 25% and 40%, which gives even gaps between the ratings. What changed more substantially is the route to those scores.
Version 7 places greater emphasis on whole-life carbon, resilience, biodiversity, materials and health and wellbeing. A life cycle assessment covering embodied and operational carbon is now a minimum requirement for Excellent and Outstanding, and an indoor air quality plan a minimum standard from Very Good upwards. Both are decisions that have to be programmed early rather than treated as optional evidence to be assembled later.
A score from an earlier-version project should not be converted by adding or subtracting a fixed number of percentage points. The criteria, category weightings and minimum standards have changed, so an older project is useful only as a broad reference. A scheme targeting Excellent under Version 7 should be tested against the current methodology through a scheme-specific pre-assessment.
Certification happens twice
BREEAM is assessed in two stages, and projects that treat it as a single event at the end of the job tend to come unstuck.
The design stage assessment produces an interim certificate based on the design and the commitments made against it. The post-construction assessment then confirms what was actually built and issues the final certificate. An interim Excellent tells you where the design ought to land, provided several things hold true afterwards. It stands up only if the specification survives value engineering, the contractor builds what was drawn, and the evidence is collected along the way.
The gap between those two assessments is where ratings tend to slip away. A specified product replaced with one that does not meet the relevant BREEAM criteria, a commissioning record that nobody kept, a subcontractor who did not realise a material had to be responsibly sourced. Any of these looks minor on its own, yet each can cost a credit that was already counted at design stage.
Excellent is decided early
This is the lesson most projects end up learning the hard way. A large share of the credits that carry a scheme to Excellent depend on decisions taken very early on, such as the site you choose, the transport links around it, the ecology strategy, the way the design team is appointed and managed, and the commissioning plan. Many of these become difficult, expensive or impossible to recover once design and procurement are well advanced. By the time the building is on site, the ceiling on the achievable rating has largely been set.
For that reason the target needs to be built into the brief and the programme from the very start, with the assessor involved early enough to help shape decisions rather than simply score them after the fact.
The credits that trip projects up
A handful come up again and again. Management credits are lost when the right processes are not set up and evidenced from the outset. Ecology and land use credits suffer when an ecologist arrives too late to influence the site strategy. Commissioning and handover evidence has a habit of getting lost in the rush at the end, when nobody has the time to gather it properly. Some are inexpensive when planned early, but can become costly, or unavailable, when introduced late. They get missed because they were left until it was too late to do anything about them.
The assessor is not the only appointment
Two roles often get confused here. The licensed assessor carries out the formal assessment and submits the evidence to BRE. The BREEAM Accredited Professional is a distinct role, brought in to steer the design team towards the target, though the same firm, and sometimes the same person, may hold both credentials. Credits may be available where an AP is appointed at the right stage and carries out the defined monitoring, coordination and reporting, not simply for naming one.
In our experience, a scheme aiming for Excellent usually benefits from both, appointed before the design is fixed. An assessor brought in at technical design can tell you fairly accurately what you are going to score, but by that point there is not a great deal they can do to change it.
The assessor and the evidence
BREEAM is an evidence-based standard, and that has real practical consequences. A credit you have genuinely earned but cannot document simply does not count. This makes early involvement from the assessor, together with a disciplined approach to record-keeping, worth as much as most of the design decisions on the project. The schemes that reach Excellent with the least trouble are the ones that treated the evidence trail as part of the job from the very beginning.
There is one more thing worth knowing. On some schemes the rating is not really a choice at all. A number of local planning authorities require a specified BREEAM rating through local policy, a planning condition or a planning obligation, which turns the rating into a compliance matter rather than an ambition and makes a missed credit a discharge-of-conditions problem at the end of the job. Where a rating is secured that way, the appointments and building contract should set out clearly who is responsible for the design measures, construction records and certification evidence.
Excellent is achievable on many projects, though feasibility is worth testing through an early pre-assessment rather than assumed. Aiming for it from the start costs far less than chasing it once construction is under way, which is the main reason we push clients to make the decision early and then commit to it properly.