Obtaining EPC Data

If you are interested in Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) then you might be interested in the following ways to obtain information about lodged certificates.

This might be because you are a property owner looking to gain insight into improving your EPC rating, it might be because you are a property owner looking to check the existance of an EPC for your property, or you might be interested from an ecological viewpoint in the distribution of EPC ratings in a particular area.

Here we present three ways of getting EPC information that might be useful.

The simplest way to obtain informatin about lodged Energy Perfomance Certificates is via the two national registers. These are:

https://www.gov.uk/find-energy-certificate - For England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

https://www.scottishepcregister.org.uk/ - For Scotland

You can visit these sites, enter the postcode of your (or any other) property, run a search and view the certificate you are looking for.

If a certificate is not available for the property you are interested in, it's possible that the property might have never had an EPC issued for it (EPCs were first introduced in 2007/2008).

Alternatively, it's possible that an EPC has been lodged but is hidden from view at the request of the property owner. This is rare however, and EPC reform consultations of 2024/2025 indicate the government will be withdrawing this privacy facility going forwards.

Alternatively, since the 24th June 2024, you can now request full assessment data from the energy assessor who lodged your Energy Performance Certificate.

Full information about this is available on our Assessment Data Sharing page.

Prior to 24th June 2024, it would technically have been illegal for an energy assessor to have provided such information.

Finally, it's possible to download a subset of assessment data used to generate a lodged EPC in England & Wales, from the opendatacommunities.org website.

At the top end of the scale, you can download a large pre-prepared data file (5.6GB) containing the subset data from all EPC certificates on the national register. This is a very large data file.

Smaller pre-prepared downloads are also available for individual counties, and these are much smaller in size, although still sizeable.

Finally, you can also conduct smaller searches of up to 5000 certificates at a time, based on various criteria.

The website is at: https://epc.opendatacommunities.org/

The data is not live though, and is updated periodically.

Even if you are interested in only one property, the detail of information that is available from this source is more than that available on an EPC certifcate itself, although it is not entirely comprehensive.

Data that might be of interest could include the Construction Dateband of the Main Building.

A similar facility is also available for EPCs lodged in Scotland, at the address: https://www.scottishepcregister.org.uk/CustomerFacingPortal/DataExtract but the data is only available in monthly installments, and this makes it more challenging to find specific information.

As an example, here we will identify the construction dateband entered in an EPC assessent for the main building of a property in England & Wales. We'll do this aross two EPCs for the same property, one expired EPC, and the current EPC, to see if the same or different datebands have been used across the two EPCs.

Firstly, go to https://epc.opendatacommunities.org/ and create an account - you need to click on the link to 'Register now for access to the data'.

Log into the website - this involces entering your email address and then clicking on a login link they send to your email address.

Once in, on the right hand side, enter the postcode of the property you are interested in. To narrow down the number of results returned, type the house number (only) in the address box.

Leave the rest of the entries as they are, and click on the search button at the bottom.

You are then presented with a list of the EPCs that match the criteria provided.

Hopefully, you'll just see EPCs that are for the property you are interested in:

Here, I have two EPCs returned. One is the current EPC for the property, and the other is an expired EPC.

Click on the 'Download all results' button on the right hand side.

Save the .zip file.and open the certificates.csv file from within it, using Excel or other compatible spreadsheet software.

Work your way along the columns in the .csv file, and locate the 'CONSTRUCTION_AGE_BAND' column.

Other columns can be used to identify the assessment date of the EPCs, so you know which EPC was the earlier one, but in this case it's not too important, as we can see the same construction dateband has been used across both EPCs.

In addition, I'm happy that the property was constructed duing this dateband. This example is my house, and I actually lodged the current EPC myself.