Which schemes require commissioning

Exact criterion names, weightings, and what must be produced

Commissioning is not required by any French building regulation. It becomes binding by contract, as soon as a project targets a label or a certification. Seven schemes name it, with requirements ranging from a simple recommendation to a mandatory independent third party. This page gives the exact wording of each.

Discuss a project Certification management

Reading note

Criterion names are never translated.

One convention governs this page, and it matters for anyone drafting specifications: the names of certification criteria are given in the language of the scheme that issues them. Writing a French rendering of Man 04 or an English rendering of PE.7.2.13 in a tender document makes the requirement untraceable for the assessor. We keep the original wording and explain it alongside.

French schemes

What applies on a French project.

  • NF Habitat HQE — criterion PE.7.2.13, Procédures de commissionnement. Not required under NF Habitat alone; worth three points under NF Habitat HQE, which is the scheme's maximum weighting. It is a process point rather than a works point: it costs no equipment. On a project aiming for three or four stars it is one of the few free levers available.
  • BBC Effinergie renovation and Effinergie RE2020 — required unconditionally on all projects, with the tertiary version extending the scope to the building automation system. This is the strictest French position in terms of applicability, since there is no way to trade it away.
  • HQE Bâtiment Durable — a dedicated theme within responsible management, structured in two blocks and broken down into fifteen actions, from the commissioning plan through to seasonal testing and the optimisation of settings. The base time scope runs to the first eighteen months of operation, and those months begin when twenty per cent of the lettable floor area is occupied — not at handover.
  • BBCA — the only French scheme to require an independent third party outright, for one innovation point. Absent from the renovation and operation versions.

The detail of the HQE requirements, including the independence threshold and the functional and time scopes, is set out on our page on building commissioning and in the scheme documentation itself.

International schemes

What an international investor will ask for.

  • BREEAM International New Construction — Man 04 Commissioning and handover, with seasonal testing sitting in a separate credit, Man 05 Aftercare. A project that budgets Man 04 believing it covers seasonal testing discovers the gap far too late. We treat this specifically on our page on BREEAM Man 04 and Man 05.
  • LEED — the only scheme in this list to place commissioning in a prerequisite, and therefore impossible to trade away at any certification level. Version 5 removed the allowance that let a qualified member of the design or construction team hold the role on projects under twenty thousand square feet and on data centres, brought the building enclosure into the prerequisite, and raised measurement-based monitoring to a three-year minimum. See LEED commissioning, from CxA to CxP.
  • DGNB Neubau — criterion PRO2.3, Geordnete Inbetriebnahme, whose indicator must be carried by an external party that is neither the contractor nor the designer. This is the strictest independence requirement of the whole corpus, backed by the VDI 6039 and VDI 6041 guidelines.

In practice

Scope on the widest requirement, not the average.

Many projects target more than one scheme — a French label for financing, an international certification for the investment market. The commissioning requirements then overlap substantially without being identical, and a single assignment can satisfy all of them, on one condition: that it was scoped against the widest requirement from the outset.

Adding deliverables afterwards is where the cost appears. Reopening a design review during construction does not recover what should have been written into the works packages, and retro-fitting seasonal testing into a contract that ended at handover means procuring it again. This is the single most common avoidable expense we see, and it is a scheduling question rather than a technical one — the phase-by-phase scope shows where the value actually sits.

On an existing asset, the equivalent approach is retro-commissioning, extended over time into ongoing commissioning. Both interact with the French tertiary decree, which imposes a declared reduction trajectory on most non-residential stock.

FAQ

Questions from international clients.

It depends on what is being measured. On applicability, LEED is strictest because it places commissioning in a prerequisite that cannot be traded away at any level. On independence, DGNB is strictest, requiring an external party that is neither designer nor contractor. On time scope, HQE Bâtiment Durable runs furthest, to the first eighteen months of operation. A project targeting several schemes must scope against whichever of these constraints binds first.
No, and this is the most frequent budgeting error on BREEAM projects. Seasonal testing sits in Man 05 Aftercare, a separate credit that must have been explicitly targeted. A project that budgets Man 04 believing it covers seasonal commissioning finds out at the point where the contract has already ended.
Yes, and it is common on tertiary projects aimed at international investment. The requirements overlap substantially without being identical, so the assignment must be scoped against the widest of them from the outset. Scoping to the French requirement and adding deliverables afterwards costs materially more, because the design-stage work cannot be recovered.
They vary by scheme and by version, and that variation is the reason we do not reproduce scoring tables here. A weighting copied without its version is wrong for a share of readers, and schemes are revised on their own cycles. We work from the reference document applicable to the project rather than from a general table.

Go further

The rest of the commissioning material.

Targeting a scheme on a French project?

We read the applicable reference document with you, identify the level actually required on commissioning, and scope the assignment against it.

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