What is LEED certification?

Owners and project teams choose LEED certification to inform, benchmark, and celebrate their sustainability goals and achievements. LEED’s framework – built on decades of expertise – empowers people to choose green options that align with their project’s vision and needs.

As project teams identify a vision for the project’s goals, scope, and spatial program, this is an excellent time to select the rating system that fits the project best. For example, if the project’s scope is a new building or substantial renovations, select the LEED Building Design and Construction rating system. Projects that focus on new interiors use LEED for Interior Design and Construction. Existing buildings that focus on operations select LEED Operations and Maintenance. Within these rating systems, there are adaptations for common project types, such as Schools, Hospitals, Data Warehouses, Core and Shell, and more, detailed in the links above. These adaptations highlight sustainable approaches that are unique to specific building types.

Once the rating system is selected, review the Minimum Program Requirements and prerequisites of the selected rating system. Project teams can use the LEED Reference Guide or LEED credit library to identify their rating system’s prerequisites. When the project team has determined that these requirements can be met, the next step is to develop a certification strategy and select the credits that the project will pursue. The strategy is tailored to the project’s identity, region, site, and specific experiential, environmental, and financial goals. The LEED scorecard is a helpful tool at this stage. Project teams often identify an ideal case, where they achieve all of their desired credit thresholds, and also a minimum case, where they achieve at least the 40 points that are required for certification. The free LEED credit library gives project teams detailed insight into the goals, metrics, and documentation strategies for each prerequisite and credit.

Within the LEED certification process, there are many opportunities to craft more sustainable, resilient, healthy, and equitable places. Some additional resources that may be helpful are below.