Buildings account for more than half of Toronto’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mostly due to energy and water use.
Toronto’s Energy and Water Reporting By-law, under Municipal Code Chapter 367 (Building Emissions Performance), requires owners of buildings 929 square metres (10,000 square feet) and larger to report energy and water use to the City annually. Buildings 4,645 square metres (50,000 square feet) and larger began reporting in 2024, and buildings 929 square metres (10,000 square feet) and larger are required to begin reporting in 2026. How the City currently discloses reported information to the public is governed by the City’s Public Disclosure of Report Information policy.
Owners of large buildings must also report energy and water use to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification by July 1 every year, under Ontario’s Energy and Water Reporting Benchmarking (EWRB) regulation (O.Reg. 506/18).
The City can determine the annual GHG emissions for each building using the reported energy and water data. This data also allows building owners to track their buildings’ performance over time and compare it with the performance of similar buildings, also known as benchmarking. Benchmarking is the first step towards improving building efficiency.
Benchmarking your building’s energy and water use can help you:
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Benchmarking and Building Performance Standards Policy Toolkit (2021), buildings that consistently benchmarked their performance achieved an average annual energy savings of 2.4 per cent.
| Building Size | Reporting Deadline |
|---|---|
Gross floor area of:
|
July 2, 2025 to the City of Toronto
July 1, 2025 to the Province of Ontario |
Gross floor area of:
|
July 2, 2026 to the City of Toronto |
The Toronto Energy and Water Reporting By-law applies to buildings located within the current boundaries of Toronto. Properties located within the boundaries of the City of Toronto have postal codes that begin with “M.”
If a property has more than one owner, all property owners are jointly responsible for submitting a single report for the property. The task of reporting may be delegated by the property owners to a single property owner or to a third party, but all property owners will be responsible if a report is not submitted for the property.
Please note that condominium buildings are composed of multiple properties (individual condominium units and condominium common areas). Currently, condominium property owners (i.e. condominium unit holders and condominium corporations) are only required to report the energy use of their condominium properties (i.e. condominium units or condominium common areas) to the City of Toronto if the individual condominium property (i.e. unit or common area) is 4,645 square metres (50,000 square feet) or larger, with this threshold changing to 929 square metres (10,000 square feet) in 2026.
The Gross Floor Area (GFA) of a single building or structure is the sum of the total area of each floor level of a building, above and below the ground, measured from the exterior surface of the enclosed exterior walls on each floor level.
The City of Toronto’s Energy and Water Reporting By-law requires building owners to report both descriptive information and performance information for each building that is subject to the bylaw’s reporting requirement.
This helps the City of Toronto to identify your building and distinguish it from other properties. Descriptive information also helps the City of Toronto to compare your building’s performance to an appropriate set of similar buildings.
Examples of descriptive information include:
This tells the City how much energy and water were used by your building during the previous year. For example, if your reporting deadline is July 2, 2025, then you will report how much energy and water your building used during each month of the 2024 calendar year.
Examples of performance information include:
For a complete list of the descriptive and performance information that building owners are required to report for each building, please see section 367-2.2 of the City’s Energy and Water Reporting By-law.
Building owners report their buildings’ monthly data to both the City of Toronto and the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Electrification using the same online tool: Energy Star Portfolio Manager (a free tool developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and adapted for use in Canada by Natural Resources Canada).
To report, building owners must first create an Energy Star Portfolio Manager account and enter their building’s information, and monthly energy and water data into the Energy Star Portfolio Manager tool. Once the data is in the tool, click the buttons below to report data to the City of Toronto, and to report your data to the Province of Ontario.
Use the buttons below to report 2024 consumption data to the City of Toronto, and the Province of Ontario in 2025.
Toronto Water account holders can download water data directly from the MyWaterToronto online self-serve portal. For guidance on this process, watch this short how-to video.
The City of Toronto will provide aggregated whole-building water consumption data for a property under the following two conditions:
If either of these two conditions apply, you can request aggregated whole-building water consumption data from the City of Toronto by emailing buildingreporting@toronto.ca.
To receive aggregated water data, the property owner must provide the municipal property address associated with the property.
If you are a consultant requesting water data on behalf of a property owner, please provide a signed letter from the property owner giving the City of Toronto permission to provide you with water data for their properties.
Toronto Hydro and Enbridge Gas account holders can download electricity and natural gas data from their accounts directly by logging into the online portals for Toronto Hydro and Enbridge Gas.
If you need whole-building consumption to be aggregated from multiple accounts that serve the same building, you can request aggregated whole-building monthly electricity and natural gas data by using the online data request forms for Toronto Hydro and Enbridge Gas. To learn more, watch this short how-to video.
Requests for aggregated whole-building data for EWRB reporting typically take about four weeks to process. Property owners are responsible for submitting data requests in a timely fashion to ensure they receive data before the reporting deadline.
The City of Toronto has created a series of instructional videos to help you document and report your building’s monthly energy and water use.
For detailed written instructions on how to submit your report using Energy Star Portfolio Manager, please refer to the Ministry of Energy Portfolio Manager Guide.
Toronto’s Energy and Water Reporting By-law requires owners of buildings 9,290 square metres (100,000 square feet) and larger to have a certified professional verify their data once every five years, starting with the first year they report to the City.
The certified professional reviews the data to make sure that values have been entered into Energy Star Portfolio Manager appropriately and to ensure that the values entered look reasonable and are within the ranges to be expected for that building (e.g. checking that the value entered for electricity use reflects the whole building’s electricity use and not just the electricity used in the building’s common areas).
Examples of certified professionals include:
To learn more, watch this how-to video on verifying your data.
The City of Toronto does not pre-qualify or endorse third-party vendors that provide data verification or energy and water report submission services.
Although the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Electrification allows building owners to report multiple buildings on the same property as a single property profile in Energy Star Portfolio Manger, the City of Toronto requires building owners to submit separate reports for each building on the same property. This means you will need to create separate property profiles in Energy Star Portfolio Manager for each separate building that meets the size threshold for reporting to the City.
For energy management purposes, the City recommends installing separate utility meters for separate buildings or even sub-meters if separate utility meters are not an option. However, where individual building meters are not available, use the cost-sharing agreement for the meter to pro-rate the consumption from the shared utility meter and assign a portion of the usage to each building serviced by the shared meter.
If there is no cost-sharing agreement in place (e.g. as may be the case for a university or hospital campus), then you can report the group of buildings that share the utility meter(s) as a campus. To do this, you will still create separate property profiles in Energy Star Portfolio Manager for each building that is required to report. These will be your ‘child’ property profiles. You will also create a ‘parent’ property profile in Energy Star Portfolio Manager to represent the group of buildings that share the utility meter(s). The gross floor area of the ‘parent’ property profile should be the sum of the gross floor areas of each of the buildings that share the utility meter(s). You will link the ‘child’ property profiles to the ‘parent’ property profile, and you will add the utility consumption from the shared meter(s) to the ‘parent’ property profile. When it comes time to submit your report information for your buildings to the City of Toronto, you will include both the ‘parent’ property profile and the ‘child’ property profiles in your report submission.
For instructions on how to create ‘parent’ and ‘child’ properties in Energy Star Portfolio Manager, see How to Benchmark a Campus in Portfolio Manager).
Unlike the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Electrification’s reporting requirement, the City of Toronto does not have ongoing exceptions for buildings with certain property uses. Buildings are required to report to the City if they have a gross floor area that meets the size threshold for reporting, regardless of property use.
However, there are some circumstances in which building owners may be granted a full or partial exemption from reporting for a particular year. These include:
If one of the scenarios above applies, a property owner may request an exemption by completing the online Exemption Request Form.
Extensions will only be granted to property owners in events beyond their reasonable control, such as death of the property owner or a property owner’s inability to access their data due to having been hacked. In such cases, property owners must complete the online Extension Request Form.
Some building types are exempt from reporting EWRB data to the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Electrification. For a full list of the property types required to report under O.Reg. 506/18, see the List of building types in the Ministry of Energy’s guide to energy and water reporting.
Webinar 1: How to Report
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Noon to 12:45 p.m.
Webinar 2: Ask Me Anything
Thursday, June 19, 2025
Noon to 12:45 p.m.
If you have questions about reporting that were not answered above, or you need assistance with some aspect of the reporting process, use the contact information below.
City of Toronto Energy and Water Reporting Help Centre
Email: buildingreporting@toronto.ca
Ontario EWRB Support Centre
Phone: 1-844-274-0689
Email: EWRBSupport@ontario.ca
The City’s Navigation & Support Services program can help you identify opportunities to improve your building’s energy efficiency and can help you access incentives and financing for energy retrofit projects. For more information, visit Better Buildings Navigation & Support Services.