Home energy labels help tell the story of energy use in our homes.
Home energy labels help tell the story of energy use in our homes
A well-designed home energy label can:
- Increase the understanding of how each home uses energy
- Suggest retrofit choices for a specific home
- Enable the comparison of the energy consumption of similar homes
- Provide reliable information about a home’s energy performance and retrofit options that can help prospective home buyers or occupants make decisions
- Include climate resiliency information that can help people understand and improve the resiliency of their homes
- Provide home energy data to inform policy and program development, track progress and measure results.
Key terminology
Climate resiliency: a home’s ability to cope with extreme weather events such as seasonal flooding, wildfire and extreme heat events.
Energy efficiency: the practice of using less energy to perform the same task or produce the same result. This involves various strategies and technologies to reduce energy consumption, lower energy costs, cut emissions, and improve overall performance of homes.
Home labelling: an evaluation of a home’s energy performance. Provides an energy rating, energy use information, greenhouse gas emissions, typical costs, and steps to improve the energy efficiency of the home.
Virtual home label (VHL): A home label resulting from a virtual assessment, with direct participation of the homeowner. Virtual home labels may be issued when the homeowner has been afforded the opportunity to review and update the information used in the virtual energy assessment and has completed a declaration that all information is correct.
In Budget 2024, the Government committed $30 million over five years to develop a National Approach to Home Labelling (NAHL). The NAHL initiative has the following goals:
- Provide guidance and tools to jurisdictions to help them implement home energy labelling programs that meet their objectives
- Foster consistency and comparability across all Canadian home energy labelling approaches
- Increase the number of households that know how their home, or prospective home, uses energy and what they can do to improve its energy performance, climate resiliency and affordability.
The vision for the NAHL is to create a consistent approach that supports labelling for all homes across Canada with energy performance ratings, energy efficiency recommendations and climate resilience information.
Public review: Guidelines for Virtual assessments and Virtual home labelling
To help advance the goal of better and more efficient home labeling across Canada, a draft of the Guidelines for Virtual Energy Assessments and Virtual Home Labelling is available for public review and comment.
Following the public review period, the draft Guidelines will be reassessed and finalized. The intention behind the Guidelines is to align virtual home labelling initiatives within Canada’s broader approach to home labelling, and to encourage consistent labelling outcomes for households.
Contact us
For more information, contact us at homelabelling-etiquetageresidentiel@nrcan-rncan.gc.ca.