New LEED Fees Discount Combined Design And Construction Review

or [pessimistically]

New LEED Fees Penalize Separate Design and Construction Reviews

I'm two weeks into a four week LEED Green Associate training course* that I'm giving at my firm, and yesterday we went over the LEED rating systems and the steps you have to go through to earn certification. As much of the process is the same as it was in the v2 system, I simply copied many of the slides from earlier classes, one of which was about when to pay registration and certification fees.

I was alert enough to recognize that the fees have been updated on January 11th, but I had assumed that there was still no difference in costs between doing a combined design and construction review or splitting it into two distinct design and construction review phases. Luckily, I'm not the only one on our staff keeping up with v3 changes, and one of our project architects corrected me this morning:

GBCI LEED Review Fee Chart

Orange = Mo' Money!

As you can see, there is a discount of 8.33% for non-members and 10% for members for using a combined review over splitting the review into separate phases. This makes sense considering it presumably takes more overhead to run two review processes instead of one, though I personally liked the option of separate reviews because you had a better understanding of where you stood points-wise before going into the final review.

It's important to note that these fees are not based on registration date but rather the date of the review submittal, so all those v2 projects will be affected as well.

*I've been using a variety of study guides (both from the USGBC and third parties) to develop this class, and will provide a detailed report of recommendations on what to study, what to pay for, what not to pay for, etc. once it's all complete. If you sell LEED study guides, practice tests, or related materials and would like to be included in this review, please contact me via email to discuss.

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