How to look up a Kansas City building's energy score

Kansas City has a law that makes the owner of almost every big building in town report how much energy and water it used last year, and it makes the answer public. If you rent in a large apartment complex, work in an office tower, or are about to sign a lease on either, you can look up how the building scored.

The city posts the numbers in two places, and neither one works the way you would expect. One file gives a zero to buildings that never reported. The newest year is on a map with no search box.

The thirty-second version

• The law: Chapter 17 of the city code, the Energy Empowerment Ordinance. Most buildings over 50,000 square feet report every May 1, and the results are public.
• Is my building covered? Open the Benchmarking building lookup list, t3e4-ew5i, on data.kcmo.org.
• How did it score? Open that year’s Community Buildings file and type the street number and one word of the street name into the search box: 2 memorial, not 2 Memorial Dr.
• Check the status column before you read the score. In the 2022 file, a building that did not report shows a score of 0. The EPA’s scale runs from 1 to 100. A zero is a blank.
• The newest year is on a separate city map with no search box. You pan and click.

What the law says

Kansas City adopted the Energy Empowerment Ordinance on June 4, 2015. It now sits in Chapter 17 of the city code. It covers three groups of buildings:

Buildings owned by the State of Missouri or the federal government are out, and so are residential buildings in the R-80 through R-2.5 zoning districts. Owners enter a year of utility bills into the EPA’s free ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager tool and send the result to the city. The city’s FAQ is plain that this is a reporting law: “Energy audits and energy retrofits are not required.”

Two sentences in Section 17-4 make this guide possible. The city “shall make available to the public annually the reported benchmarking information for the previous calendar year,” each by September 1. All of it, “including any ENERGY STAR score, shall be available to the public, without restriction,” unless an owner proves to the director that some part is protected by law.

Looking it up, in a browser

Step one: is the building covered? Go to data.kcmo.org, search for benchmarking, and open Benchmarking building lookup list. Each row gives a benchmarking ID, address, building name, floor area and owner. This is the file the city keeps current. When The Stare pulled it on September 26, 2026, its rows had last changed on August 14, 2026, and it listed 1,410 buildings.

Step two: how did it score? From the same search, open the file for the year you want. They are named by year, like 2023 Kansas City Energy and Water Consumption Benchmarking for Community Buildings (p92b-cm6v). City-owned buildings have their own file. Type into the search box:

2 memorial

That found the National WWI Museum and Memorial, which the file lists at 2 Memorial Drive. The search box does not care about capitals: 2 Memorial Drive, 2 MEMORIAL DRIVE and 2 memorial drive each found it. It does care about spelling. 2 Memorial Dr found nothing, with no hint that you were one word away. Leave the suffix off: no St, Ave, Dr or Blvd.

The filter tool is stricter than the search box. A filter on the address column matches capitals exactly. 2 Memorial Drive returned one row; 2 MEMORIAL DRIVE returned zero. That zero looks exactly like a building with no record, so stick with the search box.

Step three: read the right columns. The ones that matter are Submission Status, Energy Star Score and Weather Normalized Site EUI. EUI is energy use per square foot, and lower is better. The ENERGY STAR score compares the building with similar ones nationwide, and higher is better.

Read the status first. The next section is why.

A zero means nobody reported

In the city’s 2022 file (eys4-sd8d), a building that did not report was not left blank. It was given an ENERGY STAR score of 0 and an energy use of 0.

The EPA’s own page for the metric is titled “How the 1–100 ENERGY STAR Score is Calculated.” There is no zero on that scale. A building cannot earn it.

In The Stare’s pull of September 26, 2026, 725 buildings in that file are marked noSubmittal, and every one has a score of 0 and an EUI of 0. Rows marked Exempt and NA carry zeros too. In all, 802 buildings sit at an energy use of exactly zero.

Now sort the 2022 file by energy use, lowest first, which is how most people would hunt for the most efficient buildings in the city. The first 802 rows are zeros. Nearly all are buildings that sent nothing or were excused. The first building with a real number is row 803. Anyone who downloads the file, sorts it and quotes the top of the list will praise the buildings that ignored the law.

The city changed the practice after that. The 2023 file writes na in those rows, and the 2024 map writes Not Available. The 2022 file was not corrected. As of September 26 it had been downloaded 4,595 times, the second most of any year.

Two smaller things in the same files:

• Both the 2022 and the 2023 file say “2023” in the Submission Year column, on every row. Go by the dataset title instead.
• The 2023 file has 38 rows whose Primary Type reads ERROR: #N/A, a spreadsheet formula error published as a building type. Another 414 rows leave the type blank.

The newest year is somewhere else

The portal’s newest year is 2023, posted April 1, 2025. The 2024 results are published, but not there. They are on a city map titled Kansas City Energy Benchmarking 2025, at kcmo.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/1d7c276e8c074e47be46004a1f5c7a8b. The city names its maps for the year owners filed, so “2025” on that map means 2024 energy use.

The map shows a pie chart of compliance, a count, and a map of dots. It has no search box: the settings behind it list no map tools at all. To find a building, zoom to it and click its dot. The pop-up shows its reporting ID, address, floor area, score, emissions and energy use. Buildings that did not report say Not Available.

One column on that map is mislabeled. It is headed “Weather Normalized Site Energy Use (kBtu),” which would be a building’s total energy for the year, but its values are numbers like 24.8 and 45.1. A 50,000-square-foot building cannot run a year on 24.8 thousand BTUs, about what a space heater uses in five hours. Those are per-square-foot figures, the same EUI as the portal files.

Where is the 2025 data, reported by owners on May 1, 2026 and owed to the public by September 1? The Stare did not find it on the portal or behind the city’s map links on September 26, 2026. The city’s own naming may explain it: under its convention the 2025 figures would appear as “2026 reporting,” and the benchmarking page archived in July 2026 was still telling owners to “Submit 2025 Data.” We don’t know that the deadline was missed. We only know we couldn’t find the file on September 26.

What the city’s own column says about compliance

Each file carries a status column filled in by the city. Those entries are the city’s. The Stare didn’t grade anybody.

Among 2023 rows the city marked as required by ordinance, 563 of 863 show no submittal. The law’s remedy starts with a warning letter and a 60-day clock. After that, a fine of $50 to $500 a day, capped at $2,000 a year. The files have no column for warnings or fines, so they cannot tell you whether any were sent.

There is also no 2020 file on the portal. The years run 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023, with 2015 and 2016 reports on city-owned buildings only.

If you rent or are about to sign a lease

• Ask for the building’s benchmarking ID. It looks like 08-IS-02610, and the search box finds it.
• A score of 75 or higher is the EPA’s line for ENERGY STAR certification, per the city’s FAQ. Certification is voluntary.
• Compare EUI within a building type. An office and a hospital are not comparable. Apartments are listed as Multifamily Housing.
• A 0 or a blank is not a grade. Check the status column. If it says noSubmittal, the building did not report that year.
• Questions go to the city’s benchmarking help center, benchmarking@kcmo.org, 816-513-3462.

It’s all free to look at.

Check us

The browser route above gets you everything in this piece. The commands below re-run the key checks against the city’s live files.

# Every 2022 row whose energy use is exactly zero, counted by status
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/eys4-sd8d.json?\$select=submission_status_7,count(*)&\$where=weather_normalized_site_eui='0'&\$group=submission_status_7"

# The search box finds the building; the suffix Dr does not
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/p92b-cm6v.json?\$select=count(*)&\$q=2%20memorial"
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/p92b-cm6v.json?\$select=count(*)&\$q=2%20Memorial%20Dr"

# The 2024 results behind the city's map, counted by status
curl -s "https://services.arcgis.com/4o5uMWTHuOhUVJPd/arcgis/rest/services/2024_Compliance_Data_UPLOAD/FeatureServer/0/query?where=1%3D1&groupByFieldsForStatistics=Submitted_&outStatistics=%5B%7B%22statisticType%22%3A%22count%22%2C%22onStatisticField%22%3A%22FID%22%2C%22outStatisticFieldName%22%3A%22n%22%7D%5D&f=json"

Sourcing: benchmarking figures are from the City of Kansas City's open-data portal, datasets t3e4-ew5i, eys4-sd8d, p92b-cm6v and 8ygr-6znk, and from the 2024 compliance layer behind the city's ArcGIS dashboard "Kansas City Energy Benchmarking 2025," all pulled by The Kansas City Stare on September 26, 2026, with their published metadata. Status counts are the city's own entries. The ordinance text is Chapter 17 of the Kansas City, Missouri Code of Ordinances as published by Municode, Supplement 139. The city's benchmarking pages are from Internet Archive captures of June and July 2026, because kcmo.gov refuses automated requests. The score scale is from the EPA's ENERGY STAR site. No building owner is named in this piece, and The Stare makes no claim about the energy performance of any particular building.