EPC: what you must display in 2026

The energy performance certificate has become, in a few years, the first thing a buyer looks at after the price. It has also become one of the main sources of error in listings — because it gets copied by hand.

What a listing must show

A sale or rental listing must display both labels — energy and climate — along with the estimated annual energy costs. Since 2022, homes rated F and G must also carry the notice about required works.

These are not regulatory ornaments: their absence or inaccuracy engages the agency's liability, and an incorrect certificate in a listing can be held against you.

The problem is not the rule, it is the copying

A certificate arrives as a PDF. Someone reads the values, retypes them into the software, and off they go to five portals. Every step is a chance to get a letter or a digit wrong.

Every manual copy of a regulated value is another opportunity to expose the agency.

Going to the source

Certificates issued since July 2021 are recorded in a public database kept by the French energy agency, and that database can be queried. From a certificate number or an address you get the labels, the consumption figures and the issue date — exactly as the surveyor filed them.

That is what Hussteer does: instead of asking you to type values in, it reads them from the official source and attaches them to the property.

• Certificates issued before July 2021 are not in that database: they still have to be entered by hand.
• A certificate is valid for ten years, but those issued before the reform had their validity cut short.
• The public record reflects what was filed, not the state of the home after later works.

What it changes day to day

Nothing spectacular, and that is the point. A regulated value that was never retyped is a value that cannot have been mistyped. Across a two-hundred-property portfolio, that is one less legal risk and half a day of checking that no longer needs doing.