About €280 for a typical house
SEAI publish what people actually paid: €245 to €280 depending on the size of the home, from an apartment up to a detached house.
That is the middle price paid inside SEAI's grant schemes last year, so treat it as a good benchmark rather than as a quote. On the open market, for a sale or a letting, published prices run from about €150 for a small apartment to €300 for a family home, and more for something large or unusual.
SEAI median costs, Jan–Jun 2026, from 23,412 grant-aided upgrades: apartment €245, mid-terrace €275, semi-detached or end of terrace €280, detached €280. These are post-works assessments inside grant schemes, not open-market sale or letting assessments.
Nobody sets the price but the assessor
SEAI do not set fees and assessors are not SEAI employees. SEAI's own advice is to get three quotes and confirm every fee in writing before you book. Price mostly follows the number of rooms and how long the visit takes.
Roughly €30 of whatever you are quoted is not the assessor's: it is SEAI's levy for publishing the certificate, and it carries no VAT. Ask whether the quote includes it, because some do and some do not.
When you need one
By law, for selling or renting, including a new home that has never been lived in. The rating has to appear in the advertisement too. A few buildings are exempt — protected structures, national monuments, places of worship, and stand-alone buildings under 50 square metres.
For a grant, you need one done after the work, published, before SEAI pay. There is €50 back toward it on your first grant application, and €280 for homeowners on a qualifying welfare payment.
A certificate lasts ten years — unless you change something that changes the home's energy use, like an extension or a new heating system. Then the old one no longer describes the house. How long a BER lasts, in the law's words, and how to find a home's BER.
Getting one
Find an assessor on SEAI's public register, which is searchable by county. Book the visit; it usually takes half an hour to an hour depending on the size of the house. The assessor measures rooms and windows, and records the year built, extensions, insulation in the walls, roof and floor, the heating and hot water, the ventilation, the lighting and any solar. They go into the attic and the garage.
The result describes the building, not your life in it. How warm you keep the house and how many people live there do not come into it.
The one thing that changes your result
Bring the paperwork. Where you cannot show what was done, the assessor has to use cautious default values, and those defaults assume the worst. SEAI say so directly: missing documentation may leave your home with a lower rating than you expected.
Dig out anything you have: insulation invoices, the specification for the windows, the boiler or heat pump manual, the solar panel commissioning certificate, an attic top-up receipt, drawings for an extension. An hour in the filing cabinet is worth more than anything else you can do on the day.
The scale changed in May 2026
SEAI simplified the rating scale on 24 May 2026, from fifteen grades to eight: A0, A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Sub-grades like B1, B2 and B3 are gone. A0 is a new top grade for very efficient homes that use no fossil fuel. The new BER scale sets every old grade against its new letter.
New certificates also show how much energy the home uses, how much of it is renewable, its lifetime carbon, and a QR code linking to advice.
Nothing you already hold is affected. Existing certificates stay valid for ten years from the day they were issued, and are still accepted for selling, renting and for grants.
For grants, SEAI say the whole-house target that used to be written as B2 is now written as B, and that the amount of improvement required has not changed — only the label. Expect to see "B2" on plenty of pages, SEAI's own included, for a while yet.
A rating is not an inspection. It does not tell you the boiler is safe, the roof is sound or the wiring is legal. It is an energy calculation, and it is only as good as what the assessor was shown.