USGBC Allows Credit-by-Credit Upgrading

When LEED® for New Construction (LEED-NC) version 2.2 was released in November 2005, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) dictated that project teams that had registered projects under previous versions of LEED-NC were free to migrate to the new version, but that such a migration was an all-or-nothing proposition. A project must be submitted using either version 2.0/2.1 or version 2.2 requirements, not a combination. Now the Council has modified that policy.

With certain exceptions, projects that were registered under LEED-NC 2.0/2.1 can now be submitted for certification using version 2.2 credit requirements for individual credits. The exceptions have to do with groups of credits that are interrelated—each of those groups must be either upgraded or retained as a group. The most significant of these groups are: