Energy audits: do you need OPQIBI qualification 1905 or 1911?

A thermal engineer looking to move into energy audits quickly hits a scoping question: 1905 or 1911? Both qualifications in the OPQIBI nomenclature cover building energy audits, both carry RGE Études recognition, and they address completely different markets. Getting it wrong means assembling a full file only to find it does not cover the assignments people ask you for.

What each qualification covers

1905 covers energy audits of commercial buildings and/or multi-dwelling residential buildings. It is referenced against the requirements of the order of 24 November 2014, as amended by the order of 21 December 2023. This is the qualification for the co-ownership, social-landlord, office-building and local-authority market.

1911 covers energy audits of single-family houses, that is the audit provided for by article L. 126-28-1 of the French construction and housing code — the one required when selling the least energy-efficient dwellings. This is the qualification for private sellers, their notaries and estate agents.

	OPQIBI 1905	OPQIBI 1911
Buildings covered	Commercial and/or multi-dwelling residential	Single-family houses
Reference framework	Requirements of the amended order of 24 November 2014	Article L. 126-28-1 of the construction and housing code
Typical market	Co-ownerships, social landlords, companies, local authorities	Private sellers, notaries, estate agents
RGE Études recognition	Yes	Yes

The two can be held together. This is neither a hierarchy nor a progression: they are two doors, onto two markets.

The regulatory context feeding each market

The volume of work behind each qualification does not depend on you: it depends on regulatory timetables you need to know in order to position yourself at the right moment.

On the 1911 side, the audit before sale. Introduced by the law of 22 August 2021, the regulatory energy audit took effect on 1 April 2023. Its scope widens in stages: dwellings rated F and G since 1 April 2023, dwellings rated E since 1 January 2025, dwellings rated D from 1 January 2034. The obligation covers single-family houses and residential buildings belonging to a single owner — not the sale of an individual unit in a co-ownership.

Two requirements come with the assignment and are worth building into your organisation: the auditor must have no link liable to impair their impartiality and independence from the owner or their agent, and must carry insurance covering the consequences of any liability incurred.

On the 1905 side, the mandatory energy audit for large companies. When outsourced, the provider must hold a qualification issued by an accredited body, under decree no. 2014-1393 and the order of 24 November 2014. Add to that the whole voluntary or subsidised market of co-ownerships and social landlords, largely driven by the eco-conditionality of subsidies.

How to decide

Three questions settle it, in this order.

Who calls you today? If your inbound enquiries come from notaries, estate agents and private sellers, 1911 is your entry door. If they come from managing agents, social landlords, technical departments or public buyers, it is 1905.

Which references can you produce? The review rests on assignments actually delivered, attested by clients, at least one of which is analysed in detail. A qualification your assignments do not demonstrate is one to postpone — or to prepare through a year of targeted work.

What volume can you absorb? The two markets do not share a unit of work. Auditing a single-family house is a short, repetitive assignment; auditing a commercial building or a co-ownership is a long one, with multiple stakeholders. A small organisation targeting both without choosing ends up subcontracting one of them — which reopens the question of the requirements applying to subcontracting.

What research says about the value of an audit

An audit is only worth what it triggers. That is obvious on the ground, and it is also a measured result.

A study published in 2025 in Nature Energy titled “Management practices and manufacturing firm responses to a randomized energy audit” evaluates a scheme in which energy audits were randomly allocated to small and medium-sized metal-processing firms in China’s Shandong province. The intervention cut the firms’ unit cost of electricity by 8% on average, but the authors note strong heterogeneity: organisations with more structured management practices adopt more of the recommendations (see the study).

The message for an auditor is twofold. Audits do produce real effects — this is not an administrative formality. But the value depends as much on the recipient’s ability to act as on the technical quality of the report: an audit whose recommendations are prioritised, costed and matched to the client’s real investment capacity beats an exhaustive but unusable one.

Earlier work by Kenneth Gillingham and Tsvetan Tsvetanov, published in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management under the title “Nudging energy efficiency audits: Evidence from a field experiment”, is a reminder that the obstacle often sits upstream: commissioning the audit at all is already a costly step for the project owner (see the study). Hence the importance of the regulatory lever and of eco-conditionality, which shift that decision.

The timing trap

Training the technical referent is the critical path of any application tied to RGE Études, and it depends on when sessions run. An organisation deciding in September to move into pre-sale audits for the following season must have started training well before — not after noticing that enquiries are pouring in.

Second trap: the framework for RGE qualifications changed with the order of 23 June 2026, part of whose provisions only take effect on 1 March 2027. That is no reason to wait. A qualification obtained under the rules in force opens the same rights, and months of waiting are paid for in unsubsidised assignments. Our article on the order of 23 June 2026 sets out the reading rule to apply.

Going further

The full submission and review journey is described in our article on the OPQIBI qualification file, and the architecture of the recognition in RGE Études: what the recognition changes. If your work also touches regulatory surveys, see our sheet on certification of property surveyors.

Take action

Look at where your last ten inbound enquiries came from: the answer names your priority qualification without ambiguity. Then check that you hold attested references on that exact scope, and launch the technical referent’s training alongside the file. The full scheme sheet, with the steps and frequently asked questions, is here: the OPQIBI qualification.