While not as effective as a mandatory tiered approach, Community Improvement Incentives offer municipalities a framework to induce higher levels of building performance. This framework uses incentives, combined with a series of progressive building performance targets. Incentives can include grants, loans, refunds, fee exemptions, tax increment rebates, density bonusing, financing or other incentives to assist project proponents, subject to available funding.

Incentives are often used by communities to pull developers towards higher levels of building energy performance. Incentives can also be aligned with the tiers of the proposed 2020 NECB/NBC (see Table 1). The key to encouraging high levels of uptake using incentives is ensuring that those incentives are proportionate to the incremental costs of exceeding the minimum standard for building energy performance.