If your building just missed a benchmarking deadline, here is the short version: in Los Angeles, New York, and with the California Energy Commission, the compliance path stays open, filing late is exactly what the agencies tell you to do, and the sooner you file, the sooner the penalties stop. What follows is what actually happens in each city, quoted from the ordinances and agency FAQs rather than from vendor marketing, because the most repeated numbers online are wrong. We file these reports for owners in these cities, and the mechanics below are the ones we deal with every season.
Los Angeles: the $202 that quietly becomes $707
Start with the number everyone gets wrong. Compliance sites routinely describe LA's EBEWE penalty as "$202 per day." It is not. The EBEWE ordinance (LAMC Division 97) sets a flat $202 noncompliance fee per building, and the escalation that follows comes from the city's general fee machinery in LAMC Sec. 98.0411. LADBS's own invoice language, quoted in its April 2026 A/RCx FAQ, lays out the timeline: if the invoice is not paid within 30 days, "an additional 250% late charge/collection fee will be imposed and assignment to a collection agency may be made. After 60 days of no payment, interest will accrue at the rate of 12% annually (compounded monthly or portion of a month)."
| Moment | Amount | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Deadline missed (June 1) | $0 | LADBS issues an order to comply; the fee applies if you do not comply within the order window |
| Invoice issued | $202 | Flat noncompliance fee per building, set by the EBEWE ordinance |
| 30 days unpaid | ~$707 | A late charge equal to two times the fee plus a 50% collection fee land on top of the original $202; collection-agency referral becomes possible |
| 60 days unpaid | +12%/yr | Interest accrues at 1% per month, or fraction of a month, on the entire balance until paid |
| Any time unpaid | Permits | LADBS may withhold building permits, licenses, and approvals until the fee is paid |
Paying the fine does not fix anything
This is the part owners miss, and LADBS states it in writing: "payment of the non-compliance fee does not result in Compliance. The building will remain out of compliance with the City of Los Angeles and, as with any Los Angeles Municipal Code violation, will be subject to further legal action." Your building's status, Complied or Not Complied, is posted on a public lookup anyone can search, and LADBS notes it may in the future be recorded on the property as an open violation. Lenders and buyers can check it today.
How you actually cure it in LA
There is exactly one way to clear a Not Complied status, and it is the same path you would have taken before the deadline: register the building with LADBS, pay the year's registration fee, and submit the benchmarking report through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager. All three must be done; LADBS's FAQ is explicit that an ESPM email receipt alone "does not confirm compliance with the City's requirements." After a valid submission, your LADBS compliance status updates in 5 to 10 business days. No FAQ sets a date after which LADBS stops accepting a late report, so the door stays open, but every month it stays unfiled is another month of the fee stack above.
If your building is on the audit-and-retro-commissioning clock instead (LADBS Building IDs ending in 0 or 1 are due December 1, 2026; IDs ending in 2 or 3 follow on December 1, 2027), the same logic holds: the door stays open, but exemption requests filed 30 or more days late draw extra review, and anything submitted after the due date is recorded as late compliance. What that filing involves is covered in our guide to what a commercial energy audit costs.
LA also has real extension and waiver machinery
EBEWE is unusual among these laws: the ordinance itself lists eight conditions under which LADBS may grant a time extension, and for five of them it may also waive the fee entirely, even retroactively. The five fee-waivable conditions are utility data delays, a city notification error, conflicting information from the city, an ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager outage, and buying the building fewer than 90 days before the deadline. The other three (documented financial distress, buildings in the REAP program, and substantial hardship) can buy time but carry a $141.70 filing fee and demanding proof. Two mechanics matter: requests are not accepted more than six months before your due date, and the utility-delay waiver only protects owners who requested their data at least eight weeks before the deadline and answered the utility's follow-ups. If you are heading into a deadline still waiting on data, our utility-data guide covers how to get that request on the record in time.
New York: the meter runs quarterly, and one law hides behind another
NYC's LL84 benchmarking penalty is refreshingly mechanical. Miss May 1 and DOB may issue a $500 violation, repeated each quarter until you file, capped at $2,000 per year. The city publishes the catch-up dates: August 1, November 1, and February 1. File by the next one and the meter stops; a building that misses May 1 but files by August 1 is out one violation, not four. Resolution means paying the violation in DOB NOW and submitting the report, and owners have 30 days from the violation's postmark to challenge it, with proof of timely filing being a date-stamped ESPM confirmation email. Keep those.
Two traps sit next to that tidy system. First, the audit law: LL87 late filers owe $3,000 the first year and $5,000 for each additional year, and DOB "will not accept any outstanding EER submission if outstanding penalties are not paid in full." That inverts LA's logic: in New York you pay your way back to the filing window. Second, the numbers people quote each other: the $0.50 per square foot per month figure that circulates in benchmarking conversations is not an LL84 penalty at all. It is Local Law 97's penalty for failing to file the annual emissions report, a separate obligation on most buildings over 25,000 sq ft with its own much larger stakes. A 100,000 sq ft building that ignores both laws is accruing $500 a quarter on one and $50,000 a month in exposure on the other. Which laws apply to your building is a square-footage question, and our threshold guide answers it city by city.
California and San Francisco: the forgiving one and the strict one
The California Energy Commission runs the statewide AB 802 program with a June 1 deadline and publishes no penalty dollar amount at all. Its FAQ says it "has the authority to issue fines for noncompliance, after allowing a 30-day period to correct a violation," and in the same breath urges late owners to "report as soon as possible." Two 2026 notes: buildings in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties received an automatic one-year state extension after the January 2025 wildfires, so both 2024 and 2025 data came due June 1, 2026, with no action required to claim it. And per LADBS's February 2026 notice, the state no longer takes direct reports from buildings covered by a local ordinance like EBEWE; you comply with the state by filing with your city. One caution from the CEC itself: it charges no filing fee, and letters demanding payment to fix a "delinquency" are not from the CEC, whose notices come only from its Sacramento address.
San Francisco is the outlier. Its benchmarking FAQ is blunt: extensions do not exist. "Each building has either complied, not complied, or qualified for an exemption." Compliance status is a matter of public record on DataSF, and only the defined exemptions, new ownership without data access, tenant turnover, vacancy, and a few others, take a building off the hook. One SF report does double duty, satisfying both the city ordinance and AB 802; a report sent only to the CEC satisfies neither.
What to do this week
Missed deadlines age badly in every one of these systems, so the sequence is the same regardless of city: pull your compliance status from the public lookup (LADBS's EBEWE pages for LA, DOB NOW for NYC, DataSF for San Francisco), get the utility data request moving if that is the blocker, file the report even though it is late, and only then deal with the fee, contesting it if one of the enumerated conditions fits, paying it if not. If the deadline you missed is one of several on your calendar this cycle, the 2026-2027 deadline calendar shows what is still ahead, and our benchmarking team handles the register-request-file sequence, including the late version of it, every season.