Research · Verified on 2026-09-05
An open dossier on the digital building logbook — the common repository of a building's data across its life. The European energy performance directive defines it, the Commission study proves the economics, and Portugal's 2030 BIM mandate guarantees that, four years from now, projects are born digital. What remains to be decided is who receives that data and gives it life.
Directive (EU) 2024/1275 — the recast of the EPBD, in force since 28-05-2024 — defines the object and does so in five places: in the definition, in the renovation passport, in data exchange, in the national database and in the energy performance certificate itself.
'Digital building logbook' means a common repository for all relevant data about a building, including data related to energy performance, such as energy performance certificates, renovation passports and indicators of readiness for smart technologies, as well as data related to the life-cycle GWP, which facilitates informed decision-making and the sharing of information within the construction sector and among building owners and occupants, financial institutions and public authorities.
The detail that decides the business: the directive does not require Member States to create logbooks — every reference says "caso exista" (where available). The hard obligations are the renovation passport (scheme to be introduced by 29-05-2026, Article 12) and the national database of certificates (Article 22). The logbook is the optional piece that connects them — and the energy performance certificate now states, yes or no, whether the building has one (Annex V). On 15 July 2026, the Commission opened infringement procedures against all 27 Member States for incomplete transposition — the national decisions that form this market are being taken now (announcement).
In December 2025, the business case study of DG GROW (authors BPIE) quantified the European roll-out. Key findings of the report (PDF):
| Result | Value |
|---|---|
| Cost per logbook (base function, maturity) | ≈ €1,000 in year 1 · €1,160–1,250 steady-state |
| Cost-benefit | positive NPV · BCR > 1 in the base function and in the three modules |
| Renovation + circularity + data access | ≈ 12% of the costs → over 60% of the benefits |
| Sensitivity of the model | dominated by the costs of collecting and verifying data |
| Where the economies of scale appear | large portfolios: public housing and managers of many buildings |
| Value module 3 of 4 | BIM ↔ logbook integration (less building permitting time, models that live longer) |
The study is explicit about the viable minimum: a unique building identifier, administrative and certificate data, renovation recommendations and, whenever possible, a materials inventory and maintenance information. And about the bottleneck: whoever collects and verifies the data — technical work, not software.
About 31 active initiatives, 19 already operational (study). Three public models prove the concept; the private ones live off data collection.
| Model | What it is | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| France — Carnet d'information du logement | Mandatory by law at national level: plans, materials, systems, certificates, renovation history. | The mandate creates the market from the ground up. |
| Flanders — Woningpas | Free public repository of the Flemish government, fed by API by five agencies. | When the state is the platform, the private sector lives on top of it. |
| Estonia — e-ehitus | State e-construction ecosystem: a central data hub across the life cycle. | End-to-end administrative integration. |
| Austria — Vienna | Logbook required within building permitting itself. | The regulatory door that is possible. |
| Germany/Sweden — CAPSA | Private platform: collection by app on site visits, matching by AI, a decarbonisation roadmap. | The private side wins at collection, not at archiving. |
Transposition advances in two phases — and the country has a second engine nobody else has at this speed: the BIM mandate.
The first phase is out (Decreto-Lei n.º 11/2025 (Decree-Law) — only the funding of fossil boilers); the second phase — passports, database, logbook — was still not published as of 4 September 2026: the legislation list of the certification system contains no 2026 act whatsoever. Meanwhile, in June 2026 the Government announced the creation of a Digital Building Logbook under the new condominium regime (news item) — announced on 19 June by the Secretary of State for Housing as "an aggregator of the building's useful life" (condominium by-laws, occupancy licence, maintenance, seismic vulnerability, accessibility), with no timetable. And the Plataforma Eletrónica dos Procedimentos Urbanísticos (PEPU), where the digital works log will live, still had no public face on 05-09-2026: the law set it 05-01-2026, the sector asked "where is it?" in January and DL n.º 108/2026 ended up revoking the deadline (analysis).
The second engine is BIM: Article 17 of Decreto-Lei n.º 10/2024 provides that, from 1 January 2030, architecture projects under the urbanisation and building regime — public and private — come BIM-modelled. DL n.º 108/2026 (29 May) removed the 2027 pilot project and now requires that public works contracts above the threshold of the Public Contracts Code (€5,404,000) be, "wherever possible", modelled in BIM; the requirements for the files are left to a ministerial order. The national strategy PortugalBIM (RCM n.º 89/2026, PDF) sets the targets: 3,000 professionals trained, 50 municipalities a year. The action plan of IMPIC is already overdue — the full detail is in the PortugalBIM scorecard.
From 2030, all architecture projects are born parametric and delivered in digital submission. These models have to live somewhere across the building's next thirty years — and the directive says where: the logbook, which receives the renovation passport, the data of the technical systems and the materials inventory. The vault of PDFs sold today as a "logbook" does not receive a BIM model; it was not made for that.
Four years from now, the question stops being "do you have a folder with the building's documents?" and becomes "who looks after my building's information?". The answer will be given by whoever already lives on both sides: those who make the models and those who know how to read them.
Two legislative tracks — European and Portuguese — converging on the same object.
The recast EPBD defines the digital building logbook and refers to it in five places.
DL n.º 11/2025 — only the end of funding for standalone fossil-fuel boilers.
BCR > 1; the benefits concentrate in the data modules, not in the archive.
The digital works log moves to the platform; the platform did not start in any visible way and DL n.º 108/2026 revoked the deadline.
RCM n.º 89/2026 (PortugalBIM) and DL n.º 108/2026 (end of the 2027 pilot, large works contracts in BIM "wherever possible"); the Commission opens infringement for missing transposition.
Announced on 19 June by the Secretary of State for Housing: condominium by-laws, occupancy licence, maintenance, seismic vulnerability, accessibility — with no timetable.
DL n.º 108/2026 leaves the requirements for the files and for procurement in BIM to a ministerial order.
Renovation passport, national database — and the decision on the logbook: public platform or private conformance.
Architecture projects under Portugal's building permitting code (RJUE) arrive in BIM. The logbook no longer has to ask for the data: they are born with the building.
Public contracts are open data: the Portal BASE publishes everything, year by year, on dados.gov.pt. We analysed the works contracts (CPV 45) from 2012 to 2026 — 50,176 contracts — and the map speaks for itself:
| Contracting authority | Works contracts | Contracted value |
|---|---|---|
| Águas do Norte, S.A. | 1,007 | €76.1M |
| Municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia | 704 | €101.9M |
| DomusSocial — Porto municipal housing | 586 | €17.0M |
| Municipality of Lisbon | 570 | €164.5M |
| Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana, I.P. | 483 | €2.7M |
It is the portrait of the logbook market in Portugal: municipal public housing with hundreds of small, recurring interventions a year — exactly the large-portfolio profile where the European study measures economies of scale. Each of these contracts is one line in the history of a building that nobody can read as a whole today. The same analysis, by speciality and by municipality, is in the Quem Ganha o Que.
An open research dossier, with all the sources at the end of the page.
1 — The legal and economic map. The directive read in full (in the PT and EN versions), the Commission studies of 2021 and 2025 in full, and the Portuguese chronology day by day — from the 2024 orders to the June 2026 announcement.
2 — Literature. 156 academic works collected by API (OpenAlex), 70% from the last three years. The consensus of the literature: the bottleneck is semantic interoperability and populating the logbooks from scattered sources — software is not what is missing.
3 — The data side. The "who commissions construction" view over the open data of Portal BASE, and the same question from the side of whoever wins the works. When the ministerial order of Article 17 sets the requirements, the list updates itself.
4 — Weekly watch. The three pending announcements — the action plan of IMPIC, the ministerial order of Article 17 and the second phase of the transposition — are checked weekly on the official sites. This page updates when one of them comes out.