LEED v5’s Project Priorities
Green Building Team on June 11, 2025
- Rating System/Standard
- LEED v5
- Theme
- Certification essentials
Under LEED v5, the historical Innovation credit category has evolved to become the Project Priorities (PR) credit category, merging the six points from Innovation with the four Regional Priority points. The goal is greater flexibility for projects to address their unique context including typology, culture, location, areas of innovation and individual performance objectives.
Like the previous LEED v4 Innovation credit, project teams will find unique innovation strategies and new pilot ideas for innovation. Additionally, the category lists pilot Alternative Compliance Path (ACPs) to other credits, also similar to LEED v4.
However, the library now also clearly lays out:
- Available Exemplary Performance options for exceeding the top threshold within certain established credits;
- All regional ACPs to other credits; and,
- Project Type credits that address the unique needs of a given adaptation or building application. This is where users will find unique credits for Healthcare projects, for example.
At the present time, there are limited credits in the Project Priority Library, which will be built out over time. For example, only one Canadian regional ACP, to address Prime Farmland, has currently been posted, but CAGBC committees are reviewing the released versions of LEED v5 to determine where other Canadian ACPs are needed.
Two new pilot ACPs are partially courtesy of a request from CAGBC’s LEED v5 Accelerators. Our CAGBC committee members suggested paths for Bike Score® and Transit Score®, similar to Walk Score® have the potential to streamline documentation for Canadian project teams for the related Location and Transportation credits, under LEED v5 BD+C, ID+C, and O+M (Bike Score only). We look forward to seeing Canadian project teams try these alternative pathways.
The Project Priority Library allows for LEED to address new concepts, providing an adaptive and agile response to rapidly evolving industry knowledge, developing technologies and emerging innovative solutions.