855773667-LEED-v5-O-M-Reference-Guide-Launch-Edition-1 - Page 018

Extracted Content

REGULAR BUILDING OCCUPANTS

Regular building occupants are routine users of a project (full- and part-time) such as:

• Employees, daily volunteers, support staff (e.g., janitors)

• Residents (e.g., dormitory, apartment, condo), overnight hotel guests, medical inpatients

• K–12 students

VISITORS

Visitors are intermittent users of a project, such as:

• Retail customers

• Medical outpatients

• Volunteers who only periodically use a building (e.g., once per week)

• Higher-education classroom students

DEFAULT OCCUPANCY COUNTS

If the occupancy is unknown and cannot be reasonably projected, use one of the following resources to estimate occupancy:

• Default occupant density from ASHRAE 62.1-2022, Table 6-1 [1]

Table 1. Default occupancy counts based on gross floor area (excluding structured parking)

Col1	Gross square feet per occupant	Col3	Gross square meters per occupant	Col5
	Regular	Visitors	Regular	Visitors
General office	250	0	23	0
Retail, restaurant	435	95	40	9
Retail, grocery store	550	115	51	11
Retail, general	550	130	51	12
Retail, service	600	130	56	12
Medical office	225	330	21	31
R&D or laboratory	400	0	37	0
Warehouse, distribution	2,500	0	232	0
Warehouse, storage	20,000	0	1860	0
Educational, daycare	630	105	59	10

1 “The Standards for Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality,” ASHRAE, accessed March 21, 2025, https://www.ashrae.org/technical- resources/bookstore/standards-62-1-62-2.

U.S. Green Building Council LEED v5 Reference Guide for Operations and Maintenance, April 2025 Launch Edition 8