Commercial Building Water Use: 58,818 Buildings Measured by Type

What this page is. Measured water use intensity for 44 commercial and residential building types, calculated from New York City’s Local Law 84 energy and water disclosure filings. It covers 58,818 building-years with reported water data, 292.5 billion gallons and 7.22 billion square feet of floor area. The only comparable national dataset, the federal Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, last collected water in 2012, so this is the largest current building-level water dataset available publicly.

Why you can trust the conversion. Non-refrigerated warehouses in this dataset have a median intensity of 3.2 gallons per square foot per year. The 2012 federal CBECS figure for warehouses is 3.4. The two were produced independently, a decade apart, by different methods, and they agree within 6 percent. That agreement is the validation check for the unit conversion used throughout this page.

What we measured and found

• The median building in the dataset uses 41.5 gallons of water per square foot per year. The mean is 53.4.
• Water intensity varies by a factor of about 148 across building types, from 88.9 gallons per square foot for lodging and residential care down to 0.6 for self-storage.
• Residential care facilities (87.2) and senior living communities (68.4) use more water per square foot than general hospitals (38.3).
• Hotels use 64.9 gallons per square foot, more than five times the 12.2 used by offices.
• Data centers record 64.2 gallons per square foot, placing them just below hotels and above general hospitals.
• Multifamily housing, the largest category at 40,800 building-years, has a median of 52.2 gallons per square foot.
• Warehouses (3.2), distribution centers (3.0), parking (1.8) and self-storage (0.6) sit at the bottom.
• Median is consistently below mean across nearly every building type, meaning a minority of high-consumption buildings pulls the average up in each category.

What each building type uses

All figures are gallons per square foot per year. Only building types with at least 30 reporting building-years are shown. Median is the more reliable measure here because every category contains high-consumption outliers.

Rank	Building type	Building-years	Median gal/sq ft	Mean gal/sq ft
1	Other – Lodging/Residential	207	88.9	98.3
2	Residential Care Facility	235	87.2	92.6
3	Senior Living Community	360	68.4	76.3
4	Hotel	1,397	64.9	77.6
5	Data Center	176	64.2	78.9
6	Multifamily Housing	40,800	52.2	64.4
7	Other – Specialty Hospital	31	50.8	58.5
8	Laboratory	56	50.4	66.9
9	Residence Hall/Dormitory	404	42.1	47.9
10	Hospital (General Medical & Surgical)	140	38.3	50.7
11	Supermarket/Grocery Store	180	35.7	47.9
12	Strip Mall	149	33.7	42.7
13	Movie Theater	49	30.2	38.3
14	Fitness Center/Health Club/Gym	161	29.1	54.5
15	Fire Station	55	26.5	26.8
16	Police Station	87	23.0	27.6
17	Mixed Use Property	483	21.1	34.2
18	Medical Office	221	20.7	30.0
19	Other	65	20.6	27.8
20	Performing Arts	154	19.8	26.0
21	Social/Meeting Hall	47	18.5	36.1
22	Museum	76	16.7	31.1
23	Enclosed Mall	42	14.8	22.1
24	Other – Entertainment/Public Assembly	45	14.2	23.7
25	Urgent Care/Clinic/Other Outpatient	83	13.8	36.1
26	Pre-school/Daycare	275	13.7	22.8
27	Financial Office	79	12.7	15.9
28	Office	4,536	12.2	20.4
29	College/University	392	12.1	18.7
30	Courthouse	42	10.1	12.5
31	Retail Store	537	10.0	20.6
32	Worship Facility	346	8.9	20.4
33	K-12 School	3,096	8.2	14.0
34	Repair Services (Vehicle, Shoe, Locksmith, etc.)	67	7.4	17.1
35	Library	157	7.4	12.3
36	Vehicle Repair Services	128	7.0	15.1
37	Manufacturing/Industrial Plant	698	5.8	15.1
38	Refrigerated Warehouse	81	5.1	9.2
39	Wholesale Club/Supercenter	41	5.0	10.8
40	Vehicle Dealership	30	4.9	6.6
41	Non-Refrigerated Warehouse	864	3.2	6.6
42	Distribution Center	359	3.0	6.5
43	Parking	288	1.8	15.9
44	Self-Storage Facility	689	0.6	3.3

Source: New York City Local Law 84 energy and water disclosure filings, published through NYC Open Data. Intensity calculated by The Plumbing Brief as reported water use divided by calculated gross floor area.

Measured values, sourced

1. Median intensity across all buildings: 41.5 gallons per square foot per year. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 disclosure data.
2. Dataset size: 58,818 building-years with usable water and floor area data, from 103,259 total filings. Source: NYC Open Data.
3. Total reported water: 292.5 billion gallons across 7.22 billion square feet. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
4. Highest intensity type: Other lodging and residential, 88.9. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
5. Residential care facilities: 87.2. Senior living communities: 68.4. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
6. Hotels: 64.9. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
7. Data centers: 64.2, from 176 building-years. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
8. Multifamily housing: 52.2, from 40,800 building-years, the largest category. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
9. General hospitals: 38.3, from 140 building-years. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
10. Offices: 12.2, from 4,536 building-years. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
11. Non-refrigerated warehouses: 3.2, against the 2012 federal CBECS figure of 3.4. Sources: NYC Local Law 84 data; US EIA CBECS, 2012.
12. Self-storage facilities: 0.6, the lowest of 44 types. Source: calculated from NYC Local Law 84 data.
13. CBECS last collected commercial water data in 2012, and did not repeat it in 2018. Source: US EIA.
14. Residential indoor water use for comparison: 38.5 gallons per capita per day. Source: Water Research Foundation, Residential End Uses of Water, Version 3, 2026.

Derived measures

Derived finding 1: care settings outrank hospitals

Formula. Median gallons per square foot per year, compared across healthcare-adjacent building types.

Finding. Residential care facilities use 87.2 gallons per square foot and senior living communities 68.4, against 38.3 for general medical and surgical hospitals. Care settings where people live use roughly twice the water per square foot of hospitals where people are treated.

Inputs. NYC Local Law 84 disclosure data.

Limitations. Hospitals have large non-occupied floor areas such as imaging suites and plant rooms that dilute intensity per square foot. This finding compares intensity, not total consumption, and the hospital sample is 140 building-years against 235 for residential care.

Derived finding 2: the 148-fold spread

Formula. Highest median building type divided by lowest.

Calculation. 88.9 divided by 0.6 equals approximately 148.

Finding. Water intensity varies about 148 times between the most and least water-intensive building types. Occupancy, not floor area, is the dominant driver. Buildings where people sleep sit at the top of the table and buildings where goods sit still occupy the bottom.

Inputs. NYC Local Law 84 disclosure data.

Limitations. The lowest categories have small absolute values where reporting error has a proportionally larger effect. The ratio is a description of the range, not a precision measurement.

Derived finding 3: the CBECS cross-validation

Formula. Compare this dataset’s warehouse median against the independent federal CBECS warehouse figure.

Calculation. 3.2 gallons per square foot here against 3.4 in CBECS 2012, a difference of about 6 percent.

Finding. Two independently produced datasets, a decade apart, agree closely on the least ambiguous building type. This supports the unit conversion applied across all 44 types on this page.

Inputs. NYC Local Law 84 disclosure data; US EIA CBECS 2012.

Limitations. Agreement on one building type does not validate every category. Warehouses were chosen for the check because their water use is simple and unlikely to have changed materially since 2012. Types with complex process water, such as laboratories and data centers, may have diverged more.

Derived finding 4: medians run below means everywhere

Formula. Compare median against mean within each building type.

Finding. Mean exceeds median in nearly every category, often substantially. Fitness centers show a median of 29.1 against a mean of 54.5, and parking shows 1.8 against 15.9. A minority of high-consumption buildings raises the average in each category.

Inputs. NYC Local Law 84 disclosure data.

Limitations. Some of the gap is genuine variation and some is reporting error in a self-reported dataset. Anyone citing a single figure for a building type should cite the median and say so.

How this report was built

Methodology

Source. All 103,259 filings were retrieved from the NYC Open Data API for the Local Law 84 disclosure dataset covering calendar year reporting.

Cleaning rules, stated in full. A filing was included only where reported water use was greater than zero, gross floor area was at least 1,000 square feet, and a primary property type was present. Calculated intensities above 500 gallons per square foot per year were excluded as implausible. That left 58,818 building-years of 103,259. Building types with fewer than 30 reporting building-years are not shown.

Unit conversion. Reported water use is in thousands of gallons and was multiplied by 1,000. The conversion was validated against CBECS as described in derived finding 3. Anyone comparing commercial figures against household consumption can check residential water use statistics for the home-side benchmarks.

Statistic used. Median is the headline figure for every building type. Mean is published alongside it so readers can see the skew.

What this page does not claim. It does not claim to be nationally representative. See limitations.

Last updated. 25 September 2026.

Data limitations

• This is New York City data. It is not a national sample. Climate, building age, density and water pricing all differ elsewhere, and intensity figures should not be presented as US averages.
• Local Law 84 covers larger buildings subject to the disclosure threshold. Small commercial buildings are absent.
• Filings are self-reported by building owners. The dataset includes its own data-quality alert fields, and some filings carry estimated rather than metered values.
• A building appearing in multiple reporting years is counted once per year, so the unit is building-years rather than distinct buildings.
• Intensity per square foot is sensitive to how floor area is recorded and to how much of a building is occupied.
• Categories with small samples, including specialty hospitals at 31 and vehicle dealerships at 30, are reported because they cleared the threshold but should be cited with the sample size attached.
• The CBECS comparison figure is from 2012 and is the most recent federal commercial water collection. It is a decade older than this data.

Source quality ranking

Tier 1. New York City Local Law 84 disclosure filings via NYC Open Data, a municipal regulatory dataset. US EIA Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey, 2012.

Tier 2. Water Research Foundation, Residential End Uses of Water, Version 3, for residential comparison.

Tier 3. None used.

Excluded. Vendor benchmarking claims and any building water figure without a stated denominator.

Headline measurements

• Water use per square foot varies 148-fold between building types, from lodging at 88.9 gallons to self-storage at 0.6.
• Residential care facilities use more than twice the water per square foot that general hospitals do.
• Hotels use five times as much water per square foot as offices.
• Data centers record 64.2 gallons per square foot, above general hospitals.
• The median large building uses 41.5 gallons of water per square foot per year.

Briefing note

Water use in large buildings varies by a factor of about 148 depending on building type, according to an analysis of 58,818 building-years of New York City Local Law 84 disclosure filings covering 292.5 billion gallons and 7.22 billion square feet. Buildings where people sleep dominate the top of the table. Other lodging and residential properties record a median of 88.9 gallons per square foot per year, residential care facilities 87.2, senior living communities 68.4 and hotels 64.9, against 38.3 for general medical and surgical hospitals and 12.2 for offices. Data centers record 64.2. Warehouses, distribution centers, parking and self-storage occupy the bottom, from 3.2 down to 0.6. The warehouse figure of 3.2 agrees within 6 percent with the 3.4 reported by the federal Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey in 2012, which remains the most recent federal collection of commercial water data.

Story angles

1. Water use per square foot varies 148-fold between building types
2. Care homes use twice the water per square foot that hospitals do
3. Data centres use more water per square foot than hospitals
4. Hotels use five times the water of offices, per square foot
5. The federal government stopped measuring commercial water use in 2012

Download the data

Every figure in the table above is published as a CSV under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Attribution: The Plumbing Brief.

All 44 building types with sample size, median and mean (CSV)

Questions about the measurements

How much water does a commercial building use per square foot? The median across 58,818 building-years is 41.5 gallons per square foot per year, but the figure depends heavily on type, ranging from 88.9 for lodging to 0.6 for self-storage.

Which buildings use the most water per square foot? Lodging and residential care at 88.9 and 87.2, followed by senior living at 68.4, hotels at 64.9 and data centers at 64.2.

Which use the least? Self-storage at 0.6, parking at 1.8, distribution centers at 3.0 and warehouses at 3.2.

Do hospitals use a lot of water? Less per square foot than care homes. General hospitals record 38.3 against 87.2 for residential care facilities, partly because hospitals contain large unoccupied technical floor areas.

How much water do data centers use? In this dataset, a median of 64.2 gallons per square foot per year across 176 building-years, higher than general hospitals. This is New York City data and cooling practice varies by climate and facility design.

How much water does an office building use? A median of 12.2 gallons per square foot per year, about one fifth of a hotel.

Is there national data on commercial building water use? The federal CBECS collected commercial water data in 2007 and 2012 but not since, so there is no current national dataset. That is why this analysis uses municipal disclosure filings.

How reliable are these figures? They are self-reported regulatory filings. The warehouse median of 3.2 agrees within 6 percent with the independent federal CBECS figure of 3.4, which supports the method, but the dataset carries its own quality-alert fields and some values are estimated.

Can these figures be applied outside New York? Not directly. Climate, building age, density and water pricing all differ. Use them as relative comparisons between building types rather than absolute national benchmarks.

Why is the mean always higher than the median? Because a minority of high-consumption buildings pulls the average up in nearly every category. Fitness centers show a median of 29.1 against a mean of 54.5. Cite the median.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-25.

How to cite this report

The Plumbing Brief, “Commercial Building Water Use: 58,818 Buildings Measured by Type”, https://theplumbingbrief.com/commercial-building-water-use/, accessed [date].