#title 24

California's 2025 Title 24 is in effect as of January 1, 2026.

The big changes:

Heat pumps are the prescriptive baseline for space AND water heating in most new residential construction. Gas is still allowed through the performance pathway, but the trade-offs usually make gas the more expensive route in practice.

Commercial buildings have to replace end-of-life rooftop units with heat pumps in most retail, school, and office applications. That's a massive retrofit pipeline.

Commercial kitchens and multifamily buildings need electric-ready provisions — stubbed conduit, panel capacity for future equipment swaps.

CEC estimates $4.8B in statewide energy savings. Plan reviewers in LA, SF, and San Diego are already flagging non-compliant applications.

CEC: three JA18-certified control libraries on record, no compliance trends yet.

California Energy Commission staff told ServiceMag last week that three control libraries are currently certified under Title 24’s JA18 mandate, three months into the 2025 code cycle. The agency says it does not have enough data yet to characterize trends in certified-library use versus custom sequences, and has not received documented issues or recurring compliance challenges.

The clearest fact from the response: JA18 requirements apply to manufacturers, not contractors. Contractors install a JA18-certified library and file the compliance form against a version listed in CEC’s directory. The certification work itself sits with the vendor.

CEC also declined to give a standard certification timeframe — clean submittals move, sloppy ones wait through multiple rounds of clarification.

This is a follow-up to our earlier piece on Carrier’s December 19 i-Vu library submittal.

Roofing in California, are you ready?

Cool Roofs

We in California are very familiar with title 24 regarding Cool Roofs. For the past few years, we understand our choices of roofing materials are limited to the shingles now commonly called Cool Roof shingles. Both residential and commercial roofs, in certain climate zones in California must comply with the state Cool Roof requirement. What that basically means is we need to use highly…