2019 Commissioning Giants

The 2019 Commissioning Giants reports the top 25 firms based on whether they chose to be considered in this year’s rankings. The average percentage of commissioning revenue earned by the 2019 Commissioning Giants was approximately 30%, showing that these top 25 firms earn a great deal of their revenue from commissioning, some earning as much as 100% of their revenue solely from commissioning.  

For the 2019 report, the top 25 companies made $551 million in revenue, more than double that of last year. The majority (52%) of firms are consulting–engineering firms with a commissioning division. New to the list this year, in order of ranking, are: 

• Jacobs 
• Facility Dynamics Engineering 
• Tetra Tech’s High Performance Buildings Group (Glumac, NDY, Cosentini) 
• Engineering Economics Inc. 
• Hood Patterson & Dewar 
• SourceOne Inc. 
• AECOM. 

The average commissioning fee per project varied. Forty-four percent of companies earned $100,001 to $300,000, 32% earned $25,001 to $50,000 and 16% earned $50,001 to $100,000. Only 8% earned more than $300,000 per project.  

This data reflects commissioning at all levels: new or existing buildings (46%), retro-commissioning (10%), whole building (9%), emergency power systems (8%), monitoring-based (4%), recommissioning (3%), fire protection systems (3%), building enclosure (envelope, 3%) and communications systems (3%). Of the 25 reporting, 23 firms completed, on average, 239 commissioning projects (at any level) in 2018, up from 179 in last year’s report. 

According to survey respondents, these firms were contracted to complete commissioning for a variety of reasons: mandates (codes, standards, benchmarking: 92%), savings (energy efficiency, lower lifecycle cost: 88%) and sustainability (long-term materials and performance efficiency: 88%.) Other reasons included resiliency (80%) and marketability of the property (52%).  

Commissioning challenges 

The 2019 Commissioning Giants study asked for information related directly to challenges for these firms. The top three current challenges for the 2019 Commissioning Giants are:  

• Staffing: quality of young commissioning professionals: 40%, which is a dramatic increase from 16% last year. 
• Evolving information technologies for design or project management (8%). 
• The economy’s impact on the construction market (8%). 

Future challenges varied. The No. 1 challenge was the “lack of knowledge about commissioning’s worth,” with 48% respondents saying it was a problem (a sharp drop from 80% last year). Not far behind at 44% was “lack of funding or buy-in (from owners, engineers, etc.) to conduct commissioning.” Moving into third place this year at 40%, “not enough commissioning authorities or agents or commissioning professionals” showed up as a problem. This surpassed “codes and standards changing,” which came in at 20% this year, a drop from 28% in the previous report. 

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