Glossary

Fitwel Certification

A building certification system, originally developed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now administered by the Center for Active Design, that scores a property from 1 to 3 stars based on design and operational features shown to support occupant health outcomes.

Fitwel evaluates a building across factors such as indoor air quality, access to healthy food, walkability, stair accessibility, and emergency preparedness, producing a scorecard that is generally faster and less costly to obtain than WELL certification, which makes it attractive for large multifamily and office portfolios pursuing health-focused positioning across many assets at once. Where LEED and ENERGY STAR emphasize environmental and energy performance, Fitwel sits alongside WELL in the health-and-wellbeing certification tier, and the two are sometimes pursued together since they assess overlapping but not identical criteria — WELL relies more heavily on physical performance testing (air and water quality sampling, for example), while Fitwel is largely a documentation- and design-feature-based scorecard. Institutional owners increasingly cite Fitwel scores in tenant marketing materials and ESG reporting as a lower-cost complement to LEED, particularly for value-add repositioning projects where a full WELL certification budget is not justified.