Most building committees treat the day the capital campaign closes as the day the money question gets answered, and it is not. The campaign pays for the building once. The church’s operating budget pays for it every month after that, for as long as the congregation owns it, and church building operating costs are the part of the financial picture that almost nobody models before the vote. When we ask a committee what the new building will cost to run, the answer we hear most often is the current utility bill scaled up by feel. That guess is where the trouble starts, because the new building is not the old one with more square feet added. It runs more hours, carries more equipment, and wears out on a schedule that no one has budgeted for yet.

Church building operating costs start from the wrong baseline

The building a congregation is leaving tends to be small, old, and quietly subsidized by its own history. Its mechanical systems were paid for decades ago. Its roof may be past due, but the replacement has not happened yet, so the cost has never appeared in a budget. Its rooms are often underused because they are uncomfortable, which keeps the lights and the air handlers off. When a committee looks at what that building costs today, it is looking at a number that leaves out the replacement cycle entirely and reflects a building people avoid using. Neither condition will carry over to the new one.

The new building also adds systems the old one never had. A larger assembly building usually brings a fire sprinkler system with required periodic inspection, a monitored fire alarm, possibly an elevator with its own inspection and service contract, commercial kitchen equipment, a broadcast and sound system that needs support, access control, and a parking lot that needs sealing, striping, and eventually repaving. None of these show up in a construction estimate as an annual cost, because a construction estimate is a one-time number by definition. Each one is a line in someone’s operating budget for the next forty years. The committee that compares the new building to the old one is comparing a fully equipped facility to a partly equipped one and wondering why the numbers do not scale.

What energy costs a church per square foot

Energy is the easiest of these costs to estimate, because the federal government measures it. The Energy Information Administration’s Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey for 2018 counted about 439,000 religious worship buildings averaging 12,500 square feet. Its consumption and expenditures table, which EIA published in 2022, puts their combined spending on electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and district energy at about $3.9 billion for the year across roughly 5.5 billion square feet. That works out to about 72 cents per square foot, or roughly $9,000 for the average building, in 2018 dollars. EIA’s profile of the same buildings shows that space heating was the largest single end use, at 45 percent of their energy consumption.

Prices have not held still since then. EIA’s annual price table shows the average price of electricity to commercial customers rising from 10.67 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2018 to 13.37 cents in 2025, an increase of about a quarter. Consider an illustrative church moving from 12,000 square feet to 30,000. At the 2018 national average, the additional 18,000 square feet adds about $13,000 a year in energy, and adjusted roughly for the rise in electricity prices, something closer to $16,000. That figure is a national average and should be treated as one. A building with a weekday preschool, staff offices, and evening programs every night of the week will spend more, while a building that sits mostly empty from Monday to Saturday will spend less, and gas prices in your region may have moved differently than electricity.

The useful thing about energy is that design changes it directly. A sanctuary on its own heating and cooling zone does not have to be conditioned for a Wednesday night class of twenty people. Controls that a volunteer can actually understand and reset are the difference between a schedule that matches the calendar and a building that runs all week because no one knows how to change it, a point we made at more length when we wrote about buildings your volunteers can run. Insulation, glazing, and equipment efficiency all cost money on bid day and pay it back over time. The size of the payback depends heavily on how many hours the building is used, which is exactly why the operating model needs to exist before those decisions are made rather than after.

Maintenance is the line that is usually missing

The first few years in a new building are cheap to maintain, and that teaches exactly the wrong lesson. The roof is under warranty, the equipment is new, the carpet is clean, and the paint is fresh. A church that sets its facilities budget based on those first years will set it too low, and the shortfall will not appear until the building is fifteen or twenty years old, when several major components come due at once. Rooftop heating and cooling units, roofing, flooring, water heaters, parking lot surfaces, and sound and video equipment all have finite service lives. They do not fail on the same day, but they cluster, and the cluster tends to arrive just as the original building committee has rotated off and the campaign that built the building is a memory.

The facilities management profession has a long-standing rule of thumb for this, and it is worth knowing even though it was not written for churches. It comes from a 1990 National Research Council report on the maintenance of public buildings. The National Academies restated it in a 2023 study of how federal agencies should estimate the cost of renewing their facilities, which cites it as the most common example of an expert rule of thumb for maintenance budgets.

That guideline was written for large portfolios of public buildings, not for a single church, and it should be read that way. It averages young buildings with old ones, and a new building will usually spend below it in its first decade. But the arithmetic is still worth doing, because it shows the scale of what the building will eventually ask for. If our illustrative 30,000-square-foot church would cost $7.5 million to replace, one percent of that is $75,000 a year and two percent is $150,000. We rarely meet a congregation whose operating budget could absorb the low end of that range in year one, and we do not recommend trying. What we do recommend is a dedicated reserve that receives a contribution from the first budget year and grows on a schedule, so the roof replacement in year twenty is a withdrawal from an account rather than the opening line of a second campaign.

Staffing, insurance, and the costs that arrive by contract

Custodial time scales with floor area and with use, and a building that hosts events six days a week needs more cleaning than one that opens on Sunday. Many congregations move from a volunteer cleaning rotation to a paid part-time custodian when they move into a larger building, and some move from one part-time person to a full-time facilities role. That decision belongs in the operating model during design, because it affects how floors are finished, where storage and janitor closets are located, and how much of the building can be closed off on a slow week. A building that is cheap to clean is a design outcome, not a staffing outcome.

Property insurance follows replacement value, so a building that is worth three or four times as much as the old one will cost more to insure, often by a margin that surprises the finance committee. The service contracts multiply as well. Fire alarm monitoring, sprinkler and backflow inspections, elevator service, filter changes, pest control, sound system support, security monitoring, and software subscriptions for access control and scheduling each look small on their own, and together they can become one of the larger lines in the facilities budget. The way to avoid surprise is simple and almost never done. Ask your insurer for a quote on the projected replacement value, and ask the likely service providers for annual pricing, during design development, while the drawings can still change.

Test the operating budget before the vote

The test we encourage every church to run is a pro forma operating budget for the new building, prepared in schematic design alongside the first cost estimate and updated at each phase. It should include energy, maintenance and the reserve contribution, custodial staffing, insurance, service contracts, and any debt service, and it should sit next to the current operating budget so the change is visible line by line. The question it answers is not whether the campaign can pay for the building. It is whether the church’s ordinary giving can carry the building once the campaign is over and the excitement has settled into routine.

That question deserves a conservative answer. Giving USA’s report on philanthropy in 2025, which it released in 2026, found that giving to religion grew 2.4 percent in current dollars and was flat after adjusting for inflation. A national figure does not predict any one congregation, and a church that is growing may well see its giving rise faster. But a plan that only works if giving grows is a plan with no margin, and the operating budget should be tested against a year in which giving stays where it is. A building that the campaign can pay for but the operating budget cannot carry is not an affordable building.

When the pro forma shows a gap, the answer is rarely to abandon the project. More often it is to change the building. A smaller footprint with rooms designed to serve more than one purpose, a phase that builds the space the church will use every day and defers the space it will use twice a year, a mechanical design that zones the building to match how it is actually scheduled, or a decision to pay more up front for durable finishes that cost less to keep are all ways of moving cost from the operating budget to the construction budget, or out of the project altogether. We covered the full first-cost side of this equation when we wrote about what the building will actually cost, and the two numbers belong in the same conversation.

When the bigger building is still the right call

None of this is an argument for building small by default. A church that is renting classroom space elsewhere, running a preschool that pays tuition, or turning people away from a full sanctuary may find that the new building changes its income as well as its costs, and the pro forma should show that honestly too. Rent that stops, tuition that grows, and rental income from community groups are legitimate offsets. The opposite mistake is also real. A congregation that under-builds to protect its operating budget can find itself in a second construction project within a decade, paying the soft costs, the disruption, and the escalation twice. The point is not that operating cost should win every argument. It is that it should be in the argument at all, with real numbers, while the design can still respond to it.

At UNITE, operating cost is part of the design conversation from programming forward, not a note added after the construction estimate comes in. Across more than 1,000 church projects, we have watched congregations celebrate a finished building and then spend years working out how to pay to run it, and we have learned that the most useful thing an architect can do is put that number on the table early, next to the construction cost, while the decisions that drive it are still open. When the operating picture does not work, we come with options: a different footprint, a different phase, a different mechanical strategy, or a different balance between first cost and long-term cost, rather than a warning alone. If your church is weighing a new building or a major addition and wants to understand what it will cost to own, not just what it will cost to build, we would be glad to start that conversation.