By the end of 2024, 4,552 projects worldwide carried a WELL or Fitwel certification, up from 92 in 2017. Nearly a fifty-fold increase in seven years. Just over half of those projects sit in the United States. Another 2,000 were working through the pipeline as of May 2025 (Global Wellness Institute, Build Well To Live Well, 2025). WELL alone now covers roughly 6 billion square feet across nearly 100,000 locations in 137 countries, backing over 2 trillion dollars in certified assets and adopted by more than 180 Fortune 500 companies. Fitwel covers 2.5 billion square feet in 50-plus countries, reaching 2.6 million people. Add BREEAM’s 610,000 certified buildings, LEED’s 118,300 and Passive House’s 47,400, and the certified stock of the built environment runs past three quarters of a million projects. Most WELL and Fitwel projects are offices or mixed-use commercial space, with residential accounting for about a quarter. Of the ten countries with the most certified projects, from the United States (2,430) and China (532) down to Japan (68), not one sits in the German-speaking world.

None of that tells me whether a single occupant got healthier.

WELL offers up to 110 points across 10 concepts, capped at 100 before an innovation allowance (International WELL Building Institute, WELL v2, 2020). Fitwel scores strategies across 8 scorecards, drawn from a review of more than 7,000 studies by the Center for Active Design, the nonprofit that operates Fitwel under licence from the CDC and the US General Services Administration. A project earns points for the air handling unit it specifies, the stair signage it posts, the biophilic elements on the drawings. It earns nothing for whether sick days fell, whether cognitive test scores moved or whether a tenant reports feeling better a year after move-in. My own view: a point count is a record of specification. Whether anyone got healthier is not in it.

This is not a quirk of two schemes. Twelve competing frameworks currently touch on well-being in buildings and organisations, and no two use the same metric: WELL, Fitwel, the RIBA’s Social Value Toolkit for Architecture, BREEAM Communities, the UN SDG Impact Standards, GRESB, the EU’s Level(s) framework, SROI, the Social Earnings Ratio, ISO 26000, the Living Community Challenge and IRIS+. Every one of the twelve measures an input or a programme: access, cohesion, physical activity, comfort, monetised proxies for absenteeism. SROI assigns a monetary value to an assumed reduction in sick days. ISO 26000 checks for fair labour practices and freedom from discrimination. None of the twelve measures a cognitive or health outcome directly in the people who use the building.

One framework breaks the pattern, and only one. RESET runs sensor-based, continuous indoor air quality monitoring. It measures air quality directly, day after day, instead of scoring a specification checklist once at handover. It measures air quality alone. The other scheme owners never built the equivalent for light, acoustics, thermal comfort or the psychological outcomes WELL claims to address.

The gap turns costly at the GRESB level. Pressure in real estate ESG runs top-down. Pension funds and other asset owners sit over the public markets, REITs and equities reporting into TCFD, CDP and MSCI. Those sit over private real estate funds, reporting through GRI, IFRS and GRESB. Those sit over the physical assets themselves, certified through LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE, WELL and Greenstar. A fund manager needs a strong GRESB score to keep pension-fund capital allocated. A strong GRESB score needs certified assets. The certifications sitting underneath GRESB have point totals to report and no outcome data at all. GRESB itself increasingly asks its participants for outcomes. The schemes it depends on were never built to supply them.

Seven years, a near fifty-fold jump in certified projects, more than 2 trillion dollars in certified assets, 12 competing well-being frameworks and one sensor-based exception limited to air quality alone. That is the tally. IWBI, the Center for Active Design and the ten other scheme owners listed above built an instrument that counts what got specified. The instrument that tells a tenant, an investor or GRESB whether anyone got healthier still does not exist.