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The ‘passive house’ (PH) is a specific, pan-nationally recognised building standard designed to consume 15 kilowatt-hours of space heating energy per square metre of living area per year (kWh/m²a), significantly less than most countries’ current standard for a conventional house (CH). Most PHs cost some 5–15% more to build than a CH of equivalent size and layout. Investor-households therefore often enquire as to whether building a PH is economically viable: will the extra cost pay back in the long-run through fuel savings? A number of studies have offered cost-benefit analyses to address this, usually based on modelled heating consumption figures and prescriptive approaches to setting values for unknowable variables such as future fuel price rises and the investor's discount rate. This study offers a novel ‘reality-based, subjectivist’ approach. It uses empirically derived (i.e. real rather than modelled …