This document describes an energy benchmarking framework for hospitals. The document is organized as follows. The introduction provides a brief primer on benchmarking and its application to hospitals. The next two sections discuss special considerations including the identification of normalizing factors. The presentation of metrics is preceded by a description of the overall framework and the rationale for the grouping of metrics. Following the presentation of metrics, a high-level protocol is provided. The next section presents draft benchmarks for some metrics; benchmarks are not available for many metrics owing to a lack of data. This document ends with a list of research needs for further development.