The several parameters affect the heat load of a building; geometry, construction, layout, climate and the users. These parameters are complex and interrelated. Comprehensive models are needed to understand relationships among the parameters that can handle non-linearities. The aim of this study is to predict heat load of existing buildings benefiting from width/length ratio, wall overall heat transfer coefficient, area/volume ratio, total external surface area, total window area/total external surface area ratio by using artificial neural networks and compare the results with a building energy simulation tool called KEP-IYTE-ESS developed by Izmir Institute of Technology. A back propagation neural network algorithm has been preferred and both simulation tools were applied to 148 residential buildings selected from 3 municipalities of lzmir-Turkey. Under the given conditions, a good coherence was observed between artificial neural network and building energy simulation tool results with a mean absolute percentage error of 5.06% and successful prediction rate of 0.977. The advantages of ANN model over the energy simulation software are observed as the simplicity, the speed of calculation and learning from the limited data sets, (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.