The methodology to predict building energy consumption is increasingly important for building energy baseline model development and measurement and verification protocol (MVP). This paper presents support vector machines (SVM), a new neural network algorithm, to forecast building energy consumption in the tropical region. The objective of this paper is to examine the feasibility and applicability of SVM in building load forecasting area. Four commercial buildings in Singapore are selected randomly as case studies. Weather data including monthly mean outdoor dry-bulb temperature (TO), relative humidity (RH) and global solar radiation (GSR) are taken as three input features. Mean monthly landlord utility bills are collected for developing and testing models. In addition, the performance of SVM with respect to two parameters, C and e, was explored using stepwise searching method based on radial-basis function (RBF) kernel. Finally, all prediction results are found to have coefficients of variance (CV) less than 3% and percentage error (%error) within 4%. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.