Abstract | Since their release in 2012, the FEMA P-58 guidelines for seismic performance assessment of buildings have been regarded as the state-of-the-art paradigm for buildingspecific risk assessment and loss estimation. The latter is carried out through a rigorous component-by-component procedure that requires a complete component inventory, along with fragility and repair cost information. A fully compatible story-based approach is investigated herein as a simplified alternative that can potentially reduce the required input data with only a minor drop in accuracy. As an example, a set of story loss functions relating story repair cost with story-level engineering demand parameters are derived for standard inventory makeups of low/midrise steel office buildings. Preliminary results for a 4-story steel building show a promising balance between accuracy and simplicity.