Abstract | The quantification of seismic performance, using metrics meaningful to both engineers and stakeholders, has been a focal point of research in performance-based earthquake engineering. The prevalent paradigm is currently offered by the FEMA P-58 guidelines in the form of a component-by-component approach that provides detailed assessment capabilities at the cost of requiring a complete inventory of the structural, nonstructural, and content components. In an attempt for simplification, a fully compatible story-by-story approach is offered instead, where story loss functions are employed to directly relate monetary losses to engineering demand parameters given the story area. These functions can be adjusted for application to different situations, assuming the ratio of cost and quantity of each component category inventory remains relatively constant. As an example, they are generated for a standard inventory makeup, characteristic of low/mid-rise steel office buildings. They are shown to offer a favorable compromise of simplicity and accuracy that lies between the component-by-component and building-level approaches that are currently prevalent in building-specific and regional loss assessment, respectively.