Abstract | Over the recent years, issues pertaining to the sustainable development of structures have come into focus. Sustainability in development takes into consideration not only the present needs, but also the ones of the forthcoming users of a building. A crucial part is the estimation of the costs related to the erection and use of the structure and finally its decomissioning. Thus, a cradle-to-grave cost estimation of a building, i.e. a complete definition of all the costs during its lifespan, is a crucial part of sustainable design and construction. In order to obtain all the pertinent costs, a critical parameter to consider is the repair and maintenance cost. This becomes very important in seismically active regions where rare events may enforce total asset loss, while the occurrence of even low-intensity events, may cause significant non-structural and building content loss. Our objective is to investigate seismic losses for low/midrise reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings of the southern of Europe and the Mediterranean where significant seismic activity is observed. As an example an actual building built in Greece in 1950’s is presented. Using state-of-art approaches allows to account for structural member losses as well as non-structural components and contents, offering a holistic view of the lifetime hazard represented by older non-ductile RC frame buildings.