CDP reporting deadline 2026: the key dates, and an eight-week plan to hit the scoring cutoff

The CDP reporting deadline that matters in 2026 is September 16, 2026, the scoring deadline. Submit your response by that date and it is eligible for a CDP score. There is a second, later cutoff in the week commencing October 26, 2026, after which the questionnaire closes entirely and no further edits are possible. Responses filed between the two are accepted and published, but they are not scored, which for most companies removes the point of responding at all.

That distinction catches out a lot of first-time disclosers, who see the October date on a calendar and plan against it. If an investor or a customer asked you to disclose, what they are going to look up in December is your score. A response without one reads, from the outside, much like no response.

The 2026 CDP timeline, date by date

Milestone	Date	Why it matters
Questionnaires published	Week of April 20, 2026	The exact 2026 wording is public, so you can prepare against real questions rather than last year's
Scoring methodology published	Week of April 27, 2026	Tells you which questions carry points before you write a word
Response window opens	Week of June 15, 2026	The portal accepts submissions from this point
Scoring deadline	September 16, 2026	The real deadline. Miss it and your response is unscored
Final deadline	Week commencing October 26, 2026	Questionnaire closes; no further submissions or edits
Scores released to disclosers	December 2026	You see the result before the market does
Public A List	January 2027	Top performers published

One more date is worth noting even though CDP does not print it: your own administration fee. Companies and SMEs have to pay CDP's admin fee before a response can be submitted, and procurement cycles being what they are, a purchase order that takes three weeks to clear can turn a comfortable schedule into a missed cutoff. Raise it early. Cities, states and regions are exempt from the fee.

What happens if you miss the CDP scoring deadline?

Your response is still accepted, published on your CDP record, and visible to the investors and customers who requested it, but it receives no score for that cycle. There is no penalty and no appeal process, and you cannot buy a late score. The practical consequences are that supplier scorecards which pull a CDP grade will show a blank for you, year-on-year score comparisons break, and you lose eligibility for the A List. Companies that were requested to disclose and submit nothing at all are recorded as F, which is worse than a low score.

An eight-week plan working backwards from September 16

If you are starting in late July, eight weeks is enough for a solid first response, but only if the emissions work goes first. The most common failure pattern is writing the governance and strategy narrative in weeks one to four because it feels productive, then discovering in week seven that the Scope 3 numbers are not going to arrive.

Weeks 1 to 2: settle the boundary, close Scope 1 and 2

Decide your consolidation approach, operational control or financial control, and list every entity inside the boundary. Set the base year you will report against. Then close the two scopes that are finite: pull fuel invoices and meter data, convert with EPA emission factors, and apply eGRID factors to purchased electricity. CDP wants Scope 2 twice, location-based and market-based, so gather supplier contracts and any energy attribute certificates now rather than in September. Our guide to location-based vs market-based Scope 2 covers the dual calculation, and operational vs financial control covers the boundary decision that determines which entities are even in scope.

Weeks 3 to 4: screen all fifteen Scope 3 categories from spend

This is the step that decides whether you make the deadline. Rather than emailing suppliers and hoping, classify your accounts payable file to the fifteen Scope 3 categories and apply input-output emission factors. You get a complete, coarse number for every category in days. More importantly you learn which two or three categories carry your footprint, which tells you where the remaining four weeks of effort should go. The mechanics are in calculating Scope 3 emissions from spend.

Weeks 5 to 6: deepen the material categories, write the narrative

Take your two or three dominant categories and replace the spend estimate with supplier-specific or activity data where you can get it. CDP scores method quality, so improving purchased goods and services is worth far more than perfecting a category that contributes two percent. Document why you left the rest at a spend-based estimate; a stated method scores better than a blank. Use a Scope 3 materiality assessment to justify the split.

In parallel, the narrative modules can now be written against numbers that will not move. Governance, risks and opportunities, targets and strategy all reference the inventory, and most of the raw material already exists somewhere in the business: board minutes naming who owns climate risk, an enterprise risk register, a supplier code of conduct, last year's targets memo. Teams routinely lose days to hunting through drives and inboxes for those documents, and being able to search across every internal system at once turns that scavenger hunt into an afternoon.

Weeks 7 to 8: review, internal sign-off, submit

Leave two full weeks. Legal and finance will want to read anything that becomes a public statement, and the review always surfaces at least one question nobody can answer. Reconcile your reported Scope 1 and 2 against any figures already published elsewhere, because inconsistency between your CDP response and your annual report is the sort of thing that gets noticed. Submit a few days before September 16 rather than on it; portal problems on deadline day are not a recognized excuse.

Which parts take longest, in practice

Part of the response	Typical effort	Main risk
Scope 1 and 2 inventory	Bounded, one to two weeks	Missing meters or accounts, not methodology
Scope 3 across fifteen categories	Open-ended without a spend screen	Waiting on supplier data that never arrives
Governance and strategy narrative	Two to three weeks of writing and review	Finding source documents; sign-off queues
Targets and performance	Short, if the inventory is stable	Restating prior years after a late data fix
Internal review and approval	Two weeks, and it compresses badly	Legal or finance objections raised at the end

Is the CDP deadline the same for every company?

Yes for the main corporate cycle. The scoring deadline and final deadline apply across the full corporate questionnaire and the SME questionnaire alike, and they do not vary by country or sector. What varies is which questionnaire you complete and which themes you are asked about. Some companies are requested on climate change only; others get forests and water security as well, usually because of what they produce or where they operate. Supply-chain requests from a specific customer can carry their own earlier internal deadline, so check whether the buyer who asked you to disclose wants sight of the response before it goes in.

What if this is your first CDP response?

Aim for complete rather than impressive. CDP's scoring works through four sequential levels: disclosure, awareness, management and leadership, and you have to clear each before the next is assessed. A first response that answers every question honestly, including admitting that a Scope 3 category is estimated from spend or that a target has not been set yet, scores better than a polished response with gaps in the emissions module. Unanswered quantitative questions are the single most common reason a first response stalls at the disclosure level.

It also helps to know that the 2026 questionnaire is structurally close to the 2025 one, with targeted additions rather than a rewrite: ocean questions appear for the first time as an optional and unscored theme, forests added coffee, cocoa and rubber as scored commodities, water security expanded on wastewater and regulatory compliance, and risk questions now ask more about adaptation and resilience. If a peer shared their 2025 response with you, it is still a useful map.

Making next year's response take two weeks instead of eight

Almost all of the eight weeks above is data assembly, and almost none of it needs repeating annually if the working is kept. The companies that turn CDP into a two-week job are the ones whose emissions inventory is a living system rather than a spreadsheet rebuilt each summer: the classification rules that map ledger lines to scopes and categories persist, the emission factor sources are recorded against each figure, and every number still links to the invoice behind it. That is also what an assurance provider will ask for the moment anyone requires limited assurance over your numbers.

Our carbon accounting software builds the inventory from the accounts payable and utility data you already file, classifying each line to a scope and category with the source document attached, so the CDP emissions module becomes a report you run rather than a project you staff. If CDP is your main disclosure obligation, CDP reporting software walks through what the questionnaire asks for module by module. If you also face a statutory deadline in California, SB 253 reporting software covers that regime, and the GHG inventory checklist is the full build sequence from scratch.

CDP sets its dates, fees and scoring methodology per cycle. The dates above reflect CDP's published 2026 timeline as of July 2026; confirm current details in the CDP portal before you plan against them.