CDP scoring methodology 2026: the score bands, thresholds and essential criteria

CDP scores companies on a band from A down to D-, and the band comes from a threshold system, not from an overall average. Your response is assessed at four sequential levels: disclosure, awareness, management and leadership. You have to clear a minimum percentage at one level before CDP will credit you at the next, and separate essential criteria act as hard gates that cap your score at the level below if you miss them. Your final letter is the highest level you reached, with the percentage inside that level deciding whether you get the plain letter or the minus.

That structure is the part most first-time disclosers get wrong. They assume a strong strategy narrative can offset a patchy emissions module, and it cannot. Gaps low down in the questionnaire stop you climbing, no matter how good the answers higher up are. This page walks through how the calculation actually runs in the 2026 cycle, using the thresholds CDP publishes in its own scoring introduction.

If you are reading this in the last days before the scoring deadline, the single most useful thing to check is where your wall is. Nine of the essential criteria sit at Leadership and only one at Management, so the overwhelming majority of companies that miss a grade miss it at the Leadership boundary, usually on verification coverage or on submitting privately. Both of those are decisions you can still change today and neither requires new emissions work. If your blocker turns out to be third-party verification specifically, note that a software partner cannot solve it and a verification provider can, which is the distinction drawn in best CDP accredited solutions providers.

The four CDP scoring levels

CDP assesses every scored response against four levels, in order. Each one asks a different question about your company, and each is a prerequisite for the next.

• Disclosure. Did you answer? This level measures completeness of reporting: whether the data and processes CDP asked for are actually present in your response.
• Awareness. Do you understand how environmental issues intersect with your business? This level indicates that you have assessed your impacts and risks, but not yet that you are acting on them.
• Management. Are you acting? This level recognises evidence of processes and action to manage environmental issues.
• Leadership. Are you demonstrating best practice? This is the top level, covering best practice transparency and performance, and it is the only route to an A.

Climate change, forests and water security are each scored separately in 2026, so a company can hold three different letters. Ocean and plastics appear in the 2026 questionnaire but are not scored this cycle.

How is a CDP score calculated?

CDP calculates a percentage at each level, then compares it against a published threshold to decide both your band and whether you progress. At the disclosure and awareness levels the percentage is simple: points awarded divided by points available. At the management and leadership levels CDP applies a weighting instead, calculated per scoring category as category weighting divided by 100, multiplied by your management or leadership score for that category. The weightings reflect how important each category is for your industry, which is why two companies with identical answers can score differently if they sit in different activity groups.

The thresholds below are the ones CDP published in its 2026 Full Corporate Scoring Introduction. CDP notes that it sets these provisionally, reviews them during the scoring period so the distribution of responses stays representative, and reserves the right to adjust them before scores are released. The figures shown were the ones applied to the scores released for the 2025 disclosure cycle.

CDP applies the same threshold ladder to climate change, forests and water security. Read the table upwards and the practical rule appears: the top of each band is the bar you have to clear to be assessed at the next level. Score 82% at disclosure and you move on to awareness. Score 78% and you stop, and your final score is a D no matter what your management answers would have earned.

What are CDP's essential criteria?

Essential criteria are absolute requirements attached to a scoring level. Meeting the percentage threshold is not enough on its own: you must also satisfy every essential criterion for that level, or your score is limited. For climate change in 2026 they apply at awareness, management, leadership and A List. For forests and water security they currently apply only at leadership and A List, and CDP expects to expand them in future cycles.

Each criterion carries an identifier such as EC-CC1, and those tags appear in the tag list inside the Full Corporate Questionnaire, so you can see which questions are load-bearing before you write a word. That is worth doing early. Essential criteria are the cheapest points in the whole exercise, because missing one is not a small deduction, it is a ceiling.

There are 32 of them for climate change in 2026, and they are not evenly distributed: two apply at Awareness, one at Management, nine at Leadership and six more at the A List. The full list, what each one demands and which level it applies at, is set out on CDP essential criteria. No new criteria were added for 2026, but two were removed at Management and Leadership and around twenty question-level scoring rules moved, which is covered on CDP 2026 changes.

What is a good CDP score?

For a first response, reaching C is a reasonable result and B is a strong one. A B means CDP judged you to be actively managing environmental issues, which is the message most customer and investor requesters are actually testing for. An A requires leadership-level evidence across the board plus the A List essential criteria, and it is a multi-year project rather than something you write your way into. The more useful question in year one is not what score you got, but whether the response was scored at all.

The base rates are worth knowing before you set an internal target, because they are far harsher than most boards assume. In the 2025 cycle CDP awarded an A to 899 companies out of roughly 20,000 scored responses, which is about 5%, and only 27 companies held a Triple A across climate change, forests and water security at once. So an A is genuinely rare, a B puts you above most of the disclosing population, and a first-year C is not the failure it feels like internally. Appeals exist and can be lodged after scores are released, but they move a score in either direction, so appeal only where you can point at a specific answer that was misread rather than because the band disappointed you.

What happens if you do not respond, or respond late?

Two separate statuses cover this, and neither is a score. A company that was requested to disclose and did not is recorded as "did not disclose", which indicates it did not provide enough information to be evaluated. A company that responds after the scoring deadline has passed, or is otherwise ineligible, is recorded as "not scored". Both are visible on your public record. In 2026 the scoring deadline is September 16, with a later final deadline in the week commencing October 26 for responses and edits that will not be scored, and scores and A Lists released in the week of November 30. Our CDP 2026 deadline guide works the calendar backwards into a week-by-week plan, and when CDP scores are released covers what arrives in that November release and who can see it. There is also a limited, paid On-Demand Extension that moves the scoring deadline to September 30 if it is requested by September 29.

What actually moves a CDP score

In our experience the emissions module is where most responses lose their level, and it loses it in predictable ways. Scope 3 categories marked neither calculated nor explained. A market-based Scope 2 figure missing because nobody pulled the supplier contracts. Emission factor sources left unstated. A base year that quietly moved when an acquisition landed, with no restatement disclosed. None of those are writing problems. They are all consequences of how the underlying inventory was assembled, which is why the response you can score well is the one built from a data set you control rather than assembled from spreadsheets in the final six weeks.

The teams that improve fastest treat their emissions data the way a data engineering team treats a production pipeline: they know where every figure came from, they can rebuild it, and they monitor the freshness and completeness of the underlying records continuously rather than discovering gaps at deadline. Applied to CDP, that means keeping the boundary, the base year, the factor set and the source document for every line available all year, not reconstructing them each August.

A few specific moves are worth more than general polish. Screen all fifteen Scope 3 categories even if most come back immaterial, because an explained exclusion scores and a blank does not. State your method for each category explicitly, since CDP scores method quality. Report Scope 2 both ways. Name your emission factor sources and your global warming potential version. And check the essential criteria tags before drafting, so you are not discovering a ceiling after submission.

Where software helps, and where it does not

No tool writes a leadership-level governance answer for you, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling you something. What software can do is remove the reason most responses stall at disclosure, which is an incomplete inventory with no evidence behind it. Our carbon accounting software classifies your accounts payable and utility data into a scope-by-scope inventory (see the method step by step) and keeps each figure linked to the invoice it came from, so the Scope 3 category table CDP asks for is a report rather than a research project, and the method statement for each category is already recorded. You can run the classifier on your own ledger lines in the demo before any email address changes hands.

For the full picture of what a response requires, see CDP reporting software. The build sequence for the inventory underneath it is in the GHG inventory checklist, the hardest module is covered in Scope 3 emissions reporting. If what you actually need is what the letter means once you have it, and whether your score will be published at all, that is on what a good CDP score is, and Scope 3 materiality assessment covers how to justify which categories you deepened. If a US statute rather than a questionnaire is your real trigger, SB 253 reporting software covers California, and climate disclosure software maps which regimes catch which companies.

CDP scoring facts on this page summarize CDP's published 2026 Full Corporate Scoring Introduction and disclosure timeline as available in July 2026. CDP sets thresholds provisionally and may adjust them before scores are released, so confirm current details with CDP directly. This page is not affiliated with or endorsed by CDP.

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