CDP 2026 changes: the scoring changes, essential criteria changes and questionnaire changes for the 2026 cycle

Last updated August 2026. CDP publishes its scoring changes in a separate 81-page document that most respondents never open, because it is not linked from the main guidance pages. The summary you will find in most 2026 previews stops at the two headline changes. This page goes through the question-level changes that actually affect a climate change response: what is newly scored, what stopped being scored, where the point allocations moved, and which changes help you. If you are rebuilding the emissions figures behind Module 7, that is what our carbon accounting software is for.

CDP states that its full corporate scoring methodology and essential criteria remained largely stable between 2025 and 2026, with two major changes: cocoa, coffee and rubber were introduced as scored high risk commodities for Forests, and the wording of the essential criteria was improved across the board for clarity and consistency. CDP is explicit that the rewording has minimal to no impact on the ambition of the criteria.

That is true as a summary and misleading as a plan. The rewrite does not change what is required, but around twenty question-level scoring changes do change where the points sit. Three of them are new scored requirements that did not exist in 2025, two remove requirements that used to cost people points, and one tells you what is coming in 2027.

These are the changes worth acting on before the September 16 scoring deadline. Everything else in the changes document is either sector-specific, a renumbering, or a clarification that leaves the assessment identical.

Read the effect column as a rough balance and the picture is close to even. Governance got harder, emissions reporting got more prescriptive, and the two levers that used to cap otherwise strong responses, risk reporting inflexibility and the Leadership consolidation requirement, were released. A company that scored a B in 2025 and changes nothing will most likely score a B again, but the reasons will have moved.

No new essential criteria were introduced for 2026, and the assessment logic is unchanged. Two changes matter. CDP removed EC-CC1 and EC-CC2, the risks and opportunities criteria, from both the Management and Leadership levels, leaving them at Awareness only. And CDP restructured every criterion to specify the exact response option that must be selected, rather than describing the action being incentivized.

The removal is the more valuable of the two, and CDP explains why it happened. Its annual review found the criteria were having a high scoring impact on organizations that demonstrated strong environmental stewardship throughout the rest of their response, because of the inflexibility the criteria imposed on risk and opportunity reporting. In plain terms: companies were being capped at Management over how they had structured a risk table, not over anything substantive. If that happened to you in a previous cycle, that ceiling is gone.

Nothing on that list changes what you have to disclose. EC-CC14, EC-CC15, EC-CC17 and EC-CC25 all carry the same substance into 2026, which means the verification thresholds and the Scope 3 screening requirement are unchanged. The full set of 32 criteria, and which level each applies at, is on CDP essential criteria.

Question 7.8, the Scope 3 category table, gained a new column called "Reason for this category not being relevant", and it is scored. At Disclosure level, Route B now requires you to select a drop-down option in that column. At Awareness, any option other than "Other, please specify" is required. At Management, CDP replaced the old scoring of your free-text "Please explain" description with scoring on the new drop-down, while still checking that the free text is completed.

This is the change most likely to cost points from a response that would otherwise be identical to last year. In 2025 you could mark a category not relevant and write a paragraph explaining why, and the paragraph earned the points. In 2026 the paragraph is checked for completion only, and the points come from choosing a defensible reason off a list. A vague justification that used to pass on prose no longer has anywhere to hide.

The practical consequence is that a real relevance screening across all fifteen categories became harder to avoid. CDP states the change aligns the column with the GHG Protocol requirements for relevant Scope 3 categories. Marking a category not relevant is now a positive assertion you have to categorize, not an explanation you can write around, which is covered in detail in our note on CDP Scope 3 relevance. The categories themselves are set out on the 15 Scope 3 categories, and the methods for putting a number against each one are on how to calculate Scope 3 emissions.

Questions 7.9.1, 7.9.2 and 7.9.3, covering verification of Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 respectively, all changed in the same three ways. A pre-requisite was added at Management level requiring full Disclosure points before verification points are awarded. An additional check was added on the "Relevant standard" column for organizations reporting multiple standards in one row, so that every attached statement is checked rather than one. And a new Route C was added covering organizations that select "No verification", which restructures how those responses are assessed at both Management and Leadership.

The change with the longest lead time is in 7.9.3 at Leadership: CDP now checks a new column, "Proportion of total reported scope 3 emissions verified (%)". Scope 3 verification coverage has become a directly reported figure rather than something inferred from which categories you listed. That connects straight to EC-CC17, which requires 95% of Scope 1 and 95% of Scope 2 verified at Leadership, and 100% of both plus at least 70% of reported Scope 3 for the A List.

Assurance is the item on a CDP plan that cannot be compressed. An assurance provider has to trace a reported total back to source records, and a spreadsheet inventory usually fails its first engagement not because the numbers are wrong but because the trail from a total back to the underlying bill does not exist. The distinction between the two levels of assurance is covered in limited vs reasonable assurance.

Module 4 is where 2026 got harder, and it got harder quietly, because none of it touches the essential criteria.

Two of those five are new scored requirements about who sits on your board and how their competency is maintained. Neither can be fixed in the week before the deadline, and neither shows up in a summary that stops at the two headline changes.

Four structural additions carry through the whole scoring document. Aviation was added as a distinct sector and is scored for the first time in 2026, aligned with Transport services except for targets, which follow the Energy utilities and power generators approach. Cocoa, coffee and rubber joined cattle, palm oil, soy and timber as scored high risk commodities for Forests, which expands seven Forests essential criteria and several question-level criteria. The scoring weightings for Metals and mining and for Steel were corrected to make the external and internal documentation consistent. And question 7.15 became a matrix question, scored proportionally at Disclosure.

One forward-looking note is buried in that last item and is worth planning against. CDP states that Scope 2 breakdowns are not scored in 2026 because it is the first year of reporting them, but they will be scored in 2027. If you are building an inventory this cycle, building the Scope 2 breakdown now costs you nothing in 2026 and saves a rebuild next year. The two Scope 2 reporting bases are explained in location-based vs market-based Scope 2.

Two other changes reward disclosure that already exists. Question 7.30.1 moved from measuring the percentage of renewable energy to measuring renewable plus other low carbon, adding a column for megawatt hours from non-renewable zero or near-zero emission sources. CDP describes this as a more technology-agnostic approach, and in practice it means nuclear and comparable sources now count toward a scoring calculation that previously excluded them. And question 7.53.1 added an SBTi route at Awareness so that organizations reporting an SBTi-validated Scope 3 target separately get credit for it, along with a date check preventing targets set after the reporting year from scoring.

No. The scoring changes are independent of the calendar. The 2026 response window opened the week of June 15, the scoring deadline is September 16, 2026, and a response filed after it is published but recorded as "not scored". On-Demand Extensions move that to September 30 for a limited number of organizations, for a non-refundable fee, requested by your Disclosure Submission Lead no later than September 29. Scores are released to disclosers in the week of November 30, 2026. The full calendar is on the CDP reporting deadline for 2026 and the release dates on when CDP scores are released.

Steps one, two and seven are inventory work rather than drafting, and they are the ones that decide whether a cycle finishes comfortably or in a scramble. Our approach starts from records a company already has, classifying accounts payable and utility data into a scope-by-scope inventory with every figure tied back to the invoice that produced it, which is both what question 7.8 needs a defensible reason for and what a verifier samples. The tooling question is covered on CDP reporting software, the questionnaire structure on the CDP questionnaire, and how the bands are calculated on the CDP scoring methodology for 2026.