CDP A List criteria 2026: the requirements to score an A, threshold by threshold

Last updated August 2026. Most explanations of the CDP A List describe it as recognition for companies showing environmental leadership, which is true and useless. The A List is a mechanical outcome: a percentage threshold plus a checklist of pass or fail gates, all of it published by CDP in documents that are not linked from its main guidance pages. This page sets out the actual gates for the 2026 cycle, the numbers attached to them, and where the scoring weight sits so you can tell which gaps are worth closing before the September 16 deadline. If the blocker is your emissions data rather than your governance, that is what our carbon accounting software is built for.

The CDP A List is the top band of CDP's scoring scale, awarded to companies that score in the Leadership range and meet every essential criterion applied at Leadership and at A List level. CDP publishes a separate A List for each environmental issue it scores, so a company can be on the climate change A List without being on the forests or water security one. Companies that make all three in the same year are described as Triple A.

It is worth being precise about what the letter is measuring, because the misunderstanding here is expensive. An A does not certify that a company has low emissions. It certifies that the company has disclosed comprehensively, verified its figures, set targets that meet a defined ambition test, and can evidence governance and value chain engagement. A heavy industrial emitter with excellent disclosure can score an A. A low-emitting services company with a thin response cannot.

In 2026 the A List opens up in one notable way: small and medium sized companies responding through the SME questionnaire are eligible for an A for the first time, and financial services companies receive public forests and water security scores for the first time. The mechanics below apply to the full corporate questionnaire, which is where most companies with a revenue or headcount above CDP's SME cut-off will be.

Essential criteria are pass or fail requirements sitting on top of your percentage score. Miss one at A List level and your score is capped at A-, whatever percentage you earned. They are cumulative, so an A List response has to clear the Awareness, Management and Leadership criteria as well. The table below is the A List layer for a general company: all sectors except financial services, which runs a parallel set, and before any sector-specific criteria for your primary sector are added.

Read down that list and a pattern shows up. Five of the eight are governance and commitment items that a determined sustainability lead can assemble inside one cycle, given board access. Three are not. EC-CC13, EC-CC17 and EC-CC18 depend on the completeness and traceability of your inventory, and no amount of good drafting fixes them in the last month. They are the reason companies stall at A- and B.

The criteria that apply below A List level, EC-CC1 through EC-CC32 across every level, are set out on CDP essential criteria. The question-level scoring changes CDP made this cycle, several of which move points at Leadership, are on CDP 2026 changes.

You need a Leadership level score of 70% or higher, having already cleared Disclosure, Awareness and Management. CDP publishes provisional band thresholds that are identical across climate change, forests and water security. Below 70% at Leadership you land at A-, which is still the second highest band on the scale and is what most strong responses actually achieve.

One structural detail changes how you should read those percentages. Category weightings are applied at the Management and Leadership levels only. At Disclosure and Awareness your score is simply points awarded divided by points available. From Management upward, each scoring category is weighted, the level score is calculated as the category weighting divided by 100 multiplied by the category percentage, and the results are summed. So at Leadership, where the A is decided, a point is not a point. A point in a heavily weighted category is worth several times a point in a light one.

This is the part almost nobody works from, because CDP publishes the weightings as a bar chart inside a separate scoring category weightings document rather than as a table. Transcribed, the general sector figures look like this. Both columns sum to exactly 100%.

Three conclusions follow, and they are not the ones most companies act on.

First, targets and verification together are a quarter of the Leadership score, and both are also A List essential criteria. Effort spent there counts twice: once as points, once as a gate. Second, Scope 3 emissions carry only 3% of the weight as a scoring category, which is startling next to how much work the category consumes. That understates its real importance, because Scope 3 completeness feeds Verification at 10%, Value Chain Engagement at 5% and the emissions exclusions criterion, but it does mean that grinding a Scope 3 category from good to perfect is rarely the best marginal use of a cycle. Third, Governance is weighted more heavily at Management (11.0%) than at Leadership (8.5%), so board process work pays off earlier in the climb than people expect.

A caveat on the numbers, because guessing here would be worse than useless. These are CDP's published general sector weightings for the 2025 cycle. CDP's own 2026 changes document states that scoring weightings were corrected for Metals and mining and for Steel to ensure consistency between its external and internal documentation, and flags no change for the general sector. Treat the general figures above as the current best public reference and check CDP's 2026 climate change scoring category weightings document for your own sector before you plan around them, particularly if you are scored as metals and mining or steel.

Around 5%. In the 2025 cycle, 899 companies made the corporate A List out of nearly 20,000 scored, and 27 companies achieved Triple A across climate change, forests and water security. That base rate is the useful planning number: an A is not a stretch version of a good response, it is a different category of preparation, and roughly nineteen out of twenty companies that go through the full scoring process do not get one in a given year.

What that ratio conceals is how many companies fail on a single gate rather than on overall quality. Verification coverage and the target ambition test are the two that most often do it, and both are decided months before the questionnaire is drafted. Scores for the 2026 cycle are released to disclosers in the week of November 30, 2026, with public release and the A Lists later that week, which is covered on when CDP scores are released.

Under EC-CC17, the A List requires 100% of reported Scope 1 emissions and 100% of reported Scope 2 emissions verified or assured by a third party, plus at least 70% of reported Scope 3 emissions. Leadership is more forgiving at 95% of Scope 1, 95% of Scope 2 and at least one Scope 3 category. The gap between those two lines is where a lot of A- scores come from.

Two dependencies make this harder than the percentages suggest. EC-CC15, the Scope 3 disclosure criterion at Leadership, is a stated pre-requisite: an incomplete Scope 3 screening takes out both criteria at once, so assurance you have already paid for stops counting. And in 2026 CDP made full Disclosure points on the verification questions a pre-requisite too, and added a new column capturing the proportion of total reported Scope 3 emissions verified as a percentage, which is checked at Leadership. Reporting that one Scope 3 category is verified no longer tells CDP what it needs to know.

The practical constraint is evidence, not arithmetic. To verify 100% of Scope 1 and Scope 2 an assurance provider has to trace every figure back to a source record, which is exactly where spreadsheet inventories fail a first engagement. The totals may be correct while the trail from a total back to the underlying utility bill or fuel invoice does not exist. Our approach classifies accounts payable and utility records into a scope by scope inventory with every number tied to the document that produced it, which is the trail a verifier samples. The levels of assurance you can buy, and what each one actually tests, are covered in limited vs reasonable assurance.

No, but it satisfies the hardest criterion. EC-CC25 accepts three routes at A List level. Route A is a near-term target covering both Scope 1 and Scope 2 approved as science-based by the SBTi. Route B is a target that independently meets at least a 4.2% absolute annual emissions reduction between the base year end date and the target end date, for Scope 1 and for Scope 2, with no SBTi involvement required. Route C is the SBTi route applied through the alternative target question.

Route B is the one companies overlook, and it is genuinely open. You do not need SBTi validation to satisfy the CDP A List target criterion, you need arithmetic that clears 4.2% per year on an absolute basis for both scopes. Companies that have set an ambitious target but not paid for validation frequently already qualify and do not realize it. Companies with an intensity-based target usually do not, because the test is absolute.

The reason a science-based target still does not guarantee an A is that it clears one of eight gates. Plenty of SBTi-validated companies land at A- because their Scope 3 verification sits below 70%, or because climate is absent from executive incentives, or because they submitted privately.

September 16, 2026 is the scoring deadline. Responses submitted after it are still accepted until the final deadline in the week of October 26, but they are not scored, and an unscored response cannot be on the A List. CDP offers a limited number of paid on-demand extensions that move the scoring deadline to September 30, 2026, requested by the organization's Disclosure Submission Lead by September 29. The fee is US$2,500 in North America and Latin America excluding Brazil, £2,000 in the UK, €2,300 in Europe including Turkiye, and US$2,500 elsewhere. Slots are limited, granted at CDP's discretion, and the fee is non-refundable once granted even if you end up submitting on time.

One easily missed bar sits alongside the dates. EC-CC32 requires a public response to be scored at Leadership at all, so a private submission cannot reach the A List regardless of content. If your only requesters are supply chain customers rather than capital markets signatories, your response defaults to private unless you score an A, which makes electing to respond publicly a prerequisite rather than a preference. The full 2026 calendar is on the CDP reporting deadline for 2026.

If steps four and five are where you are stuck, the problem is almost certainly inventory completeness rather than effort, and it repeats every cycle until the underlying data collection changes. Building the inventory from source documents instead of reassembling it each year is what CDP reporting software is for, and the same evidence trail serves SB 253 reporting when California's Scope 1 and 2 deadline arrives on November 10, 2026.