CDP admin fee 2026: what CDP reporting costs, which fee tier you pay, and who is exempt

Last updated August 2026. Most companies meet CDP as an email from a customer or an investor, and the first budgeting question is what the response is going to cost. CDP publishes its administrative fee table openly, but it sits on an FAQ page rather than anywhere near the disclosure guidance, and the exemption rule that decides whether a US company pays anything at all is one sentence long and easy to miss. This page sets out the published 2026 figures, who owes them, what each tier buys, and the costs that sit outside the fee entirely. If the expensive part of your response turns out to be building the emissions numbers rather than paying CDP, that is what our carbon accounting software is for.

For an organization headquartered in North America the 2026 CDP admin fee is US$7,650 at the Enhanced tier and US$3,250 at the Foundation tier. The cheaper Essential tier is not available to North American companies, so US$3,250 is the effective floor for a US company that owes a fee. CDP raised fees by approximately 5% globally for 2026, and the fee is not refundable.

Read that table by headquarters, not by where you operate. A US subsidiary of a European parent is billed against the parent group's disclosing entity, so which legal entity registers on the CDP portal decides which row applies to you. The Essential tier is restricted to organizations headquartered outside North America, the UK, Europe including Türkiye, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda, Bahrain, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Guernsey. For a US buyer the practical choice is a two-row table: US$3,250 or US$7,650.

Three groups pay. CDP states that the admin fee is owed by companies requested to disclose by CDP's Capital Market Signatories, by self-selected companies that choose to disclose without being requested, and by public authorities. Everyone else who was requested through one of CDP's other programs is exempt.

The word doing the work in CDP's exemption is "only". CDP states that disclosers are exempt if they have only been requested by a Supply Chain member, a Banks Program member, a Private Markets member or the RE100 initiative. Pick up a single investor request alongside your customer request and the exemption falls away for the whole cycle. That is worth checking on the Requests page of your discloser dashboard before you assume a zero-cost response, because a company can be added to an investor request list without anyone internally noticing.

Yes, for the CDP fee itself. A company requested only by a customer through CDP's supply chain program pays no admin fee, submits the same questionnaire, and receives the same scored letter grade. Around 45,000 suppliers were requested this way in CDP's 2025 cycle, and for most of them CDP charges nothing.

Two consequences follow, and they push in opposite directions. The first is that the barrier to a supplier response is time and data, not money, so a first-year response that gets deferred over budget is usually being deferred over the wrong thing. The second is that free does not mean cheap: the work of assembling a defensible Scope 1, 2 and 3 inventory is where a first CDP response actually costs a company, and no fee waiver touches it. What a customer request adds to the questionnaire, and why the customer is pushing, is set out in the CDP supply chain questionnaire.

There is a related asymmetry that makes a first supplier response less risky than most teams assume. CDP's score privacy policy states that where you were requested by a supply chain member rather than by capital markets, your score remains private unless you receive an A. A weak first attempt is not published. A strong one is. The full picture of what your letter means commercially is on CDP score.

Both tiers give you the same thing that actually matters: access to the CDP portal, CDP's reporting frameworks and guidance tools, and a scored response. The extra US$4,400 in North America buys recognition, benchmarking data and a supplier screen, none of which affect your score.

The bottom row is the one to decide on. Paying more does not buy points, and CDP does not treat Enhanced disclosers differently in scoring. The two Enhanced items with real working value are the Comparative Analysis Report against ten peers, which tells you where your score sits in your own sector rather than in the abstract, and the top-50 supplier screen, which is useful if your own Scope 3 category 1 work is about to start. If neither is on your plan this year, Foundation buys the same outcome for US$3,250. If you are weighing the peer report, note that a first-year discloser has no prior score to compare, so the benchmarking is usually worth more in year two than in year one.

US$2,500 for organizations in North America and Latin America excluding Brazil, and it is separate from the admin fee. The extension moves your scoring deadline from September 16, 2026 to September 30, 2026. It must be requested by your Disclosure Submission Lead no later than September 29, availability is limited, CDP grants it at its own discretion, and the fee is non-refundable once granted.

Two weeks for US$2,500 is a poor trade when the thing you are short of is emissions data, because two weeks does not produce a verified inventory. It is a reasonable trade when the response is written and you are waiting on a signature, a verification statement or a board sign-off that has a known date inside the window. Treat it as insurance on a scheduling risk, not as extra project time. The full 2026 calendar, including the final October deadline for unscored amendments, is in our CDP deadline guide.

CDP does not publish a price for Reporter Services. It is a separate fee-based membership, distinct from the admin fee, with 430 or more members worldwide, and CDP asks you to contact its team for costs. It is not available to organizations in India.

What the membership includes is published, and it is worth reading before you assume it duplicates a software purchase. Members get one-to-one account management from a CDP expert through the year, high-level feedback on their score, a gap analysis of last year's response against the updated guidance and scoring methodology, a review of the draft response before the deadline, and step-by-step guidance for first-time disclosers, plus comparative analysis reports, a sector data extract, an analytics platform and member-only webinars.

Read that list carefully and it is advisory work on the response document. None of it builds your emissions inventory, and CDP is explicit that it does not audit or verify your data. That is the split worth holding in your head when you budget: Reporter Services helps you answer better, carbon accounting software helps you have something to answer with, and third-party assurance is a third purchase again. We work through that make-or-buy decision in CDP Reporter Services vs carbon accounting software.

For most first-time disclosers the admin fee is the smallest line on the page, and in the supply chain case it is zero. These are the lines that decide the real number.

Internal time is the line that surprises people. A first CDP response asks for activity data from facilities, procurement, HR, travel and finance, and the person assembling it usually has another job. The way to shrink that line is to stop re-collecting data the company already has: accounts payable, utility bills and expense records already describe most of a footprint, and classifying them is a repeatable step rather than a survey campaign. The method is set out in calculating Scope 3 from spend, and the wider question of what carbon accounting software costs is on carbon accounting software cost.

If the fee question is settled and the work is what remains, the response itself is covered on CDP reporting software, the 13 modules you will actually be shown on the CDP questionnaire, and the pass-or-fail gates that cap a score on CDP essential criteria. What moved this cycle is on CDP 2026 changes, and what separates an A- from an A is on CDP A List criteria. For the vendor decision, see best carbon accounting software. If a US statute rather than a customer is your real trigger, SB 253 reporting software covers California, where the penalties are set out in the SB 253 penalty rules.