SBTi target validation process: the protocol, timeline and stages behind a 2026 submission

Last updated September 2026. Two documents govern what actually happens after you hit submit, and neither is the criteria everyone reads. The first is the Standard Operating Procedure for the Validation of SBTi Targets, version 1.1, effective January 2026, which sets out the stages, the roles and the grounds for rejection. The second is Target Validation Service Offerings version 6.1, effective January 5, 2026, which sets the service levels and the tiers.

One distinction explains most of the confusion. The Science Based Targets initiative writes the standards. SBTi Services Limited, a separate legal entity and wholly owned subsidiary registered at 66 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, is the body that validates your targets and invoices you for it. The criteria come from one, the process on this page comes from the other.

Between 40 and 60 business days for a corporate full target validation, measured from the contract start date rather than from the day you finish the portal. Financial institutions are estimated at 60 business days. SMEs are estimated at 21 business days, on a first come, first served queue. Those are the published service levels, not averages.

The timelines have a clause attached that companies routinely miss. Total duration may be extended by concurrent processes such as complaints or appeals reviews, and for SMEs the wait varies with the size of the queue and with how fast the company answers clarifications. The clock is a service commitment on the reviewer’s side, not a guarantee of a decision date on yours: your own response time sits inside it.

Corporate figures run from the validation or contract start date. The 40 to 60 day range on the first two depends on the service type purchased, and the SME queue is first come, first served.

Five, and one of them is optional in a way that is worth engineering for. The process runs portal information entry, assessment, evaluation, decision, then the validation decision statement. If every query and non-conformity is resolved during the assessment stage, the SOP says the process skips the evaluation stage entirely and proceeds straight to the decision stage. A clean submission is not just lower risk, it is measurably shorter.

Two: approval or rejection. There is no conditional pass and no partial approval. Approval means the submitted targets meet all applicable requirements. Rejection means the targets did not meet the requirements, or issues were left unresolved, or the company missed the reviewer’s deadline. That third ground is administrative rather than technical, and it is entirely within your control.

You may also stop. If a company decides not to continue, the reviewer closes the process once that is confirmed in writing and issues a letter confirming the closure. If the company had also made a commitment to set targets and withdraws it, the Committed status becomes Removed under the Commitment Compliance Policy.

In practice for one of three reasons, and only one of them is about climate ambition. The first is a missed deadline during the evaluation stage. The second is an inconsistency the reviewer finds between your submission and your own published reporting, because the initial review deliberately compares the two and also benchmarks you against sector peers. The third is a criteria failure in the target itself.

The first two are documentation problems. If your submitted inventory does not reconcile to the figure in your published sustainability report, or a category total moved without an explanation you can produce quickly, you are answering queries under a clock that can reject you for being slow. Companies that can trace any reported tonne back to a source document answer in hours. Companies that rebuilt last year’s numbers in a spreadsheet somebody has since left behind answer in weeks, and that is where the deadline risk lives.

One impartiality safeguard is worth knowing because it is time-limited. The lead reviewer must not have done any work for your company in the two years before the validation starts, and if you believe impartiality is at risk you may request a replacement of assigned team members within five working days of the validation schedule being sent, with justification. After that window the objection is much harder to raise.

No, and this is the most consequential sentence in the whole SOP. Validation activities do not extend to verification of GHG inventories or of achieved emissions reductions. SBTi Services checks that your targets conform to the standards. It does not audit the emissions figures underneath them.

The assessment itself is performed through a limited assurance approach, which is what results in a validation statement rather than an audit opinion. Limited assurance is a negative form of conclusion, and what it does and does not tell a reader is set out on limited versus reasonable assurance for emissions. The practical consequence for you is simple: nobody in this process is going to find the error in your category 1 total. If the inventory is wrong, an approved target is wrong too, and the exposure sits with you when a customer, a regulator or an allegation puts it under a real audit.

A six-month clock starts, and missing it is expensive. SBTi Services sets a publication date for approved targets on the SBTi Target Dashboard when it tells you the decision. You can ask to amend that date, but approved targets must be announced within six months of the validation decision date. If a company asks not to publish within six months, the targets are no longer valid and must be resubmitted for validation, under criteria assessment indicators NT C28 and FI C22.

Resubmission means paying the fee again. The published price list by tier and organization type is on SBTi validation fees, and it is worth putting the announcement date in the same project plan as the submission date rather than treating it as a communications afterthought.

Two further post-approval rules matter. Target language is assigned automatically by the portal for corporates, while financial institutions must enter it manually and follow the SBTi templates exactly, since any deviation may be rejected by the FI Target Validation Team. And approval is not permanent: SBTi Services can revoke a validation decision where a company fails to demonstrate conformance, and will remove targets from the dashboard if information is found to have been falsified, unless the non-conformity is corrected before the process concludes.

Whenever you change your base year or the methodologies you used. The SOP puts that squarely inside full target validation, not the cheaper update service, which means a decision that looks like housekeeping quietly moves you into the most expensive service line. Rebaselining after an acquisition is the common trigger.

Two review types run on their own schedule rather than yours. The mandatory five-year target review checks that approved targets still align with current science under C26 and C32, and it is a 40 business day corporate service. Triggered recalculation validation applies under C27 and C33, and also when you want to increase ambition; only the affected targets are reassessed, and companies whose targets remain in line with the criteria in force at their last validation do not have to resubmit. Non-affected active targets are exempt unless new or updated standards require otherwise.

This is where the Corporate Net-Zero Standard version 2.0 becomes a budgeting question rather than a technical one, since it takes effect on February 1, 2027 while version 1 stays open for target setting until the end of 2027. Which of the two you submit under changes the work and the service you buy, and we walk through that decision in Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0 and your Scope 3 software.

A complete, gross, category-level inventory that reconciles to your published reporting, with a documented method behind every line and no proxy years, produced fast enough to answer reviewer queries inside a deadline that can reject you. None of that is climate modeling. It is bookkeeping, and it is where the calendar goes.

Category 1 is usually the bulk of it, because it means assigning tens of thousands of accounts payable lines to a Scope 3 category and an emission factor, defensibly and repeatably. Teams that already run a clean, coded accounts payable ledger start this work from a far better place than teams pulling PDFs out of a shared mailbox. Our carbon accounting software is built for that step: it reads the invoices and the AP export you already have, drafts a scope, category and emission factor for each line with a stated confidence, leaves the uncertain tail for a person to decide, and keeps every reported tonne linked to the document it came from. When a reviewer asks why a category moved, the answer is a query rather than an archaeology project. The boundary decisions, the materiality calls and the basis of preparation stay yours, and a tool that appears to make them for you has only hidden them.

The requirements your targets are judged against are set out on SBTi Scope 3 requirements, the fee schedule on SBTi validation fees, and the capability checklist worth taking into a vendor call in our comparison of carbon accounting software for SBTi target setting. If a customer or a statute is driving the work rather than a target, start with Scope 3 emissions reporting requirements instead.