SBTi validation fees and cost: the full 2026 USD price matrix, tiers, timeline and submission requirements

Last updated September 2026. SBTi validation costs a US corporate $13,000 to $26,000 for near-term targets, depending on annual turnover, and $17,000 to $34,000 for the discounted near-term and net-zero package. Small and medium enterprises pay $1,250 or $2,000. Financial institutions pay $20,000 to $49,800. Those are the fees in the Target Validation Service Offerings V6.1, released October 27, 2025 and effective January 5, 2026. They cover the validation only. They do not cover building the greenhouse gas inventory the submission stands on, which is where most of the real budget goes.

This page reproduces the published matrix in full, explains which tier your company falls into, and sets out the criteria your inventory has to meet before any of it is worth paying for.

Between $1,250 and $49,800, set by organization type and annual turnover. SBTi Services uses a four-tier model for corporates and financial institutions and a two-tier model for SMEs. The tier is fixed at registration, when SBTi Services reviews your latest financial statement, so it is not something you self-select. Prices are issued in USD for every company except UK-registered ones, which may be invoiced in GBP plus 20% VAT.

Two things in that table save real money if you notice them early. The near-term and net-zero package is a genuine discount: $17,000 at Tier 1 against $24,000 if you buy the two services separately, a saving of $7,000. But SBTi Services is explicit that the package rate is only available when the targets are originally submitted as a package. Amend the service type later and you are charged the full standalone fee for each. Deciding whether you want a long-term net-zero target has to happen before submission, not during review.

The second is the FLAG and/or buildings line. It is an add-on that must be submitted alongside another service, and one fee covers both FLAG and buildings targets rather than two. Companies required to set forestry, land and agriculture targets often budget for two separate add-ons and do not need to.

Annual turnover thresholds, expressed in euros because SBTi registration works in euros even though most invoices are issued in USD. The thresholds differ by organization type, and the difference between the corporate and financial institution tables catches out mid-sized banks and asset managers in particular.

A US company with $300m of revenue sits in corporate Tier 2 and pays $16,000 for near-term validation. The same company as a financial institution sits in FI Tier 1 and pays $20,000. Organization type moves the number more than size does at the bottom of the range.

Financial institution buildings targets are free as an add-on. SBTi Services states plainly that FI near-term and FI net-zero validation fees are inclusive of the buildings service, both for new targets and for updates, so there is no separate line to budget for. That is the opposite of the corporate treatment, where buildings targets sit inside a paid FLAG and buildings add-on.

No. SBTi discounts are set by two tests applied together: annual turnover and the World Bank income classification of the country where your headquarters sits. Discount Level 1 and Discount Level 2 are both restricted to companies headquartered in low-income or lower-middle-income economies. The United States is a high-income economy, so a US-headquartered company pays the full published fee regardless of how small it is.

This is worth stating clearly because the discount columns appear in the same table as the standard prices, and a $2,000 figure sitting next to $13,000 has misled more than one budget request. If your headquarters is in the US, the $13,000 column is your number. Discounts must also be requested during registration; SBTi Services will not consider them afterward, and asks companies that can afford the standard fee to pay it so the discount stays available to those who cannot.

SBTi Services delivers corporate validation results within 40 business days of the service start date, and financial institution results within 60 days. SMEs get a tailored validation service with no committed timeframe. Those windows run from the service start date, not from the day you decide to set a target, and they cover the review itself rather than the months of inventory work that precede it.

Two dates after approval matter more than most companies expect. Under criterion C28, a company with approved targets must announce the target publicly on the SBTi website within six months of the approval date, and targets left unannounced after six months have to go through the approval process again unless a different timeframe was agreed in writing. Paying the fee and then sitting on the result is a way to pay it twice.

The second is criterion C26. All active targets must be reviewed at least every five years to check they still meet current SBTi criteria, and targets that no longer meet them have to be updated and revalidated at the update fee. SBTi validation is a recurring cost, not a one-time one, which is the single most common gap between a first budget request and reality.

Register with SBTi Services, which reviews your latest financial statement and assigns your tier and organization type. Build a greenhouse gas inventory that meets the boundary and coverage criteria. Model targets with a currently approved SBTi method or tool. Submit, pay, and go through technical review, a validation call and a decision. Then announce publicly within six months and report progress annually.

The step that decides the outcome is the inventory, not the paperwork. The criteria below are the ones that most often send a submission back.

Read C5 and C6 together and you get the reason SBTi submissions stall. C5 caps what you may leave out of the inventory at 5% of Scope 3. C6 then measures your 67% target coverage against reported plus excluded emissions. There is no version of this where a partial inventory is enough. You need to know what is in every Scope 3 category before you can prove that the categories you targeted add up to two thirds of the whole, and the recommendation to pick a 2030 target year under R7 does not change that arithmetic.

That screening problem is the one our product is built for. Every purchase, utility bill, fuel card charge and freight invoice already sits in accounts payable. Classifying those lines into GHG Protocol scopes and categories gives you a defensible first pass at all fifteen categories, which is what tells you whether C4 applies and where the 67% has to come from. The method is set out on how to calculate Scope 3 emissions and the category boundaries on the 15 Scope 3 categories.

The SBTi released Corporate Net-Zero Standard Version 2.0 on June 11, 2026, with effective dates from February 1, 2027. Version 1 of the standard remains open for setting targets until the end of 2027, and companies that already hold 2030 targets are told to set their next cycle, 2030 to 2035, under V2.0 from 2028. So a US company submitting today is still working to Version 1.3.1 and the Corporate Near-Term Criteria V5.3.1, and has a defined runway rather than a cliff.

Getting this sequence right matters because a lot of published commentary compresses it into a single date. The version history in the standard itself gives the release date as June 11, 2026 and the effective date as February 1, 2027, while the transition text keeps Version 1 open through the end of 2027. Both are true and they describe different things.

The line that changes budgets is the assurance requirement. A medium-sized company headquartered in the United States is Category A, because Category B only takes medium-sized companies from lower-income countries. That means limited assurance of target base year data becomes a requirement rather than a nice-to-have once V2.0 applies to you, along with a disclosed transition plan and Scope 3 target setting. Assurance is priced on how traceable your numbers are, so the work that makes an inventory auditable is the same work that keeps that engagement affordable. What limited assurance involves is covered in limited versus reasonable assurance for emissions, and the wider readiness question on carbon audit software.

The validation fee is the smallest and the most predictable line. A realistic budget for a first-time US corporate submission has four parts, and only one of them appears in the SBTi price list.

Be sceptical of any all-in figure quoted without those four lines separated, including figures quoted in euros for European companies, which do not translate to a US cost base. The one number you can rely on is the published fee, because SBTi Services publishes it and revises it in a versioned document with stated effective dates.

For how the ongoing inventory cost compares against platform pricing generally, see carbon accounting software cost. If a customer or an investor is the reason you are looking at SBTi at all, supplier emissions reporting software covers that position directly.

Because both programs now treat a validated science-based target as a gate rather than a bonus, which is why SBTi shows up on a lot of budgets that were never planning for it.

On CDP, essential criterion EC-CC25 sits at the A List level and asks for an SBTi-approved Scope 1 and 2 target, or an absolute reduction of at least 4.2% a year. Without one of those, an A is not reachable no matter how complete the rest of the response is. The full criteria set is on CDP essential criteria and the band arithmetic on the CDP A List.

On EcoVadis, the Carbon Rating methodology names evidence of science-aligned targets as a mandatory prerequisite for the Leader band at 76 to 100, alongside formal Scope 1 and Scope 2 absolute reduction targets. A company with no SBTi submission is capped below Leader for that cycle regardless of its data quality. Those thresholds are set out on EcoVadis carbon management software.

All three run on one inventory. Building it once to the strictest of the three requirements, which is SBTi's 5% exclusion cap, is cheaper than building it three times, and SBTi itself recommends disclosing progress through CDP's climate change questionnaire under R12.

Being precise about the boundary: target modeling happens in the SBTi's own tools and target setting methods, and validation happens on the SBTi Services validation portal. Carbonaccounting.ai does not submit targets to the SBTi, is not an SBTi partner or approved provider, and does not model target pathways. No carbon accounting product validates a target for you.

What software is for is the layer underneath: the greenhouse gas inventory that the criteria measure. Our approach starts from accounts payable, utility and fuel records, classifies each line into a GHG Protocol scope and category, and keeps the source document attached to the number, so the figure can be traced back when a reviewer asks how the Scope 3 screening was done or where the 5% exclusion sits. That traceability is also what makes the V2.0 limited assurance requirement affordable rather than painful.

The product is in early access. The classification demo above is live and does what it says. Platform capabilities beyond it are described as planned. For the method, see GHG accounting software and how carbon accounting works. For an honest look at the alternatives, best carbon accounting software.

If SBTi is one of several requests landing at once, the sequencing matters more than the individual submissions. CDP reporting software and EcoVadis carbon management software cover the two programs that most often push a company toward SBTi, and the best carbon accounting software for SBTi target setting compares what each type of tool actually does for the inventory underneath. If a US regulator rather than a customer is driving the work, start at SB 253 reporting software and EPA GHG reporting.