Scope 3 categories: all 15 categories of Scope 3 emissions in the GHG Protocol list, 1 to 15

Last updated August 2026. The 15 categories come from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard, published in 2011, and the list has not changed since. What has changed is how many people need it: CDP asks you to mark every category relevant or not, IFRS S2 requires you to consider all 15, and California SB 253 brings Scope 3 into US law from 2027. This page is the working reference: the full list, what belongs in each, the data each one needs, and which ones actually carry your emissions.

The 15 Scope 3 categories are: purchased goods and services, capital goods, fuel and energy-related activities, upstream transportation and distribution, waste generated in operations, business travel, employee commuting, and upstream leased assets (categories 1 to 8, upstream); then downstream transportation and distribution, processing of sold products, use of sold products, end-of-life treatment of sold products, downstream leased assets, franchises, and investments (categories 9 to 15, downstream). Each is defined below.

There are 15. Eight are upstream, numbered 1 to 8, and seven are downstream, numbered 9 to 15. The number has been fixed since the GHG Protocol published the Scope 3 Standard in 2011, and no framework in use adds or removes any: CDP, IFRS S2, the SBTi and California SB 253 all reference the same 15. If you see a sixteenth category anywhere, it is either a sub-category someone has invented for internal reporting or a misreading of the list.

Upstream Scope 3 categories cover emissions from everything you buy and everything it takes to run your operations, categories 1 to 8. Downstream categories cover what happens to your products after they leave you, categories 9 to 15. The split is about direction of trade, not size. The dividing line falls between categories 8 and 9.

Most companies find their emissions are almost entirely upstream, because they buy far more than they sell into further processing or energy-consuming use. The exception is decisive: if your product burns fuel or draws power while a customer uses it, downstream category 11 can be larger than everything upstream combined.

Six of the fifteen account for most of the questions, either because they are large or because their boundaries are genuinely confusing.

Every category uses the same arithmetic: activity data multiplied by an emission factor, summed. What differs is the activity data and how specific it is. The GHG Protocol allows four methods, running from supplier-specific primary data through hybrid and average-data down to spend-based factors per dollar, and you are expected to mix them across the fifteen rather than pick one for the whole inventory.

In practice the choice per category is driven by what data exists. Category 3 uses figures you already collected for Scope 1 and 2. Category 6 uses travel bookings. Category 1 starts spend-based and migrates to supplier data for the top suppliers. The method-by-method detail, the step sequence and the US factor sets to apply are on how to calculate Scope 3 emissions, and the tools that do it are compared on Scope 3 emissions software.

CDP does not require you to calculate all 15, but it does require you to account for all 15. Its climate module asks you to mark each category as relevant and calculated, relevant but not yet calculated, or not relevant with a stated explanation. Blanket exclusions without a reason lose points, and from 2026 the reason itself is a scored drop-down rather than free text, so a plausible paragraph no longer earns the marks. How to run the screen and what counts as a defensible exclusion is covered in CDP Scope 3 relevance. An incomplete screening also blocks the Leadership essential criteria: EC-CC15 asks for base year emissions across every category you have marked calculated plus real calculations for at least one, and it is a stated pre-requisite for the verification criterion. The requirement chain is set out on CDP essential criteria.

No, but you do have to consider all 15 and be able to say why you excluded any. The GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain Standard asks you to evaluate every category and report the ones that are relevant. IFRS S2 takes the same position: you must consider all 15 categories, determine which are relevant, and disclose which ones your Scope 3 figure includes. CDP is stricter in practice, because its climate module asks you to mark each of the 15 as relevant and calculated, relevant but not yet calculated, or not relevant with a stated reason, and blanket exclusions without a reason lose points. In every framework the failure mode is the same: silence on a category reads as an omission, while an explained exclusion reads as a boundary decision. Our guide to Scope 3 materiality assessment covers how to document those judgements.

For most companies, category 1, purchased goods and services, is the largest, because it absorbs almost everything the business buys. The main exception is any company whose products consume energy in use: for a vehicle manufacturer, an appliance maker, an oil and gas producer or a software company selling hardware, category 11, use of sold products, usually dwarfs everything else and can be most of the total footprint on its own. Financial institutions are a third case, where category 15, investments, is the whole story. Knowing which of these three patterns you fall into before you start collecting data is worth more than any amount of precision on the small categories.

Materiality is concentrated. For most services companies, categories 1 (purchased goods and services), 2 (capital goods) and 6 (business travel) carry nearly everything. For manufacturers, category 1 plus 4 (upstream transport) and 11 (use of sold products, if products consume energy). For logistics, fuel is Scope 1 and the subcontracted fleet is category 4. A spend-based screening pass, like the one our demo runs, is the standard way to find your own concentration before spending money on data collection. The definitions above come from the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard; the overview of all three scopes is on our scope 1 2 3 emissions page.

In practice, category classification is an accounts-payable problem: ten thousand invoice lines, each needing a scope, a category and a factor. That is the exact classification pass our carbon accounting software automates: AI drafts the mapping line by line with a stated confidence, a human reviews the low-confidence tail, and every decision stays attached to the source line. See what scope 3 emissions reporting then requires, or read the plain-language Scope 3 definition first.

Where these categories end up being read matters as much as how you calculate them. If a customer or investor asked you to disclose, the categories go into the climate module of the CDP questionnaire, one relevance statement at a time. If California SB 253 applies to you, Scope 3 follows in 2027 under SB 253 reporting software. If your reporting basis is the ISSB standards, our note on IFRS carbon accounting covers how IFRS S2 treats the same 15 categories. The build sequence for all three is in the GHG inventory checklist, and the cheapest way to get a first number for every category is the method in calculating Scope 3 from spend.