The CBAM downstream extension is not law yet. Here is what Parliament actually voted for.

By Ahmed Medhat · Published22 September 2026

Your feed told you CBAM just got bigger. It did not. On 15 September 2026 the European Parliament adopted its first-reading position on a proposal to extend CBAM to downstream goods, and then sent the file straight back to committee for negotiations with the Council. A negotiating position is not a law. Nothing in Annex I to Regulation (EU) 2023/956 moved that day, and nothing you import today is in scope that was not in scope on 14 September.

That distinction is the whole point of this piece. The proposal is real, the direction is clear, and the numbers being quoted around it are mostly right. But the date at which any of it binds you is not set, and several of the claims circulating attach the wrong mechanism to the wrong article.

What was actually voted

The file is procedure 2025/0419(COD). It began with a Commission proposal, COM(2025) 989, published on 17 December 2025. The Council agreed its general approach on 12 June 2026. Parliament adopted its position on 15 September 2026, as text T10-0276/2026, and the file was referred back to the Committee on the Environment, Climate and Food Safety for interinstitutional negotiations under Rule 59(4).

What that means in practice: three institutions now hold three different texts and go into trilogue to reconcile them. Until they agree, and until the agreed act is published in the Official Journal, the law is unchanged.

The proposal sets 1 January 2028 as the date the extension would apply from (COM(2025) 989, Article 2). Treat that as the earliest plausible date, not a fixed one. It is a date in a proposal, and proposals move.

The number everyone is quoting

The three institutions disagree about how many products to add, and the gap between them is wide. According to the European Parliamentary Research Service, the Commission proposed roughly 180 products, the Council's general approach covers around 200, and Parliament's position covers 457.

That spread of 180 to 457 is the single most useful fact about this file. It tells you the outcome is genuinely unsettled, and that the eventual scope will probably land between the two ends rather than at either. Anyone telling you 457 products are coming is quoting one institution's opening bid.

The products share a common test: they are goods that are mostly steel or aluminium by weight. The research service puts the average metal content of the added goods at about 79 per cent.

What kind of goods

Around 94 per cent of what would be added are industrial supply-chain items rather than consumer products. Base metal mountings such as hinges and brackets. Cylinders and industrial radiators. Casting machines. Steel structures, pipes and tubes. Fasteners: screws, bolts. Wire and springs.

The remaining six per cent or so are household goods, and the research service's own illustration is a washing machine.

Parliament also added fertiliser products to its position, naming urea, ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulphate.

We are deliberately not reproducing a CN code list here. The product list sits in an annex to the proposal, and the annex is the only place it is authoritative. A list transcribed from a news report is exactly the sort of thing that gets built into a compliance process and then turns out to be wrong. If you need to know whether a specific code is on Parliament's list, read the annex to COM(2025) 989.

Two things being widely misdescribed

Article 27a is not an importer exemption. It is being reported as an escape hatch that Parliament deleted. It is not. In the Commission's proposal, Article 27a is a safeguard power belonging to the Commission: the ability to remove a good from Annex I in the event of a price shock. Parliament did delete it, but it did not simply remove a protection and leave a gap. It replaced the mechanism with a temporary redirection of CBAM revenue towards affected sectors, together with a derogation for the EU's outermost regions.

The anti-circumvention tightening at Article 27(2) did not originate with Parliament. The language about artificially adjusting supply chains in order to benefit from lower default values is in the Commission's own proposal. What Parliament did was sharpen it: bringing slight processing within the concept, allowing default values to be applied where a circumvention pattern is detected, and attaching retroactive liability where shipments are split to stay under a threshold.

That last point deserves attention if you sell into the EU online. What the clause is aimed at is a pattern: arranging a supply chain so that the goods attract a lower default value than the production behind them deserves. Parliament's addition of retroactive liability for split online shipments sits in that same anti-circumvention article, and is separate from the 50-tonne threshold, which aggregates every CBAM good an importer brings in across a whole calendar year and cannot be reached by splitting anything.

The decarbonisation fund is a different file

A Temporary Decarbonisation Fund is being discussed in the same breath as this vote, and it is not part of the same instrument. It is procedure 2025/0418(COD), from proposal COM(2025) 990, voted the same day. The Commission's version would draw 25 per cent of CBAM revenue across 2028 and 2029. Parliament wants it running from 2027 to 2029. The Council has not taken a position on it at all.

Two files, two timetables, two sets of odds. Conflating them makes the fund look more certain than it is.

This is not the amendment that already passed

There is a genuine CBAM amendment already in force, and it is easy to confuse with this one. Regulation (EU) 2025/2083, adopted in October 2025, is the simplification package: the 50-tonne mass threshold, the move of the first declaration deadline to 30 September 2027, the reduction in the certificate holding requirement to 50 per cent, and the start of certificate sales from 1 February 2027. We wrote that one up separately, and it is law today.

The downstream extension is a different instrument at a different stage. If a briefing you are reading treats them as one thing, it is not a briefing to rely on.

What to do now

Nothing, in compliance terms. There is no obligation to prepare for, no registration to make, no data to start collecting for a scope that does not yet exist.

What is worth doing is commercial. If a meaningful share of what you sell into the EU is a finished steel or aluminium product, you are now on a list that three institutions are arguing over, and the argument will conclude. Two questions are worth answering while there is time to answer them calmly: how much of your EU-bound revenue sits in goods that are mostly steel or aluminium by weight, and do you know the embedded emissions of the metal you buy. The second question is the hard one, and it is the same question the existing scope already asks of your customers.

If the answer is that you do not know, that is not a reason to wait for the trilogue. It takes a season to get a straight emissions figure out of a supply chain, and the exporters who found that out did so under the current scope.

Where this goes next

Trilogue, then a provisional agreement, then formal adoption by both institutions, then publication in the Official Journal. Any of those steps can change the text, and the scope number is the most likely thing to move.

We track the adopted CBAM acts daily and publish what changes. This file is not one of them yet. When it becomes one, it will appear in our updates log with the article and annex references, and the product list will be read from the act rather than from a summary of it.