What changed in the CBAM acts in August 2026, and what did not

Published 15 September 2026

A compliance reader wants two things from any period of watching: to know what moved, and to be sure that "nothing moved" is a finding rather than an absence of looking. This is the first entry of that kind on this site, and it opens our compliance change log, which keeps the same record from now on with the last check stamped on it.

What the watch reads, and how often

The watch holds sixteen acts: the CBAM acts in force, from Regulation (EU) 2023/956 to the correcting act of July 2026, plus the EU ETS act that sets the benchmark values the CBAM benchmarks derive from; the superseded transitional-period reporting act is held but not watched. It reads each act's record on the EU Publications Office's machine-readable endpoint. A deep check compares every watched act against its recorded fingerprint and runs two discovery queries for acts we do not yet hold. From 7 August 2026 that check ran at least once a day and recorded the same verdict each time: sixteen of sixteen acts read, none corrected, none new. In the first week of the month the held set was still being completed and several runs read only part of it; the corrigenda those early reads surfaced against seven held acts were each read and found to be language-specific, with no English expression, so no English text or figure moved.

On two mornings, 17 and 23 August, the run could not read a single record and wrote a failure rather than a clean verdict; a later run the same day read all sixteen and found nothing moved. That distinction is the whole point of the log: a check that cannot see does not say "no change".

What did not change

No act in force was amended, corrected or replaced in August 2026. The most recent act remains Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740, adopted on 20 July 2026 and published on 31 July, which corrects Annexes I and IV of the default values act, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621. Its own recital says why: some production route indicators in those annexes were missing or incorrect, which made the free allocation adjustment under Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2620 impossible to calculate correctly for the goods concerned.

So the rules an importer files under in 2027, and the rules a producer's emissions data is read against, are the same at the end of August as at the start.

What the Commission published instead

The month's movement was in documents, not acts. The Commission published three, and each has a direct consequence.

10 August: the default values workbook, version 2. The workbook's own version history names its authority as Annexes I and II to Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740, replacing the earlier version built on Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621. For an importer who declares on default values, this is the table that now applies; our own default values were compared against it line by line and hold the same figures, after one value was corrected, one country's single published good was added and two country rows were relabelled to match it.

14 August: ten guidance documents for the definitive period. No. 1 introduces the concepts, No. 2 is the quick guide for non-EU operators, No. 3 sets out the methods for calculating embedded emissions, No. 4 the free allocation adjustment, and No. 5a to 5f cover cement, hydrogen, fertilisers, iron and steel, aluminium and electricity in turn. They are non-binding: the acts remain the authority, and where a guidance document and an act read differently we cite the act. Three points in them matter at once for a producer preparing 2026 data, and all three are the guidance's reading of the acts, No. 3 above all. It reads the system boundary as stationary units only, so forklifts, trucks and other mobile machinery fall outside it. It reads actual data for a precursor as usable only where it comes from a verification report by an accredited verifier that covers the period in which the precursor was produced, with the default value applying otherwise. And it reads the reporting period for 2026 as the calendar year only.

August: guidance on verification and accreditation. A 141-page document for verifiers and national accreditation bodies. It changes nothing a producer must do directly, but it is what the verifier who signs a producer's report will be working from.

What is due next

The next dated entry the log expects is the third quarterly certificate price of 2026, on the Commission's announced publication day of 5 October 2026. The price is calculated in the first calendar week of the following quarter and published in the week after that (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2548 Art. 1(2) and 4(1)); the official figures are on the price tracker. Beyond it, the first CBAM declaration for 2026 imports is due by 30 September 2027 (Regulation (EU) 2023/956 Art. 6(1), as amended by Regulation (EU) 2025/2083); the compliance calendar lists every dated duty in order.

How to read the log

Every line on the change log is one of four things: an act, with the Official Journal date printed in the act itself; a Commission document, on the date the Commission's page lists for it; a certificate price, on its announced day; or a check, which is the watch's own record. The stamp at the top is read from that record, never typed. When a week has nothing to say, the stamp says so, and that silence is a finding.

Regulatory sources: Regulation (EU) 2023/956 Art. 6(1), as amended by Regulation (EU) 2025/2083; Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740, recitals (1) and (2); Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621; Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2620; Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2548 Art. 1(2) and 4(1). Documents: the Commission's CBAM legislation and guidance pages, as recorded in our held copies.