CSRD deadlines: which dates are spent and which are live

In short

• The next date that matters is financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2027, reached through national law transposed by 19 March 2027.
• Three widely quoted dates were deleted rather than moved: sector ESRS on 30 June 2026, listed SME reporting, and reasonable assurance in 2028.
• Because CSRD is a directive, every company-facing date is a national date, not an EU one.

The next live date is the start of financial years beginning on or after 1 January 2027, which is when the revised CSRD scope first bites, reaching you through national law that Member States must transpose by 19 March 2027. Behind it sit 1 July 2027 for the Commission's limited assurance standards and 1 January 2028 for third-country groups. Several dates still described as upcoming are not: 30 June 2026 for sector standards and 1 October 2028 for reasonable assurance were deleted from the text, not postponed.

What is the full calendar?

Everything below is verified against the Official Journal. The status column is the part most calendars leave out.

Which dates have already passed but are still sold as upcoming?

Three, and each one is quoted confidently somewhere.

30 June 2026, the sector-specific ESRS deadline. It is gone. Directive (EU) 2026/470 deleted the third subparagraph of Article 29b(1) of Directive 2013/34/EU, which was both the empowerment to adopt sector standards and the deadline for a first set. Recital 20 gives the reason: avoiding an increase in the number of prescribed datapoints. Non-binding sector guidance remains possible, but nothing is promised on a date. If you are told to prepare for a sector standard, you are preparing for a document that no longer has a legal basis.

1 October 2026, the original assurance standards deadline. It moved to 1 July 2027. That one is a genuine postponement rather than a deletion.

1 October 2028, reasonable assurance. Deleted. The empowerment to adopt reasonable assurance standards was removed in February 2026, on the stated ground of avoiding an increase in assurance costs. The planned step up from limited to reasonable assurance no longer exists anywhere in the text, so a project plan that budgets for it is budgeting for nothing.

Two more dates are worth naming as absent rather than passed. Listed SMEs were once due to report from financial year 2026, then from financial year 2028 after the stop-the-clock. Neither date survives: the wave was deleted, along with the Article 29c empowerment for a separate listed-SME standard.

What has to be true by 1 January 2027?

If you exceed both thresholds, EUR 450 million of net turnover and an average of 1,000 employees, then the financial year beginning on or after that date is the first one you report. Working backwards, four things need to be settled before it starts, and only one of them is a software decision.

Your boundary. The sustainability statement covers the same reporting undertaking as your financial statements. Then, for greenhouse gases, associates, joint ventures and jointly controlled operations come in at 100 percent where you have operational control, not at your equity share. Two boundaries in one report. Deciding which entities sit where is a finance conversation, and it is slow.

Your scope 2 method, on both bases. Location based and market based figures have to exist separately for every site, which means supplier contracts and residual mix data have to be in hand before the year starts, not reconstructed afterwards.

Your significant scope 3 categories. Not all fifteen automatically, but the ones that are a priority for you, and the selection has to be defensible.

Your evidence trail. The statement carries a limited assurance opinion. Until the harmonised standards arrive on 1 July 2027, your provider works to national ones and will ask how each figure was produced.

Is 19 March 2027 a date for you or for your government?

For your government, and this distinction decides how much any EU date is worth to your planning.

CSRD is an amending directive. It binds Member States to legislate, not companies to report. Every company-facing date is therefore a date by which national law must produce an effect. Your actual start date is whatever your national transposing act says, and Member States do sometimes transpose late or with their own timing.

There is one place where this bites immediately. Directive (EU) 2026/470 gave Member States an option, not an obligation, to relieve undertakings below the new thresholds for financial years starting between 1 January 2025 and 31 December 2026. Whether a first-wave company below EUR 450 million or 1,000 employees actually had to file for 2025 and 2026 therefore depends entirely on where it files. There is no EU-wide answer, and anyone giving you one for your country without citing the national act is guessing.

Which dates are adopted but not yet real?

The two Commission delegated regulations of 3 July 2026, C(2026) 5010 on revised and simplified standards and C(2026) 5011 on the voluntary standard.

Both were still in the Parliament and Council scrutiny period on 28 August 2026. The Commission's own level two page describes each as not in force until it is published in the Official Journal, and C(2026) 5010 still carried an unfilled entry-into-force placeholder. Until they are published, the standards in force are Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/2772 as amended by (EU) 2025/1416.

The practical rule for a project plan: design to the 2023 standards, and treat any article describing what the simplified version requires as a forecast. That includes the widely repeated datapoint reduction figure, which comes from an explanatory memorandum to an act that is not law.

What should you do with this calendar?

Two things, depending on which side of the threshold you are on.

If you are in scope, the date to work back from is the first day of your 2027 financial year, not any reporting or filing date after it. Data you did not collect during the year cannot be collected once the year has closed, and that is what makes 1 January the real deadline.

If you are out of scope, none of these dates are yours, and that is worth saying out loud because the calendars circulating do not distinguish. What you have instead is a customer whose 2027 financial year is coming and who will ask you for value chain data during it. Suppliers up to an average of 1,000 employees now have a statutory ceiling on what may be demanded for that purpose, and a contract clause overriding it is not binding. Where that line falls is covered in what a customer may not ask you, and the standard the ceiling is measured against is the VSME standard.

Either way, an inventory you can repeat annually is the thing that makes any of these dates survivable. The platform has 5,000+ users and a free account that produces a first number without a sales call.

One honest limit if you are planning multi-year. A Small Business reviewer rated us 5 out of 5 on G2 in August 2026 and noted that there is no forecasting, adding that we had told them it is on the development list. If your 2027 plan needs modelled future years rather than measured past ones, that is not in the product today.

Sources: Directive (EU) 2022/2464, Directive (EU) 2025/794, Directive (EU) 2026/470, Directive 2013/34/EU, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/2772, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/1416, Commission Recommendation (EU) 2025/1710, and Commission acts C(2026) 5010 and C(2026) 5011. Read against the Official Journal text and verified 28 August 2026.

Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.