In short
- The next dated obligation in the instrument itself is 1 January 2028, when Sections 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 of Annex V to Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2178 apply.
- 1 January 2026 and 26 February 2026 are both behind us and are still written up as forthcoming.
- The date that decides whether any of it reaches you is set by your own Member State, because Directive (EU) 2026/470 is a directive.
The next Taxonomy date written into the instruments is 1 January 2028, when Sections 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 of Annex V to Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2178 begin to apply, per the amendment made by Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73. Everything else on most published calendars has already happened. The two big ones landed in early 2026: the simplification act applied from 1 January and the scope cut was published on 26 February. And the date that governs whether any of it reaches you at all is not an EU date. It is your Member State's transposition date.
What is the whole calendar, in order?
Six entries, five of them already behind us.
| Date | What happened, or happens | Source instrument |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2022 | Article 8 disclosures begin for climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation | Regulation (EU) 2020/852 |
| 1 January 2023 | Article 8 disclosures begin for the remaining four environmental objectives | Regulation (EU) 2020/852 |
| 8 January 2026 | The simplification act is published in the Official Journal, in force twenty days later | Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73 |
| 1 January 2026 | That act applies. The 10 percent materiality exemption, simplified templates and simplified generic do-no-significant-harm criteria take effect | Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73 |
| 26 February 2026 | The Omnibus directive is published, having been adopted on 24 February. It narrows Articles 19a and 29a and therefore narrows Article 8 | Directive (EU) 2026/470 |
| 1 January 2028 | Sections 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 of Annex V to Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2178 apply | Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73 |
Two of those rows carry an oddity worth noting rather than smoothing over. The simplification act was adopted by the Commission on 4 July 2025 and only published on 8 January 2026, while applying from 1 January 2026. And undertakings could still apply the pre-2026 rules for a financial year that started during 2025, so two different rule sets were live in parallel for a while.
Which dates are still described as upcoming when they are not?
Two, and both of them are the ones people plan around.
1 January 2026 is behind us. The relief in Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73 is not a proposal and not a forthcoming simplification. It applies. A non-financial undertaking may omit assessing eligibility and alignment for any activity below 10 percent of the denominator of the relevant turnover, capital expenditure or operating expenditure KPI. Credit institutions, asset managers, investment firms and insurers have equivalent 10 percent derogations, including for the Green Asset Ratio. If your project plan still has "await simplification" on it, delete the line and take the relief.
26 February 2026 is behind us too. Directive (EU) 2026/470 was adopted on 24 February 2026 and published two days later. It reset Articles 19a and 29a of Directive 2013/34/EU to undertakings above both EUR 450 000 000 of net turnover and an average of 1 000 employees. Because Article 8(1) of the Taxonomy Regulation binds whoever is caught by those two articles, that reset also narrows the Taxonomy population, without a word of the Taxonomy Regulation changing. When it takes effect for your company depends on your country's transposing law.
There is also a number to watch when you are reading anyone else's calendar. Some write-ups attribute the January 2026 changes to "Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/76". That instrument does not exist. The simplification act is 2026/73, and a source that gets the citation wrong has probably not read it.
What has to be true by 1 January 2028?
Less than the date suggests, and it is worth being precise rather than dramatic about it.
What applies from that date is two named sections of Annex V to the Disclosures Delegated Act, inserted by the 2026 amendment. Annex V is where the reporting templates live. So this is a template date rather than a new duty, and it is relevant to you only if you are inside Article 8 scope in the first place. If the borrowed scope test leaves you outside, nothing about 1 January 2028 changes your position.
The honest framing for most readers, then: there is no Taxonomy deadline coming for you. There is a Taxonomy question coming for you, from a lender, and it has no statutory date at all. It arrives when your facility is refinanced or reviewed.
Which date decides whether I report at all?
A national one, and nobody can give it to you from Brussels.
Directive (EU) 2026/470 is a directive. It binds Member States to legislate, and the exact date on which the narrower scope takes effect for an undertaking in a given country is fixed by that country's transposing law. This is the single most common place a Taxonomy calendar goes wrong: an EU publication date gets reported as the day the change reached companies, and those are different things.
So the sequence to hold is: the EU date tells you the direction of travel, your national transposition tells you when it lands, and your own financial year end tells you which reporting period it first bites on. Only the first of those three is public knowledge on 28 August 2026.
What runs on no deadline at all?
The part that reaches mid-sized companies, which is why it feels so shapeless.
Credit institutions in scope publish a Green Asset Ratio, and the templates carry explicit lines for loans collateralised by residential immovable property, for building renovation loans, for housing financing within local government financing, and for collateral obtained by taking possession of residential and commercial immovable properties. Those lines cannot be filled from bank records alone. The bank asks the borrower, on the bank's own cycle.
What that means practically is that the evidence has to exist before the request, because you will not get months of notice. For a building you own, the evidence is documentary rather than analytical: the Energy Performance Certificate showing class A, or adequate evidence that the asset sits within the top 15 percent of the national or regional stock by operational primary energy demand, plus, for a large non-residential building rated above 290 kW for heating or cooling, evidence that it is efficiently operated through energy performance monitoring and assessment.
Where does an emissions calendar fit next to this one?
It does not, and conflating them is how good teams end up late on both.
The dates above govern financial ratios and energy evidence. Your greenhouse gas inventory runs on a different clock, set by whichever obligation or counterparty actually asks for it. The overlap is upstream, in the meter readings and the entity boundary, not in the deadlines. Our page on choosing carbon accounting software as a smaller company works through that separation for teams doing both.
If a first inventory is the thing on your own calendar, you can build one on a free account on the platform without a sales call. One limit stated plainly first, because deadlines make it matter: a small business reviewer said on G2 in August 2026 that loading the data takes a lot of manual work, and that once it is in, everything works perfectly. Getting it in is the part to plan around. Where the data itself is genuinely messy, carbon footprint consulting is the faster route.
Sources: Regulation (EU) 2020/852, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2021/2178, Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73 published OJ L, 2026/73 of 8 January 2026, Directive (EU) 2026/470 adopted 24 February 2026, read against the Official Journal text. Verified 28 August 2026. No national date is stated here, because 2026/470 is a directive and transposition varies.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-17.
