In short
- Nothing is credited without an uploaded document behind it, and there is a 55-document limit, so choose the claims you can prove.
- Greenhouse gas and energy data must cover 95 percent of the registered scope to count at all, against 80 percent for other reporting.
- One input is collected without you. 360 Watch findings come from outside and you cannot upload your way past them.
EcoVadis is a commercial supplier rating that scores documents, not intentions, so the data it needs is a folder rather than a calculation. It binds nobody by law: you are in it because you accepted, almost always after a customer invited you. What it wants is evidence against seven management indicators across four themes, uploaded within a 55-document limit, for the legal entity, site or group you registered. On carbon there is one rule that decides everything: greenhouse gas and energy data must cover 95 percent of the assessed scope to be credited at all. Start with the boundary, not the arithmetic.
What are the seven things being evidenced?
Each theme score is a weighted average of seven management indicators, and knowing them turns a vague questionnaire into a list.
| Indicator | What a strong document looks like | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Policy | A signed policy with a quantitative target and a date | Management, not a template download |
| Endorsement | Evidence the policy is owned at senior level | Board minutes, signed statements |
| Measure | Records of concrete actions taken, with dates | Project files, procurement records, training logs |
| Certifications | Valid certificates within their own stated period | Certification bodies |
| Coverage | Evidence of how far measures extend across the organisation | Applies to large companies, 1,000 employees and above |
| Reporting | Reported results and key performance indicators | Your inventory, energy records, HR data |
| 360 Watch | Nothing you can upload | Collected by EcoVadis independently |
That last row is worth sitting with. 360 Watch is external stakeholder feedback, drawn from non-governmental organisations, trade unions, government sources and grievance mechanisms, gathered by EcoVadis without reference to what you submit. It is the one input the rated company does not control, and certain findings also disqualify a company from a medal.
Which themes is all of this collected for?
Four themes covering 21 criteria, and the second one is habitually misnamed.
Environment. Labor and Human Rights. Ethics. Sustainable Procurement. Calling the second one "labour" alone drops the human rights half, which is precisely the part a procurement reader is checking for.
Inside Environment there are nine issues: Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Water, Biodiversity, Air Pollution, Materials and Chemicals and Waste, Product Use, Product End-of-Life, Customer Health and Safety, and Environmental Services and Advocacy. Carbon is one of those nine, inside one of those four. It is important to the people reading this page and it is a slice of the whole for the analyst.
What is the rule that actually decides whether my carbon data counts?
Coverage, and it is unusually blunt.
The Reporting indicator normally requires reporting to cover at least 80 percent of the scope of assessment. Greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption are the exception: they have to be provided for 95 percent of the scope to be credited. Below that they earn nothing, however carefully they were prepared.
This inverts the instinct most teams bring. The temptation is to produce a beautiful number for the sites where the data is clean and note the rest as a limitation. That approach scores zero on the indicator. A rougher figure that includes every site and legal entity inside the registered scope scores. Completeness beats precision, and the boundary is the first decision, not the last.
The registered scope is your own choice at registration, which means the fix is sometimes upstream of the data entirely: register the entity you can evidence rather than the group that looks more impressive.
How current does the data have to be?
Less current than people assume, and the different clocks are worth separating.
Inside a reassessment, EcoVadis applies validity periods to submitted evidence. Policies and actions count for 8 years. Reporting on key performance indicators counts for 2 annual reporting cycles. Certificates count for their own stated period. So a footprint for your last complete financial year is comfortably current, and rebuilding it in a rush because a deadline appeared is usually unnecessary.
Separately, the scorecard itself is valid for 12 months from publication, medals and badges expire with it, and reassessment is annual and voluntary, occurring only if the rated company decides to renew. The subscription period is a fourth clock again, running 1 or 3 years, and an active subscription is needed to share a scorecard even while it is still inside its twelve months.
What does the carbon evidence file need to contain?
Five things, and only one of them is a number.
A stated boundary. Which legal entities, which sites, which countries, matched to what you registered. "Our operations" is not a boundary.
A named method. Which standard was applied, which factor set was used, which activities were included and which were left out, and why.
The activity data with source records behind it. Energy bills, fuel records, mileage. The number is only as good as what sits under it, and an analyst checking evidence is checking exactly that.
A prior year on the same basis. One year is a data point. Two years on a consistent basis show a direction, and reporting data stays valid for two annual cycles, so the earlier year is still usable evidence.
A target, and evidence of action against it. The rating asks whether a company has carbon reduction targets, though EcoVadis states its methodology does not specifically refer to the targets and objectives of the Paris Agreement.
If your invitation names the EcoVadis Carbon Rating rather than the sustainability assessment, this list becomes the entire assessment rather than one part of it. That methodology strictly mirrors the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, adopts its definitions for scopes 1, 2 and all 15 scope 3 categories, credits monitoring only at 95 percent of operational boundaries, and weights Reporting at half the score.
How many documents can I actually upload?
Fifty-five, which is fewer than most companies expect and is the reason to plan the file rather than empty a drive into it.
Only questionnaire declarations supported by document evidence can be credited, so an unevidenced claim is worth nothing and, in a file with a limit, worse than nothing because it consumes attention. Submitted documents are confidential and are not shared with requesting companies by default; they are shared only if you choose to share them.
The practical sequence that follows: decide which claims you can prove, write only those, and attach the proof at the time. Adding evidence retrospectively costs far more than attaching it as you go, and it is the failure that repeats every cycle when the person who held the spreadsheet has moved on.
Where should I start?
With the boundary, then the energy and greenhouse gas data across all of it, then the documents for everything else.
That order exists because the 95 percent rule is the one place where good carbon work can earn no credit at all. Most of the carbon evidence is graded; that rule is binary.
Our platform states support for EcoVadis compliance workflows alongside SBTi and B-Corp. It guides you through GHG Protocol setup and inventory building, holds 20,000+ spend-based and activity-based factors, lets you add your own organisation-specific or supplier-specific data, manages multiple entities and sites with roles for data owners, auditors and managers, and runs in English, French and Dutch, with 5,000+ users. It produces the carbon evidence rather than the completed questionnaire, and three of the four themes are outside it: a mid-market reviewer rated us 3.5 out of 5 on G2 in June 2026 and said the platform is less complete as a broader ESG and CSRD reporting system, with no data source management feature and no decarbonisation target monitoring.
If your customer is pushing further into value chain categories than the assessment itself does, scope 3 consulting is where that goes, and if the environment section is only part of a wider request, which value chain questions you can decline helps separate what a customer asks for its own CSRD reporting from commercial requests like the EcoVadis assessment itself, which that cap does not cover.
Sources: EcoVadis Sustainability Rating Methodology disclosure document v10.0, EcoVadis Carbon Rating Methodology disclosure document v2.0, and EcoVadis Help Center articles on the assessment process, on sharing a scorecard and on subscription period versus scorecard validity. Verified 28 August 2026. EcoVadis is a commercial scheme and describes the rating as its own opinion.
Facts on this page were last verified on 2026-09-24.
