EPA Pushes Back GHG Reporting Deadline as It Contemplates the Program’s Future
The Environmental Protection Agency has extended the reporting deadline for calendar year 2025 as required by the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, just five months after the NAM urged it to do so (POLITICO’s CLIMATEWIRE, subscription).
What’s going on: The agency last Friday finalized a rule pushing back the deadline for large industrial emitters of GHG from March 31, which was last year’s deadline, to Oct. 30, 2026.
- It’s a move that affects approximately 8,200 entities required by the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program to report their emissions every year—and one the NAM asked it to make last fall.
- “In September 2025, EPA put forward a plan to eliminate the decades-old reporting requirement for 46 of 47 source categories,” CLIMATEWIRE reports. “The exception is the petroleum sector, which is treated separately.”
- The agency proposed, as part of that action, delaying the 2026 reporting deadline “to allow time for the EPA to issue a final rule … and to allow regulated entities to adjust compliance efforts accordingly,” according to the rule.
But … The delay only applies to reporting year 2025 and doesn’t affect the administration’s push to rescind the program. That decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks.
Why it’s important: In October, the NAM urged the EPA to extend the deadline and to evaluate certain considerations before making a final decision on repealing the GHG reporting requirement entirely.
- The NAM “supports a deadline extension for RY2025, announced sufficiently in advance of the current RY2025 reporting deadline, to give covered sources additional leeway to plan while the EPA considers next steps for the Proposed Rule,” the NAM told the agency.
- However, it continued, “[a] rollback of the GHGRP could remove a reliable, cost-effective and regulator-vetted emissions reporting pathway for U.S. companies with significant overseas business interests, which could lead to increased reliance on potentially costly third-party verification services run by non-U.S. firms.”