CBAM import carbon levy: declarant status from 2026, certificate costs from 2027

Since 1 January 2026 the definitive phase of CBAM (Regulation (EU) 2023/956) has applied, replacing the reporting-only transitional period that ran to 31 December 2025 (Article 36). Under Article 4, goods within scope may enter the EU customs territory only through an 'authorised CBAM declarant', a status that must be applied for before importing (Article 5). Scope follows Annex I of the regulation and covers iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen. An importer that lodged its application by 31 March 2026 may, under the amended Article 17, provisionally continue to import while the competent authority assesses the request, so for volumes above the exemption threshold the continuity of import operations depends on that application being on file.

A frequent misreading is that certificates must be bought the moment the definitive regime starts. They do not. The 2025 Omnibus (Regulation (EU) 2025/2083) sets the first sale of CBAM certificates for 1 February 2027 (Article 20), so no certificates are purchased during 2026. The annual CBAM declaration and the surrender of certificates covering a year's embedded emissions are both due by 30 September of the following year, for the first time in 2027 for 2026 imports (Articles 6 and 22 as amended). The duty to measure and report embedded emissions therefore attaches to 2026 flows even though the cash outlay for certificates lands in 2027; an importer that treats 2026 as a data-gathering year is likely reading the timeline correctly.

The Omnibus replaced the earlier per-consignment de minimis with a single mass-based threshold: an importer is exempt from CBAM obligations where the net mass of its imported CBAM goods does not cumulatively exceed 50 tonnes in a calendar year (new Article 2a). The Commission estimates this removes roughly 182,000 importers, mostly SMEs and occasional importers, from scope while still covering over 99% of the embedded emissions the mechanism targets. Two points matter for anyone relying on it. First, the 50 tonnes is cumulative across the mass-based sectors (iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers), not per shipment or per product. Second, Article 2a expressly does not apply to electricity or hydrogen, so importers of those two remain in scope regardless of tonnage. Whether a given importer qualifies turns on its own annual volume, so the exemption is best assessed against actual and forecast imports rather than assumed.

CBAM is not a border formality that can be cleared with a tariff line; it requires installation-level data on the CO2 embedded in the goods, calculated under Article 7 and verified under Article 8, drawn from the producer's production processes (Annex IV). The authorised CBAM declarant carries the legal responsibility and the record-keeping duty, but the underlying figures originate upstream with the manufacturer, which makes supplier engagement a supply-chain problem rather than a customs-desk one. An indirect customs representative can itself be the authorised declarant, and under the amended rules a declarant may delegate the filing of declarations to an EU-established third party holding an EORI number while remaining responsible for compliance. For forwarders, customs agents, terminals and shippers handling these flows, the practical consequence is that clients will increasingly treat CBAM readiness, meaning declarant status, a supplier-data process and clean documentation, as a precondition for moving the goods at all.

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