CBAM's definitive regime: liabilities are accruing now
Carbon & energy · 10 March 2026 · Slava Volotovsky
TL;DR
- The definitive CBAM regime has applied since 1 January 2026. Certificate purchases and the first surrenders arrive from February 2027 — but the liability attaches to imports made now.
- The post-Omnibus threshold of 50 tonnes of covered goods per importer per year replaces the old consignment-based de minimis. Borderline importers need a quantified answer, not an assumption.
- Embedded-emissions data strategy — default values versus actual, verified figures — is now a commercial decision with a price attached, and it is being made in supply contracts this year.
The transitional period trained the market to think of CBAM as a reporting exercise. That framing is now wrong. Since 1 January 2026, imports of covered goods create a certificate liability that will be settled from 2027. The cash-flow event is deferred; the exposure is not.
Law, regulator practice, market practice
Black-letter law. The definitive regime requires authorised CBAM declarant status to import covered goods, an annual declaration of embedded emissions, and the surrender of certificates priced by reference to EU ETS allowances. The Omnibus amendments replaced the value-based de minimis with a mass-based threshold: importers below 50 tonnes of covered goods per year are generally outside the regime, subject to anti-circumvention provisions. The first certificate sales and surrender obligations arrive from February 2027 in respect of 2026 imports.
Regulator practice. Implementation runs through national competent authorities and the central CBAM registry, and their operational postures differ. Authorisation processing times, tolerance for data gaps inherited from the transitional period, and the appetite to test anti-circumvention arguments around the threshold are all still settling. It would be imprudent to assume that transitional-period leniency on data quality carries over to a regime with money attached.
Market practice. The sophisticated end of the market is treating 2026 as the pricing year: quantifying the certificate liability accruing per shipment, deciding between default values and actual verified emissions where the difference is material, and moving carbon-cost pass-through clauses into supply contracts before the 2027 settlement makes the numbers concrete. Importers of electricity face a distinct set of questions — default values, the treatment of interconnector flows, and the conditions for demonstrating actual emissions — that generally reward early analysis.
Who this affects
Importers of iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, hydrogen, and electricity, most obviously. Less obviously: mid-sized firms whose imports sit near the 50-tonne threshold, for whom the difference between 40 and 60 tonnes a year is the difference between no regime and the full regime; traders whose contracts are silent on who bears the certificate cost; and groups whose import volumes are spread across entities in a way that the anti-circumvention rules may look through.
Operational implications
The near-term work is unglamorous and quantitative. Establish whether authorised declarant status is needed and, if so, whether the application is in train. Map covered CN codes against actual import volumes to give threshold-adjacent importers a defensible answer. Build the embedded-emissions data pipeline now — supplier data requests have long lead times, and the default-value fallback has a price. Model the 2027 certificate cost against ETS price scenarios so the liability appears in this year's planning rather than next year's surprise. And review supply contracts for pass-through, because whoever signs without a CBAM clause in 2026 is likely to own the cost in 2027.
We carry out CBAM exposure assessments and threshold analyses for importers, traders, and electricity market participants. A short call generally clarifies scope and feasibility: contact@viekey.eu.
