EU CBAM in 2026: What Your EU Buyer Needs From You
If you export cement, fertiliser, iron and steel, or aluminium to a buyer in the European Union, there is a rule that costs your buyer money and that you have never filed anything for. That is the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, usually written CBAM. The European Commission states that "as of 1 January 2026, CBAM is applicable under its definitive regime." The obligation sits on the EU importer. The number they pay is decided by data that only you, the producer, can supply.
This article is about the practical part of that: whether it touches your goods at all, what your buyer will ask you for, and what it costs them if you have nothing to give.
Does CBAM even apply to what you export?
Probably not. That is the honest first answer, and it saves most readers the rest of the page.
CBAM covers a short list of goods, identified by CN code in Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2023/956: cement, fertilisers, iron and steel, aluminium, electricity and hydrogen. If you export machinery, food, furniture, instruments, textiles or almost anything else, your goods are not on that list and none of this applies to your shipments today. The scope is defined by the code, not by the industry, so a small aluminium part can be in scope while a finished machine is not.
The way to settle it is to take the CN codes you already put on your commercial invoices and check them against Annex I. That is a paperwork question, not a carbon question, and it is answered once.
Who files CBAM, you or your buyer?
Your buyer. The regulation places authorisation, declaration and certificate obligations on the importer bringing the goods into the EU. There is no filing for a non-EU exporter, no registration you are required to complete, and no penalty aimed at you.
What there is instead is a commercial dependency. Your buyer's CBAM cost is calculated from the emissions embedded in the goods you made. If you can tell them what those emissions actually are, they pay against your number. If you cannot, the EU has a number of its own, and it is not built to flatter you.
What is the 50-tonne exemption, and why is it a cliff?
This is the part most worth knowing, because it decides whether your buyer cares at all.
Regulation (EU) 2025/2083 of 8 October 2025 inserted a new Article 2a, "De minimis exemption", into the CBAM regulation. An importer is exempt where "the net mass of the imported goods in a given calendar year does not cumulatively exceed the single mass-based threshold", and the recitals record that the threshold "should be introduced in Regulation (EU) 2023/956, and initially be set at a level of 50 tonnes". It applies cumulatively across iron and steel, aluminium, fertilisers and cement, and it applies from 1 January 2026. Electricity and hydrogen are outside the exemption.
Now the part that surprises people. It is not an allowance on the first fifty tonnes. Article 2a(2) says that an importer who crosses the threshold in a year "shall be subject to all obligations under this Regulation in respect of all emissions embedded in all goods imported in that calendar year". Crossing at tonne fifty-one does not tax tonne fifty-one. It pulls the whole year into scope, including the shipments that were already delivered and invoiced.
For you this has one practical consequence. A buyer sitting comfortably under the threshold will never ask you for anything. A buyer near it will ask suddenly, in the middle of a year, about goods you shipped months ago. The data is easier to produce before that phone call than after it.
What happens if you send no emissions data?
The declarant uses a default value instead. Those defaults are set out in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621 of 16 December 2025, adopted under Article 7(7) of the CBAM regulation. Annex I of that regulation is a country-by-country table, and the United States has its own section, broken down by CN code.
The defaults are deliberately conservative. Recital 3 states the reasoning plainly: the objective "would be compromised if importers of goods other than electricity were allowed to apply default values that are lower than the actual emissions embedded in those goods". A default is not meant to be a convenient substitute for measuring. It is meant to be the worse option.
How big is the mark-up, and does it grow?
On top of the default value, the regulation adds a mark-up: 10% in 2026, 20% in 2027, and 30% from 2028 onwards. Fertilisers are the exception, carrying a 1% mark-up in all three columns. Recital 5 explains the phase-in as a way "to avoid immediate disproportionate impacts on prices of goods, and to give economic operators time to adapt", which is another way of saying the cheap years are the early ones.
Two rows from the United States table, read from the regulation on 2 September 2026:
| CN code | Description | Total (no mark-up) | 2026 | 2027 | 2028 onwards |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7606 | Aluminium plates, sheets and strip, thickness over 0.2 mm | 2.730 | 3.003 | 3.276 | 3.549 |
| 2523 29 00 | Grey Portland cement | 1.210 | 1.331 | 1.452 | 1.573 |
Read the aluminium row across and you have the whole argument in one line. The gap between what your product actually emits and what the EU will assume it emits is a price difference your competitor may not be carrying. If your plant is cleaner than the American average, the default is charging your buyer for someone else's furnace.
What should you actually put in the shipment file?
Your buyer's declarant needs emissions attributed to the installation that made the goods, not a corporate average and not a marketing figure. In practice the request lands as a short list:
- The installation that produced the goods, identified consistently from shipment to shipment.
- Direct emissions per tonne of product, and indirect emissions from purchased electricity.
- The production route, because the regulation's benchmarks distinguish between routes for steel and aluminium.
- The CN code you already declare, matching the code on the invoice exactly.
- Precursor materials, where the goods are made from other CBAM goods.
The failure mode here is familiar to anyone who has run export paperwork for a while. The number is produced once for one buyer, lives in one spreadsheet on one person's laptop, and by the second request nobody can say whether the new figure and the old figure describe the same installation or the same period. The fix is not a carbon system. It is the same fix as everywhere else in export documentation: one record per shipment that every document reads, so the CN code, the weights and the origin cannot quietly disagree with each other. We wrote about that pattern for origin documents in certificate of origin and commercial invoice from one master file.
What CBAM does not require of you
It is worth stating the boundaries, because the internet is full of pages that blur them.
You are not required to file a CBAM declaration. You are not required to buy CBAM certificates. Providing emissions data to your buyer is not a customs formality and it does not go to CBP or to the EU on your behalf. And the exemption is your buyer's to claim, not yours to grant, because it is calculated on their total imports across all suppliers in the year, which is a figure you cannot see.
If a service tells you that a US exporter must register with the EU to keep shipping in-scope goods, ask them which article says so.
Where does ovrseas fit?
Narrowly, and it is worth being precise about it. ovrseas does not calculate emissions, does not verify them, and does not file anything with the European Union. No document tool does that, and a tool that claims to would be worth doubting.
What it does is hold one shipment record that every document reads, so the CN code, net and gross weights, product description and origin are entered once and appear identically on the commercial invoice, the packing list and the rest of the set. When a buyer comes back nine months later asking which shipments made up their fifty tonnes, that consistency is what makes the answer findable. If you are still assembling document sets by copying last month's spreadsheet, the wider comparison is in our guide to export documentation software for small exporters.
What should a small exporter do this month?
Three things, in order, and the first one ends it for most readers.
Check your CN codes against Annex I. If none of them are in scope, stop; nothing here is your problem. If some are, ask your EU buyers whether they expect to cross fifty tonnes of CBAM goods this calendar year across all their suppliers, because that answer decides whether anyone will ever ask you for a number. And if the answer is yes or maybe, start assembling installation-level emissions data now, while it is a scheduled task rather than an urgent one, and keep it attached to the same shipment record as the rest of the document set.
Sources checked 2 September 2026: Regulation (EU) 2025/2083 (OJ 17.10.2025), Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621 (OJ 31.12.2025), and the European Commission's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism page. Rules and figures change; read the current text before you budget against it.
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