Staying Compliant as the Rules Phase In

CBAM is being phased in, not switched on all at once: reporting-only obligations during the transitional period give way to full authorised-declarant and certificate obligations from 2026, monitoring and verification rules start applying from 2026, and the mark-up built into default values increases in steps. Missing an authorisation deadline, missing the annual CBAM declaration, or relying on a default value you should have replaced with verified data can all have real consequences.

The scope keeps moving too: in 2026 the EU Council agreed to extend CBAM to around 180 additional downstream steel and aluminium products — things like fasteners, filters, washing machines and certain vehicle parts — with the new obligations starting 1 January 2028. If your company imports finished or semi-finished goods with steel or aluminium content, it's worth checking now whether something currently outside CBAM's scope is due to fall inside it.

Staying compliant mostly comes down to not letting any of this slip: keeping your company's declarant status and entity details current, tracking every reporting deadline — annual for the declaration, quarterly for certificate holdings from 2027 — and knowing when a shipment has moved from 'needs supplier data' to 'ready to declare'. Cora keeps entity and report settings in one place, and its report tracker shows exactly what's been generated, uploaded, or still outstanding — so nothing quietly misses a deadline. When a verifier does come knocking — mandatory from 2026 for anyone declaring actual values — Cora keeps the underlying data and documentation organised and ready to hand over, instead of reconstructed under deadline pressure.