CBAM Scope Expansion: Three Institutions, Three Different Lists

In one line: CBAM entered its definitive regime on 1 January 2026, but what is actually moving is its product scope — the Commission proposed an extension in December 2025, the Council took a position in June 2026, and the European Parliament adopted amendments on 15 September 2026, each making the list bigger than the last (Commission's original proposal · Council +300-odd products · Parliament +around 400). The three numbers disagree, which means the final list is not settled. In parallel, the US Trade Representative opened a public comment procedure on CBAM — the first formal assessment launched by a third-country government.

1. Separate "definitive regime" from "scope expansion"

These two things are often discussed as one, but their timelines do not overlap.

How to read it: goods imported in 2026 are already accruing a financial obligation based on embedded emissions — importers simply do not pay during that year. Payment opens in February 2027; the declaration is due by 30 September 2027. The Commission's own framing is "import in one year, declare and pay in the next".

2. Scope: three institutions, three numbers

In December 2025 the Commission proposed amending Regulation (EU) 2023/956 to extend coverage to downstream steel- and aluminium-intensive goods, adding anti-circumvention provisions. Both co-legislators then went further than the original proposal.

The gap between the numbers is itself the information. It does not mean 400 categories are covered; it means the three institutions want different scopes. Under the ordinary legislative procedure, the next step is trilogue negotiation, then formal adoption.

What that means for compliance planning: building a system against today's six categories prepares you for the smallest possible opening; building it against the Parliament's version may overshoot. The practical answer is to keep the product list as a configurable module rather than hard-coding any single version into the process.

3. The calculation rules are moving too

On 14 August 2026 the Commission's Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union (DG TAXUD) published ten definitive-phase guidance documents — four general plus six sector-specific (cement, hydrogen, fertilisers, steel, aluminium, electricity).

Details that are easy to miss:

The escalating uplift deserves separate attention. Its design intent is to make actual data eventually cheaper than default values. Climbing from 10% to 30% is, in effect, a steep cost curve imposed on data capability.

4. Carbon price: where each side stands

CBAM is fundamentally a carbon-cost equalisation mechanism: if the carbon price in the country of origin is lower than the EU's, the importer buys certificates to close the gap. Carbon prices on both sides are therefore comparable anchors.

This piece does not use price snapshots whose issuing body is unnamed. The on-site record index contains an "EUA spot settlement price" entry whose source is given only as "market data", with no issuing institution named — it cannot be verified. Under this site's rule that every data point must name a source institution, that entry is excluded from the data table here.

⚠️ Do not simply divide one by the other. The two differ in measurement basis, sectoral coverage and allowance allocation. A straight conversion produces a precise-looking but meaningless "X-times gap". What is comparable is each market's trend and institutional position — not a single-point value.

5. The United States: the first governmental review procedure

The US Trade Representative published a request for comments in the Federal Register (91 FR 64450), seeking views on three questions:

1. CBAM's current impact on US producers' costs and market access
2. The potential impact of the three expansion proposals (Commission, Council, Parliament)
3. Whether trade remedies are appropriate, and if so, what form they should take

This is the only non-EU institutional action in this piece. It moves CBAM from a climate-policy topic squarely into trade policy. A comment procedure is not a ruling — but it is where such a process begins.

6. Boundaries and definitions

1. The expanded list is not final. Neither the Parliament's 15 September 2026 amendments nor the Council's general approach is the adopted text; trilogue negotiation and formal adoption remain. Any statement that "CBAM will cover N product categories" must also state which institution's version it refers to.
2. EU legislative documents here are official (EUR-Lex / Council document register / European Parliament document register / US Federal Register) — grade L1. However, the primary legal texts were not read in full by the author; expansion counts are taken from each institution's document summaries. Confidence B.
3. Carbon prices are point-in-time snapshots. Both EU ETS and China's national carbon market trade continuously; the figures above are dated snapshots, not long-run price levels.
4. No currency conversion is applied. EUR and CNY were deliberately not converted — conversion introduces an exchange-rate date as an extra variable, and the purpose here is institutional comparison, not cost calculation.

Data sources

Sourcing floor: all data here comes from public governments / international organisations / intergovernmental bodies. No commercial data vendors.

Grade key: L1 = government / international organisation / intergovernmental body / customs; L2 = international standards bodies / regulated exchanges / state think tanks; L3 = industry associations / company self-disclosure / official media relay / reprocessed third-party public data (grey — original source must be cited); L4 = commercial data vendors / self-media (prohibited in this project).

Entries marked "—" are published here for the first time and are not yet in the on-site record index; their sources are official texts or official institutional publications.

Data as of 2026-10-11. Individual records can be retrieved by record ID via the on-site data index or the MCP endpoint.