CDP reporting timeline 2026–2027: the dates that matter

The cycle only has two states that matter: before the scoring deadline and after it.

It is now after it: 16 September 2026 has passed, and nothing submitted since will affect a 2026 score.

The On-Demand Extension request window closed on 29 September 2026, and extended responses are due by the end of 30 September 2026.

Until 28 October 2026 you can still submit a first response, or edit and resubmit one filed earlier, and both are accepted without being scored.

A company disclosing on a theme for the first time, if it is Capital Markets requested or self-selected, may ask for a private score within six weeks of the scoring deadline — six weeks after 16 September is 28 October.

An A score is always public, whatever is asked.

The next date that changes anything is the week of 30 November 2026, when scores arrive.

CDP does run an extension, and its shape is unusual.

It applies to a response submitted after the Scoring Deadline but on or before 30 September 2026, and it must be requested by 29 September 2026.

The fee is published in Annex III of CDP’s 2026 scoring introduction: £2,000 for a UK organisation, €2,300 in Europe and US$2,500 in North America.

CDP says only a limited number are available, that they are granted at its discretion, and that once granted the fee is non-refundable even if you then submit on time or not at all.

So it is discretionary, capped, paid and requested after the deadline it extends has passed.

It is not a planning instrument: you cannot decide in July to use it, and the fourteen days it buys come after your data was already late.

It makes sense in one narrow case: a substantially complete response with one dependency — an assurance opinion, one Scope 3 category, a governance sign-off — that has slipped by days.

For 2027, CDP says it expects to offer a similar approach.

The scoring deadline is the only date in the cycle that changes an outcome rather than a record.

CDP scores on four levels: Disclosure (D- or D), Awareness (C- or C), Management (B- or B) and Leadership (A- or A).

In 2026 the full questionnaire is scored for climate change, forests and water security; plastics, biodiversity and the new ocean questions are unscored.

Missing the deadline does not move a response down that ladder — it takes it off the ladder entirely.

In the 2025 cycle more than 22,100 companies disclosed and nearly 20,000 were scored.

CDP announced the 2025 Corporate A List on 8 January 2026 as 877 companies, 4% of those scored, with 23 Triple A; its scores data page now shows 899 (5%) and 27.

The same announcement named Japan, Türkiye and France (each 12%), Portugal and Spain (9%) and Taiwan (8%) as the markets with the highest share of A List companies among those scored.

Demand is what makes the ladder worth climbing: for the 2026 cycle, CDP’s Capital Markets Signatories, over 540 financial institutions with more than US$110 trillion in assets, are requesting more than 43,000 organisations to disclose.

On the customer side, more than 270 corporate buyers used CDP’s Supply Chain programme to request data from around 45,000 suppliers in 2025.

For a supplier, the second number matters more: a score that a customer reads in its supplier review is a commercial fact, whatever its regulatory status.

A CDP score has no regulatory status in the UK: no statute, listing rule or procurement note requires one.

How the bands are awarded, and the thresholds behind them, are on CDP scores explained.

Most CDP searches are for one date, and the answer depends on which of several dates the searcher means.

If you want a score, the date is the scoring deadline: 16 September in 2026, 23 June in 2027.

If you only need a response on record, the date is the questionnaire closure, which CDP states two ways for 2026.

If you are a supplier, the date that starts your cycle is your customer’s request list, which is built months before the Portal opens.

And if you are reporting to a board, the date that matters is score release, in the week of 30 November 2026 and aimed for September in 2027.

The 2025 cycle ran on the same pattern as 2026, with a mid-year window and a September scoring deadline, which is why “CDP deadline” still means September to most practitioners and why the 2027 move catches people out.

CDP’s Terms of Disclosure reserve the right to change any date at its sole discretion, so a date written into a plan should be rechecked against the 2027 hub at the start of the year.

The fee becomes a timeline question once you notice that disclosing companies must pay the CDP admin fee before submitting.

For a UK-headquartered company the 2026 fee is £2,450 at Foundation tier or £5,985 at Enhanced, excluding taxes, and fees rose by approximately 5% globally in 2026.

CDP’s supplier guidance is explicit: for companies only requested by their customers it is free to disclose, but a Capital Markets request brings the fee.

Exempt organisations still have to select “No fee payable” before the Submit button works.

A fee that has to clear your own procurement is a finance process with its own calendar, and a payment that slips is a scoring deadline missed for an administrative reason.

The requester calendar starts earlier than yours: requesters build their lists from April, and CDP’s Supply Chain guide gave members 8 June 2026 to submit supplier lists.

Requesters are several classes: Supply Chain members asking suppliers, Capital Markets Signatories asking through the Letter to the Board, banks, private-market investors and initiatives such as RE100.

A customer may set its own earlier deadline, requests can be added after the Portal opens under a “For Review” tab, and accepting one after setup means resubmitting the questionnaire setup so its questions appear.

The full fee table and what each tier returns are on CDP cost and admin fees 2026.

Questionnaire changes are usually written up as content news; read as calendar news, they show where the extra work of a cycle sits.

CDP’s Disclosure 2026 hub lists the year’s changes: nature coverage expanded to include ocean, optional forest and water questions for SMEs, updated guidance for the full and SME questionnaires, and an opt-in during setup to disclose on the most relevant topics.

Ocean is optional and unscored in its first year, so it costs time only if a company chooses to spend it.

Forests coverage reaches further into commodities, which is where genuinely new data collection lands for food, retail and consumer-goods companies.

Water data tends to sit with site operations rather than the sustainability team, which lengthens the internal chain for anyone answering the water module for the first time.

An SME answering beyond climate for the first time meets a new module entirely, though CDP has made those questions optional.

On the other side of the ledger, CDP lists enhanced data ingestion, so organisations can upload data directly or reuse previously reported information, and its onboarding guidance says a 2025 discloser’s 2026 questionnaire may be pre-filled with select responses the first time setup is submitted.

That pre-fill only happens once, which is a reason to get the setup selections right before the first submission rather than after.

The planning assumption that survives all of this: a module you have answered before costs weeks, and one you have never answered can cost a cycle to answer well.

Many UK suppliers meet CDP through a customer’s Supply Chain request, and many of them answer the SME questionnaire rather than the full corporate one.

The dates on this page are CDP’s dates for the cycle as a whole, and the Disclosure 2026 hub sets out no separate SME calendar.

What differs is the questionnaire and the ladder: CDP introduced its dedicated SME questionnaire in 2024, and for 2026 it added an SME A score, where an SME could previously reach only an SME B (Key Changes 2026).

SME forests and water questions are new and optional, and they are not scored this year, so an SME that answers them is building next year’s response rather than this year’s score.

One eligibility change moves some companies up a questionnaire: companies requested by RE100 can no longer use the SME version.

For a supplier the practical deadline is often its customer’s, which can fall earlier than CDP’s; the requester calendar above sets out why.

How SME and full scores compare, band by band, is on CDP scores explained.

CDP says that “the ISSB’s climate standard is the foundational baseline for CDP’s climate disclosure” and that its questionnaire has been aligned with IFRS S2 since 2024 (CDP framework alignment).

UK SRS S2 is the UK’s version of IFRS S2, and from 2027 listed companies report against it on a comply-or-explain basis under the FCA’s final rules, PS26/19.

So a UK listed company answering CDP is, from 2027, preparing much of the same climate information twice, for two audiences on two timetables.

The timetables pull in opposite directions for a December year-end company.

Its 2027 annual report, the first under the FCA’s rules, is published by the end of April 2028, and a CDP response on the same year would follow in the 2028 cycle, whose dates CDP has not yet published.

Its 2027 CDP response, due by 23 June 2027 for a score, reports on 2026, the last year under the TCFD-aligned rules.

The practical conclusion is to build one set of climate data and controls to the UK SRS standard, and treat the CDP response as a second output of it.

Alignment is CDP’s own description, not a regulator’s finding: a CDP response does not discharge a UK SRS obligation, and a UK SRS report does not answer CDP’s questions for you.

The listing-rule dates are on the UK SRS timeline, and the rest of CDP’s framework on the CDP reporting framework.

CDP’s Terms are direct about this.

If a response misses the Scoring Deadline, CDP reserves the right not to score it and, separately, not to include its data in any report, data product or other analysis.

So late is not simply unscored — it is unscored, and possibly unused.

CDP’s scoring introduction gives late responders the status “not scored”, which is different from “Did not disclose”.

There is no penalty, no fine and no enforcement, because CDP disclosure is voluntary.

The consequence is commercial: the investor or customer who asked sees that you were asked, and sees what arrived.

The next opportunity after 28 October 2026 is the 2027 window, which opens on 14 April 2027.

In July 2026 CDP published the 2027 calendar, the largest change to the shape of the cycle in years.

The response window opens on 14 April 2027, two months earlier than 2026, and the scoring deadline falls on 23 June 2027, almost three months earlier than 16 September.

The final response deadline is 25 August 2027.

CDP aims “to deliver scores to Disclosers in September, publish the public score release in November”, with exact dates to be communicated.

It says stakeholders “consistently told us they prefer the response window to open earlier in the calendar year”, and that the dates are more aligned to the timeframes it used before 2024.

The window is “one month shorter than in previous cycles”: 14 April to 23 June is ten weeks, against thirteen from mid-June to 16 September in 2026.

CDP’s case for the shorter window is an improved copy-forward function, a new AI-enabled response suggestion feature and “no major changes expected to the questionnaire”.

A repeat discloser gets both tools; a first-time discloser gets neither, and meets a shorter window with nothing to carry forward.

Read with the reporting-period rule, a December year-end company disclosing FY2026 in the 2027 cycle has to be submission-ready by late June 2027, roughly six months after its year end.

CDP confirmed that “the key dates for this year’s 2026 cycle remain unchanged”, and that any later change to window timeframes will be “validated with our customers and communicated well in advance”.