The SB 253 reporting deadline just moved. If your sustainability or finance team has been working backward from August 10, that date no longer applies. On June 24, 2026, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) announced it would push the SB 253 reporting deadline to November 10, 2026 — a three-month extension — while it revises parts of the implementing regulation.
Nothing else about the law changed. The $1 billion revenue threshold still applies. Scope 1 and Scope 2 are still the first numbers due. Scope 3 still arrives in 2027.
This update is easy to misread as a green light to slow down. It isn’t. Here’s what actually happened, what stayed the same, and what to do with the extra twelve weeks.
CARB extended the SB 253 reporting deadline for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions from August 10, 2026 to November 10, 2026.
The agency also withdrew its rulemaking package from the Office of Administrative Law (OAL) so it can propose “limited changes” to the regulation. Those changes will go through a 15-day public comment period before resubmission.
The reporting obligation itself is unchanged. Who’s covered, what’s due, and the 2027 start date for Scope 3 all stay exactly as written into the law.
CARB’s June 24 bulletin confirmed one specific change. The SB 253 reporting deadline for Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions moves from August 10, 2026 to November 10, 2026.
That’s the entire substance of the announcement. There’s no change to who must report, what they must report, or when Scope 3 reporting begins.
| Original Plan | Updated Plan (June 24, 2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope 1 & 2 reporting deadline | August 10, 2026 | November 10, 2026 |
| Companies in scope | U.S. entities with >$1B revenue doing business in CA | Unchanged |
| Reporting year covered | FY2025 | Unchanged |
| Scope 3 reporting starts | 2027 | Unchanged |
| First-year enforcement | Good-faith effort standard, no penalties | Unchanged |
| Regulation status | Submitted to OAL | Withdrawn from OAL pending revisions |
The driver behind the new SB 253 reporting deadline is procedural, not substantive. CARB had already sent its approved regulation to the Office of Administrative Law for review.
To make “limited changes” intended to clarify reporting requirements, the agency had to pull that package back. Since OAL approval could now land later than planned, CARB decided to give reporting entities more runway after the final rule is in place.
CARB’s own language frames this as a clarity move, not a relief measure. The agency said the deferral “will help ensure reporting entities have additional clarity following approval of the final regulation before reporting is due.”
In plain terms: rather than lock companies into reporting under a regulation that’s still being revised, CARB is sequencing things so the final rule lands first and the deadline follows.
This matters for how teams should read the signal. It isn’t CARB stepping back from enforcement. It isn’t a sign that further extensions are likely either.
The agency has held a hard line on the underlying statutory deadlines through multiple workshops over the past year, even when the rulemaking process itself ran behind schedule. Timelines for the regulation slip. Reporting dates set in the law move only when CARB explicitly says so, and only by the amount it specifies.
It’s worth being precise here. The parts of SB 253 that didn’t move are the parts that actually drive most of the compliance workload.
It’s easy to conflate California’s two climate disclosure laws since they were signed together and are both administered by CARB. Right now, they’re on noticeably different paths.
| SB 253 (Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) | SB 261 (Climate-Related Financial Risk Act) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it requires | GHG emissions disclosure (Scope 1, 2, then 3) | Disclosure of climate-related financial risks and mitigation measures |
| Legal status | Proceeding; deadline just extended | Under a Ninth Circuit preliminary injunction |
| Current CARB stance | Active reporting obligation, with extended deadline | Compliance made voluntary while litigation continues |
| Voluntary activity | N/A — mandatory | Over 170 companies have voluntarily filed reports to CARB’s public docket as of late June 2026 |
The takeaway: don’t let SB 261’s legal uncertainty create a false sense that SB 253 is similarly unsettled. SB 253 implementation is continuing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit specifically allowed it to proceed even as it paused SB 261.
For teams that joined this process partway through, here’s the condensed version of how California got here.
A three-month extension is genuinely useful only if it’s spent on the things that were actually slowing teams down. A few priorities worth focusing on:
Building a defensible Scope 1 and 2 inventory — and getting ahead of Scope 3 before it becomes mandatory — depends on having traceable, supplier-specific data rather than generic estimates. Sprih’s AI engine, SustainSense, processes data from over 400,000 sustainability reports across 150,000+ companies to extract supplier-specific emission figures instead of spend-based proxies, and it does this without sending suppliers another questionnaire. For SB 253 reporting specifically, that means Scope 1 and 2 data your team can stand behind under CARB’s good-faith standard, with the underlying audit trail already built in rather than reconstructed after the fact. Sprih’s regulatory mapping also covers CSRD, EUDR, and California’s reporting timelines natively, so the same dataset that supports SB 253 doesn’t need to be rebuilt for every other framework your company reports under.
