CBAM September 2026: eight key dates, from verifier registration to the Q3 price

CBAM Guide Weekly is the free email digest from cbamguide.com, and its first issue went out to subscribers on the morning of August 26, 2026. Each issue is republished here two days after it sends; the email arrives first. Issue #1 called it the September wall: September 2026 is the most loaded month CBAM has had since the definitive phase began, with eight dated events in thirty days, and it ends with the first materially higher quarterly certificate price of the definitive phase due on October 5. What follows is the full issue as subscribers received it.

The September calendar

Eight dated CBAM events land between September 1 and September 28, 2026, before the official Q3 certificate price publishes on October 5. The table below is the calendar as it stood at send time.

Then October 5: the official Q3 certificate price. Which brings us to money.

Price corner: Q3 is tracking six to seven euros above Q2

The official Q2 2026 certificate price is €75.28/tCO₂e, published July 6 (Q1 was €75.36), and the Q3 number due October 5 is shaping up materially higher. EUA settlements have held a band of roughly €81 to €84 all quarter and spent late August at the top of it, closing near €84 on August 24, a one-month high. That puts the Q3 price on track to land roughly €6 to €7 above Q2, in the €81 to €82.50 area, on our estimate. It would be the first materially higher quarterly price of the definitive phase, and it prices certificates importers will be buying when sales open February 1, 2027.

Every quarter-to-date figure is an estimate until the Commission publishes; the remaining auctions can still move the average. Newsletter subscribers get the official Q3 number by email the morning it drops.

Live tracker: ETS price vs. published quarterly averages · Mid-quarter analysis

The money story: every corrected default value went down

Importers who provisioned 2026 CBAM costs on the January default-value tables have likely set aside too much, not too little. On August 10, DG TAXUD finally posted the corrected default-values Excel, ten days after Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1740 corrected the tables with retroactive effect from January 1. A steelnews.biz analysis then found the pattern: of the 46 genuine numerical replacements in the correction, all 46 lowered the value. The largest steel correction removes 0.088 tCO₂ per tonne, worth roughly €1,660 per 10,000 tonnes at the Q2 price. The only increases anywhere: two aluminium precursor CN codes, up about 47.5%.

Same page, same month: the Commission published its ten guidance documents for the definitive period on August 14, then added an eleventh on August 24, dedicated verification and accreditation guidance for verifiers and national accreditation bodies. One TAXUD page has become the most consequential download destination in CBAM.

The correction, dissected · The ten guidance documents

The bottleneck: 13 months, zero verifiers, and a mandatory site visit

The first CBAM declaration is due September 30, 2027, and any declarant who wants to use actual emissions values needs an accredited verifier that does not yet exist anywhere in the EU. Using actual values is how importers skip the default-value markup that rises from 10% now to 30% by 2028. And when verifiers do arrive, the rules give them no shortcut: in an installation's first verification year, a physical site visit is mandatory, with only a narrow force-majeure exception. Virtual visits and waivers only unlock in later years, and only for plants that have not significantly changed.

DG TAXUD's head of unit put the capacity question plainly to would-be verifiers: "those who will access accreditation first will be better placed to provide services to clients." A regulator telling applicants to hurry tells you what the queue will look like.

Why every first verification includes a site visit · Verification guide for importers

Quick hits from issue #1

• Korea: a KCCI/KICOX survey of 300 exporters finds 99.3% face customer demands for carbon data, and two thirds manage it without any shared platform. Separate analysis puts the CBAM exposure of Korean steel alone at roughly $4 billion. The survey · The exposure math
• Geopolitics: BRICS environment ministers, meeting in New Delhi on August 18, jointly called carbon border measures such as CBAM unilateral, punitive, discriminatory and protectionist, and not in line with international law, days after the Commission publicly rejected the US ambassador's claim that CBAM is a tariff. With Russia's panel request expected at the DSB on September 25, the opposition is now bloc-level and on paper. More
• Guidance pushback: the definitive-period guidance stack now tops 430 pages across eleven documents published this month, and compliance teams are saying so out loud. More
• ETS review: rapporteur Peter Liese wants Parliament and Council positions final by year-end so that ETS-review trilogues can start in January 2027, which keeps the CBAM phase-in debate alive well past September. More

September is supplier-chasing season

Importers planning to declare actual values for 2026 need their suppliers' data to exist before verifiers start booking site visits. The free supplier data-request generator builds the exact request letter, field by field, in the browser.

CBAM Guide Weekly sends by email first, every week, free. The signup forms on this page deliver issue #2 to your inbox the morning it goes out.