CBAM: the 50-tonne threshold is cumulative, and crossing it makes the whole year answerable
6 min read
A typical scenario, not our own case. A company that machines aluminium profiles for construction, in the manufacturing sector, imports semi-finished billets from three non-EU suppliers, through two different freight forwarders and across several ports of entry. Every customs entry records the CN code and the net mass of that one shipment: nobody in the company adds those masses up across the year. In October an extra order comes in, needed to honour a contract won mid-year. Nobody checks whether that order pushes the cumulative total over a threshold the regulation sets not per shipment, but for the entire calendar year.
The exemption sits in Article 2a, the regime in Article 36
Regulation (EU) 2023/956 of 10 May 2023 establishes the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the CBAM. The definitive regime — authorisation, declaration, surrender of certificates — does not run from publication: Article 36(2)(b), as replaced by Regulation (EU) 2025/2083 of 8 October 2025, lists the articles that “shall apply from 1 January 2026” — among them Article 2a on the de minimis exemption, Article 4 on the authorised declarant, and Articles 6 to 9 on declaration, calculation, verification of emissions and the carbon price already paid abroad. Regulation 2025/2083 is the simplification package known as Omnibus: it does not loosen the substantive obligations, it introduces a threshold below which they do not apply at all.
A cumulative threshold, not a per-shipment one
Article 2a(1) exempts whoever stays below the threshold: “An importer, including any importer with the status of an authorised CBAM declarant, shall be exempted from the obligations under this Regulation, where the net mass of the imported goods in a given calendar year does not cumulatively exceed the single mass-based threshold.” The same provision clarifies what gets added up: “That threshold shall apply to the total net mass of goods under all CN codes aggregated per importer and per calendar year” — not per shipment, not per customs code, not per supplier: per importer, summing aluminium, iron, cement and fertilisers into a single annual total. Annex VII, point 1, fixes the number: “The single mass-based threshold referred to in Article 2a shall be set at 50 tonnes of net mass.” Electricity and hydrogen remain outside this exemption in every case: paragraph 4 of the same article says so.
The day the threshold is crossed, it reaches back to January
Crossing the threshold does not add an obligation on the excess tonnes: it extends the obligation to the entire year already gone by. Article 2a(2) is blunt: importers who exceed the threshold within the relevant calendar year “shall be subject to all obligations under this Regulation in respect of all emissions embedded in all goods imported in that calendar year.” One shipment too many in October does not require declaring only that shipment: it requires reconstructing the embedded emissions of every shipment since January, including the ones that, on their own, would have stayed below the threshold. Article 5(1b) asks for the same assessment in advance: “Where Article 2a applies, the importer shall submit the application for an authorisation in cases where that importer expects to exceed the single mass-based threshold” — a forecast, not a year-end tally: a total that, until yesterday, nobody had reason to calculate ahead of time.
The one piece of data no corporate system holds in full
Even staying above the threshold for a single quarter, the year’s cumulative mass is a number no system already keeps ready. The ERP logs orders by supplier, not the annual total across all CN codes for one importer. Customs declarations, shipment by shipment, often sit with the forwarder or the indirect customs representative — who, for anyone not established in a Member State, is itself the authorised CBAM declarant, not the company. Purchase invoices sit in accounting. The CBAM registry, where the application for authorisation and later the annual declaration are filed, is a Commission system, not the company’s: the same distance already seen on customs origin rules, where the declaration itself is held by the customs representative, not by whoever generated it.
And above all of this sits the piece of data that is genuinely missing: the specific embedded emissions of each good. Article 7(2)(a) makes them depend on “the actual emissions in accordance with the methods set out in points 2 and 3 of Annex IV” — and Annex IV, point 2, is precise about where they are born: “For determining the specific actual embedded emissions of simple goods produced in a given installation, direct and, where applicable, indirect emissions shall be accounted for.” A value specific to one installation: it is not calculated by whoever imports the billet, it is measured by whoever smelts it, in a plant outside the Union that the buyer has often never visited — the same blind spot already seen on the battery passport, where the starting data is born at the mine, not in the assembler’s ERP. Without that data, only the default values of Annex IV, point 4.1, remain — more conservative, almost always costlier than a verified real value.
The dates are written, not calculated
None of these deadlines is a count we made ourselves: they all sit in Article 36 or Article 6. The definitive regime — exemption, authorised declarant, calculation and verification of emissions — runs from 1 January 2026. Quarterly oversight of certificate coverage, introduced by Article 22(2), runs from 1 January 2027. The sale of CBAM certificates by Member States runs from 1 February 2027, for paragraphs 1, 3, 4 and 5 of Article 20. And the first annual CBAM declaration — the one that, if the threshold has been crossed, must reconstruct the entire year — is fixed by Article 6(1) “by 30 September of each year, and for the first time in 2027 for the year 2026.”
What we have not verified
We do not give customs or environmental advice, and we do not assess any specific company’s exposure to the CBAM. We have not verified on a primary source which Italian authority has been designated as competent for authorisation applications, nor the national penalty regime for violations: the Regulation leaves both to the Member States, and we found no confirmation on a published Italian act. We do not report sector default emission values: they change by product, are updated through Commission implementing acts, and need checking case by case.
The two axes, applied
Complying. In our system, the same setup keeps, for every importer in the group, the cumulative net mass imported that year across all CN codes — with an alert before the running total approaches the threshold, not after it has crossed it — and maintains the file of installation-specific emissions per supplier plant, updated shipment by shipment instead of rebuilt the following January.
Deciding. The same system brings together the ERP, procurement, the forwarder and the CBAM registry into a single operating model, on which AI agents execute decisions with a human operator in command. Always in two modes: on-premises, on autonomous machines with no deep integration into the network, or dedicated cloud, with a data centre in Italy and premises staffed by us. This is our platform’s method, applied to a sector where the threshold stays invisible until someone adds it up, shipment after shipment, across a whole year.
Do you import CBAM goods from several non-EU suppliers? Half an hour with one of our engineers for the first cumulative tally of the current year, shipment by shipment.