Draft EU CBAM Certificate Platform Fees

Status at 16 July 2026 — draft, not law. Ares(2026)6860249 is dated 9 July 2026 on the official EUR-Lex draft page. The fee and the platform procedures it proposes were not live charges or adopted obligations at the research cutoff.

You will buy CBAM certificates through a system that nobody has used yet. A draft Commission delegated regulation, Ares(2026)6860249, proposes how those sales, and the repurchases that follow them, would run through a common central platform.

The draft covers the roles of the platform and the Registry, payments, fees, security, reporting and data protection. None of it is in force. Every parameter below is provisional.

The Registry and the platform would do different jobs

Under the draft, the CBAM Registry would hold the compliance record: requests, certificate creation, ownership, holdings, surrender, cancellation and the audit trail. The common central platform would handle the money. It would execute the banking and payment side of sales and repurchases.

The sequence matters to anyone designing a process around it. A request would start in the Registry. The platform would act only after secure data exchange and effective payment. Purchased certificates would become available after payment confirmation, and under the draft they would be non-transferable and assigned only to the purchasing declarant.

The proposal contains no supply cap and no Member-State allocation limit. Purchase timing, and the holding and surrender rules in the basic Regulation, remain separate considerations.

The proposed sale fee is EUR 0.05 per certificate

Article 15(1) of the draft sets a fixed fee of EUR 0.05 per CBAM certificate sold, and says that no other sale or repurchase fee or charge would apply.

The fee would finance operation of the common central platform, and would be collected through declarant payments. Article 13(3) of the same draft would require all sale and repurchase payments to be made exclusively in euro.

Treat the EUR 0.05 as a proposal, not a current tariff. It is safe to use as a clearly labelled scenario in a cash-flow model. It should not appear in a customer quote, an approved budget or a software configuration as a settled charge until adoption is verified.

Repurchase would be one irrevocable request a year

The draft provides for one repurchase request per year. Once entered, that request would be irrevocable and could not be amended.

Competent-authority approval windows would be tied to 1 April, 1 July and 1 November, with a 42-calendar-day decision period for eligible requests. Any repurchase would remain subject to the limit in Regulation (EU) 2023/956, and would use the original purchase price. The platform would be able to refuse a payment where request data appeared inaccurate or security was compromised.

Design the workflow around that irreversibility. An annual request that cannot be amended leaves no room to correct an error, so it needs a formal pre-submission check with a named approver.

Access, reconciliation and retention would be written into the design

The proposal calls for a secure, near-real-time interface between the Registry and the platform. It adds incident controls, transaction logs, daily reconciliation, operational reporting, a helpline and continuity arrangements.

Access would be split. Member-State authorities would see only declarants established in their territory, while the Commission would have system-wide access. Bank-account and transaction data would sit under a joint-controller model, and platform data would be retained for five years after the recording year.

The draft would generally apply from 1 February 2027, while the procurement and contract provision would apply earlier, after entry into force. Neither date should be treated as operative until an adopted act is checked.

What to do now: separate the two systems in your requirements

Three teams have work they can start this quarter.

• Declarants can map who will initiate requests, approve payments, reconcile certificates and review bank details.
• Finance teams can model euro liquidity, and add the draft fee as a clearly labelled scenario.
• System teams can separate the Registry compliance record from payment execution in their requirements, because the draft treats them as two different things.

Before implementation, recheck the Official Journal and compare the final act with this draft, article by article. Until then, document your assumptions and give one named person the job of watching for adoption. Do not present the platform or the fee to anyone as live.

Source note: This article is based solely on the official EUR-Lex draft linked below, with a research cutoff of 16 July 2026. Recheck EUR-Lex and the Official Journal immediately before publication or implementation.

Source

Source publication: Draft Commission Delegated Regulation, Ares(2026)68602496860249)

Source status/class: Draft EU delegated regulation — not adopted; official EUR-Lex feedback text.