What the Revised ESRS actually changes for FY2026 reporting

If you’re a sustainability, ESG, or finance lead preparing for FY2026 reporting under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the headline is simple: mandatory data points are down 61%. The Revised ESRS is mandatory from FY2027, but you can choose to apply it early for FY2026. Either way, it means fewer data points to collect, less detailed reporting, and less dense text to work through.

The topics you’re reporting on haven’t disappeared; the level of detail required has simply been reduced. That gives you room to make the report shorter, clearer, and more focused on what matters to your business and the people reading it. Rethink how your reporting is structured, and you can make important information easier to find and use.

When we polled attendees at our recent webinar, just over half of those already in CSRD scope had filed a compliant report and the rest are still working toward their first one. There’s real optimism in the room too with almost 30% of attendees seeing signs of an ESG rebound.

Wherever you land in that mix, the five areas EFRAG used to streamline the standard are the same five places worth spending your attention. Here’s what actually shifted in each, and what to do about it.

1. Shorter, clearer legal text

The original ESRS earned its reputation as hard to navigate. EFRAG’s rewrite doesn’t turn the standard into plain English, it’s still a legal text, but it does reorganize where things sit. Application requirements, the specific, contextual details behind a disclosure, now sit directly after the disclosure requirement they support, instead of grouped separately at the end of each topical chapter.

In practice: Your team spends less time cross-referencing and more time actually reporting. Worth a read-through of the new structure before you assign data points to owners, since the map has changed even where the destination hasn’t.

2. Policies, actions, and targets in one place

Previously, disclosure requirements on policies, actions, and targets were split between ESRS 2 and the individual topical standards. A team working on, say, workforce disclosures had to hunt across two different parts of the framework to find everything relevant. EFRAG has now pulled most of that into ESRS 2, giving companies more flexibility in how it’s written and presented.

In practice: Less time spent tracking down requirements, and more freedom in how you tell the story of what your organization is doing and why, as long as you can still point to the evidence underneath it.

3. A 61% cut in mandatory data points

This is the number getting most of the attention, and for good reason. EFRAG achieved it mainly by merging and removing data points rather than removing entire disclosure requirements. Most topics you’re already reporting on are still there, just asked for at a lower level of detail. Take the transition plan disclosure (E1-1). The maximum number of data points it can require drops from 11 to 6, though your own report may need fewer, depending on what’s applicable to your transition plan.

In practice: This reshapes your data collection workload, not your topic coverage. It’s worth revisiting your reporting plan requirement by requirement rather than assuming a topic has disappeared just because the detail behind it has shrunk.

4. Better alignment across standards and jurisdictions

If your organization reports under more than one framework, such as ESRS alongside the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) standards, you’ll notice EFRAG has worked to align definitions and units of measure across them. It’s not full interoperability yet, but it’s a meaningful step toward not having to restate the same underlying metric three different ways for three different audiences.

In practice: Multi-country or multi-framework reporters get a chance to streamline how data flows between reports, though it’s worth double-checking specific reliefs against ISSB requirements if you need to claim compliance with both.

5. A more proportionate approach to materiality

This is the area generating the most questions, and understandably so. The Revised ESRS now explicitly allows a top-down approach to materiality alongside the existing bottom-up method, and it clarifies how gross versus net impact should be treated, how positive impacts and mitigating actions are weighed, and how non-material topics can still appear in a report as long as they’re clearly labeled as such.

The double materiality assessment (DMA) question we heard most often: does this mean starting over? The answer is no. If you’ve already completed a DMA, the recommendation is to revisit it against the new guidance rather than rebuild it from the ground up. Re-check the assumptions behind your judgment calls, confirm your documentation lines up with the updated clarifications, and re-document where needed. The EFRAG Knowledge Hub is a genuinely useful, free resource for tracking the latest guidance if you’re not sure where to start.

What this looks like in practice

Two examples from this year make the shift from “shorter” to “better” tangible.

ESVAGT, an offshore support vessel operator serving wind and oil and gas clients, had already been reporting against ESRS-inspired frameworks since 2023. When it applied the Revised ESRS exposure drafts to its 2025 sustainability report, the team set three objectives before writing a word: strengthen the link between sustainability topics and the business model, cut duplication, and keep every disclosure decision useful.

They restructured ESRS 2 to lead with strategic ambition, condensed repeated impact, risk, and opportunity (IRO) descriptions into single, purposeful sentences, and used subheadings to keep each action concrete: roughly a 44% reduction in word count, about 24 fewer pages, and a 40% average cut in IRO word count. The result was a shorter, clearer report without losing the substance underneath.

Position Green applied a similar mindset to its own 2025 report, but the lever was structure rather than language. Rather than reporting topics in standard order, the team led with the topic most material to stakeholders, moved general-section policies into one place and referenced them from each topical chapter, and added one-page chapter summaries so a reader could grasp the relevance of a topic before diving into the detail.

Neither example treats simplification as an excuse to say less. Both treat it as an opportunity to say the right things more clearly.

Where to start

The text is now confirmed, so there’s no reason to wait until the last minute to get moving. Starting now spreads the risk and the workload, rather than betting everything on one deadline.

A practical starting point:

• Revisit your materiality assessment, don’t restart it. Re-check your assumptions against the new guidance, especially around the treatment of gross versus net impact, and re-document rather than rebuild.
• Build a phase-in roadmap. Map out which standards or data points you can defer, for how long, and who owns getting ready for the year that relief runs out.
• Redesign your report structure for clarity. Consider leading with your most material topic, centralizing policies with clear cross-references, and adding chapter-level summaries.
• Talk to your auditor early, especially if you’re weighing which transitional reporting options apply to your FY2026 reporting.
• Keep your data governance strong even as the data point count shrinks. Auditors still expect evidence and traceability behind every number that remains.

A shorter standard gives you an opportunity to make your report both leaner and more useful. Cut duplication, focus on what’s material, and use the flexibility to make important information easier to find and understand. FY2026 isn’t about writing less. It’s about reporting better.

About Position Green

Position Green is the end-to-end platform that turns sustainability reporting into a strategic asset. Unlike traditional sustainability tools that stop at compliance, Position Green combines AI-driven automation with human expertise to transform fragmented data into a credible strategy, making organizations bankable, investable, and insurable.