CSRD: Preliminary agreement reached in trilogue negotiations on the substance proposal

On 9 December 2025, the JURI Committee of the European Parliament and the EU Council of Ministers reached a provisional agreement on the European Commission’s proposal for an amending directive to simplify sustainability reporting under CSRD and due diligence obligations under CSDDD.

The initial content of the provisional agreement can be found in a press release from the European Parliament and a press release from the Council of the European Union and relates in particular to the following points:

• CSRD: companies subject to reporting requirements must have more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million in turnover
• CSDDD: companies subject to the directive must have more than 5,000 employees and more than €1.5 billion in turnover.

The full provisional agreement is expected to be published shortly. A public press conference will be held on 9 December 2025 at 10:30 a.m.

Subsequently, both the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union must vote on the provisional agreement, which is expected to take place before the end of this year. The new EU provisions will then be published in the Official Journal of the European Union and must be transposed into national law by the EU Member States.

Background:
On 26 February 2025, the European Commission published the Omnibus I package with proposals to reduce red tape for businesses. These proposals focus in particular on the so-called Substance Proposal to amend the Accounting Directive (Directive 2013/34/EU), the CSRD (Directive (EU) 2022/2464) and the CSDDD (Directive (EU) 2024/1760) as well as the Audit Directive (Directive 2006/43/EC). The objective of the Substance Proposal with regard to amendments to the Accounting Directive is to achieve significant simplifications in the requirements for sustainability reporting. Formally separate from this, a proposal was submitted to postpone the temporal scope of application of the CSRD and the CSDDD (‘Stop-the-Clock’ Directive), which has now been published as Directive (EU) 2025/794 in the EU Official Journal.