The Commission has published a fourth FAQ notice on Taxonomy disclosure, now incorporating the Omnibus Delegated Act simplifications. For financial undertakings in particular, the two-year opt-out from detailed KPI reporting is the most consequential development.
The EU Taxonomy disclosure framework has, since 2021, accumulated layers of guidance almost as fast as it has accumulated critics. The fourth Commission notice, published on 30 April 2026 under reference C/2026/2558, is the latest in a series of interpretive FAQ documents designed to fill the gaps that the underlying legislation has left open. What makes this round different from the previous three is its scope: it is the first notice to address the Omnibus Delegated Act (Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/73), which entered into application on 1 January 2026 and introduced the most substantial simplifications to the disclosure framework since its inception.
The notice is non-binding, with the Commission being explicit that only the Court of Justice can authoritatively interpret EU law. But in practice, it is the closest thing to official guidance that compliance teams will get on questions that the legal text leaves ambiguous, and supervisory authorities will treat it as such.
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Transitional Options for 2025 Reports
The most immediately relevant clarification concerns reporting for the 2025 financial year, published in 2026. The Omnibus Delegated Act provides a transitional option: undertakings may choose to apply either the new simplified rules (as amended from 1 January 2026) or the pre-Omnibus rules in full, but not a mixture of both. The notice confirms this is an all-or-nothing choice, and requires undertakings to state explicitly in their contextual information which set of rules they applied. The notice also addresses the edge case of non-calendar financial years, confirming that the option extends to reporting years ending in 2025 even where the financial year does not align with the calendar.
A specific complication arises for credit institutions: the Fees and Commission KPI and the Trading Book KPI were deferred to 1 January 2028 by the Omnibus Act. The notice confirms that these KPIs need not be reported in 2026, regardless of which transitional option the undertaking chooses, including those who opt into the pre-Omnibus rules. This is a deliberate policy choice by the Commission, not an oversight, and it closes an otherwise awkward inconsistency.
Two Year Opt-Outs for Financial Undertakings
The most significant simplification introduced by the Omnibus Delegated Act is the two-year opt-out available to reporting financial undertakings from 1 January 2026 to 1 January 2028. Under Article 7(9) of the Disclosures Delegated Act as amended, financial undertakings may replace all detailed Taxonomy KPI reporting, including the Green Asset Ratio, with a single statement in the management report declaring that no activities are claimed as Taxonomy-aligned. The notice dedicates substantial space to the conditions under which this opt-out may be used, because those conditions are more restrictive than the headline reads.
The core restriction is that the opt-out is conditional on making no claim, through any external communication, that the undertaking’s activities are associated with Taxonomy-aligned activities. The notice lists several scenarios where this condition would be breached: issuing green bonds, advising on or facilitating the issuance of green bonds by third parties, or making any public statement in 2025 or 2026 linking the undertaking’s activities to Taxonomy alignment. Past disclosures of positive Taxonomy-alignment ratios for earlier financial years do not in themselves prevent the use of the opt-out, but any claim made during the financial year in question does.
The notice also confirms that the opt-out is all-or-nothing: partial reporting of some KPIs while claiming the opt-out is not permissible. A financial undertaking that buys or distributes financial products referencing Taxonomy-aligned investments under the SFDR may still use the opt-out, provided it is not itself the manufacturer of those claims and does not independently communicate Taxonomy-alignment.
A 10% Materiality Threshold
The Omnibus Delegated Act introduced a quantitative materiality threshold: undertakings need not assess Taxonomy-eligibility or alignment for economic activities that cumulatively fall below 10% of the relevant KPI denominator. The notice provides considerable guidance on how this threshold interacts with IFRS 8 operating segment reporting. The key principle is consistency: if an activity is disclosed as a separate reportable segment under IFRS 8, it cannot simultaneously be treated as non-material for Taxonomy purposes. The notice provides a worked example involving a renewable energy company, activities totalling 9% of turnover but disclosed as a named segment must be assessed; the same activities combined into “other” without a segment disclosure need not be.
For non-financial undertakings, the OpEx KPI receives specific treatment. Where OpEx is not material for the business model (a category the notice acknowledges may apply to certain service businesses), undertakings may omit the OpEx KPI entirely, provided they state the denominator value and explain the omission. They cannot, however, selectively omit a geographic subset of a material economic activity, the activity must be assessed in its entirety once identified as material, even if some of the activity takes place in a country that would otherwise fall below the threshold.
Special Purpose Vehicles
The notice closes an important gap on exposures to Special Purpose Vehicles, clarifying that financial undertakings must “look through” SPVs when calculating the numerator of their KPIs where the SPV finances an undertaking subject to mandatory sustainability reporting. The look-through applies to both direct ownership SPVs (e.g. a wind farm SPV) and general-purpose financing SPVs. Third-country SPVs are covered on the same basis if they finance CSRD-subject counterparties or their assets. A building owned by an SPV and rented out, regardless of to whom, is treated as a real estate exposure under Article 7(6)(e) of the Disclosures Delegated Act and must be included in the denominator accordingly.
