Regulation guidance: the EU Omnibus Sustainability Package

The European Parliament has formally approved changes to key pieces of sustainability legislation under the Omnibus regulation. Here’s what you need to know.

For businesses operating within the EU, Green Deal legislation – which includes measures such as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) among many others – requires a new and targeted focus on sustainability, data and reporting. However, this number of new measures has led to widespread complaints that sustainability regulation in the EU is complex, repetitive and difficult to navigate.

Enter the Omnibus Package. Originally proposed in February 2025, the Omnibus is the EC’s attempt to streamline and simplify the burden of legislative compliance for businesses in the EU.

The package proposed targeted amendments to several cornerstone regulations – chiefly the CSRD and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D).

The proposal would mean simplified reporting templates, a narrower scope of reporting, longer reporting deadlines and reduced red tape for EU funding programmes. Additionally, the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) would be revised to reduce the data points companies must report, provide clarification on overlapping requirements, and ensure consistency with other EU reporting frameworks.

The EC outlined an explicit goal of reducing reporting burdens by 25% for large companies and 35% for SMEs, which, it said, reflects a broader effort to simplify sustainability disclosures while maintaining the EU’s ambitious environmental objectives.

The Omnibus represents significant changes to the CSRD and CS3D, and to which businesses now fall in scope of the regulations.

Omnibus changes to the CSRD

Previously, to fall in scope with the CSRD, EU companies needed to meet two of the following thresholds:

CSRD was also applicable to non-EU headquartered groups with a large EU subsidiary or branch that generates more than €40 million net turnover, and which had a net turnover of more than €150 million within the EU

Under the Omnibus, those thresholds have been reduced. EU companies will now fall in scope of CSRD only if they have more than €450 million net turnover and more than 1,000 employees on average during the financial year. Reporting will now begin in 2028 for these companies.