CBAM Exposure

From 2026 an EU importer of steel, cement, aluminium, fertiliser or hydrogen pays for the carbon embedded in it. Without data from the plant that made the goods, the emissions counted fall back to a country default published in Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2621, as corrected in August 2026. This page prices those defaults. The figures are gross: they come before the deductions for EU ETS free allocation and for any carbon price paid where the good was made, which this page does not model, so they are more than an importer will owe.

The same tonne carries very different gross costs at the border

For this good the 2026 gross cost runs from Azerbaijan at €11 a tonne to Indonesia at €677 a tonne, a gap of €667 on an identical product. For steel the colours sort almost perfectly: the production route, not the country, sets the price. Every country, with its route and value →

Electricity is almost none of it

The annex counts electricity only for cement and fertilisers, and even there it is under a tenth. So a country's grid barely moves its gross border cost: primary aluminium costs about the same whether it was smelted on the cleanest grid or the dirtiest. Why the grid barely counts →

The euro figure is a price you choose

There is no free public feed for the EU carbon price, so the page does not pretend to quote one. The tonnage is fixed by law; the euros scale with whatever price you assume, and the gap between suppliers scales with it.

The bill rises every year to 2028

The defaults carry a mark-up of 10% in 2026, 20% in 2027 and 30% from 2028, so the cost of not collecting supplier data grows each year. Fertilisers are the exception, at a flat 1%. Free allocation phases out over the same years, so the deduction for it shrinks, and what an importer actually owes rises faster than the mark-ups alone suggest. Method and limits →