NGER Reporting Thresholds 2026: Does Your Company Need to Report?

There are 961 controlling corporations on the NGER register as of the 2023–24 reporting year. But the Clean Energy Regulator doesn't know how many companies should be on that register and aren't. Nobody does.

That's the quiet risk with NGER reporting thresholds. They're not complicated. The numbers are public. But a surprising number of Australian companies — particularly mid-market ones that have grown through acquisition or expanded their operations — don't realise they've crossed a threshold until it's too late. And "too late" now means something very different than it did two years ago.

Because here's the thing that changed everything: if you trigger NGER registration, you're automatically pulled into ASRS Group 2 mandatory climate reporting. That's not just an annual emissions return to the Clean Energy Regulator anymore. That's AASB S2 climate-related financial disclosures, assurance requirements, and director liability for the accuracy of your Scope 1 and 2 numbers. The stakes went up dramatically in 2025, and most companies near the thresholds haven't caught on yet.

The Two Levels: Facility and Corporate Group

The NGER Act (section 13) sets two distinct threshold levels. You only need to trigger one.

Facility-level thresholds — any single facility that meets any one of these:

Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions of 25,000 tonnes CO2-e or more
Energy production of 100 TJ or more
Energy consumption of 100 TJ or more

Corporate group thresholds — the aggregate across your entire group that meets any one of these:

Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions of 50,000 tonnes CO2-e or more
Energy production of 200 TJ or more
Energy consumption of 200 TJ or more

Here's the distinction that matters: if only a single facility crosses the facility threshold, you report only for that facility. But if your corporate group crosses the corporate group threshold, every facility in the group must report — even if no individual facility would trigger reporting on its own. That second pathway catches a lot of companies off guard.

And it's worth understanding what "corporate group" actually means here. Under section 7 of the NGER Act, a controlling corporation is a constitutional corporation that doesn't have a holding company incorporated in Australia. It's the entity at the top of your Australian corporate tree. The group includes the controlling corporation plus all subsidiaries as defined under section 48 of the Corporations Act 2001. So if your parent company owns three operating subsidiaries, each running a small manufacturing site, and their combined emissions cross 50 kt — the parent is the one that has to register and report on the lot of them.

What Actually Counts as a "Facility"

This is where people trip up. A "facility" under NGER doesn't mean what you think it means.

Section 9 of the NGER Act and division 2.4 of the NGER Regulations define a facility as "an activity or series of activities (including ancillary activities) that generate greenhouse gas emissions and produce or consume energy" forming a single undertaking or enterprise. That's deliberately broad. The Clean Energy Regulator's own guidance document on defining facilities (July 2022) makes clear that a facility is not necessarily co-extensive with a physical premises, building, or property.

What does this mean in practice? A large construction project can be a facility. A mining operation with remote camps and satellite sites connected to a central operation can be a single facility. Transport operations count. A fleet of vehicles operated from a depot can fall within a facility's boundary if they're part of the same undertaking.

The operational control test (sections 11–11B of the NGER Act) determines who reports for a given facility. If your corporation has the authority to introduce and implement operating policies, health and safety policies, and environmental policies for the facility — you've got operational control. This matters when you have contractors, joint ventures, or outsourced operations. Someone has operational control. The question is whether it's you.

We see this create real confusion in construction and property. A builder running a major project might have operational control over generators, concrete batching, and vehicle movements on site. A property manager might have operational control over the base building HVAC system across a portfolio of buildings. Neither thinks of themselves as running a "facility" under NGER — but the Act might disagree.

The Scenarios That Catch Companies Unaware

Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to become an NGER reporter. It tends to happen gradually, and the realisation comes late. These are the patterns we see most often.

Acquisitions. Your company buys another business. That business has three sites, a vehicle fleet, and some gas-fired equipment. Individually, nothing comes close to the facility threshold. But added to your existing group's emissions and energy consumption, you've now crossed the corporate group threshold. Under the NGER Act, when operational control of a facility changes during a financial year, each corporation reports for the portion of the year they held control. But the threshold calculation uses the full year. So an acquisition in March can trigger reporting obligations for the entire financial year if the combined group exceeds 50 kt or 200 TJ.

Fleet expansion. A logistics company that's been growing its truck fleet by 15% a year might not be tracking total diesel consumption in terajoules. They're tracking litres, kilometres, and fuel costs — operational metrics. But diesel has an energy content factor of around 38.6 GJ per kilolitre (NGA Factors 2025). A fleet consuming 5.2 million litres of diesel per year is already at 200 TJ. That one fuel type alone could trigger the corporate group energy consumption threshold.

New gas connections. A manufacturing company that switches from electric heating to natural gas (maybe for process heat, or because gas was cheaper at the time) picks up Scope 1 emissions it didn't have before. Natural gas has an emission factor of 51.4 kg CO2-e per GJ (NGA Factors 2025, scope 1). If you're burning 15,000 GJ of gas per year across the group, that's about 770 tonnes of CO2-e just from gas — but that's additive to your electricity emissions, fleet emissions, and everything else.

Multi-site property portfolios. A REIT or property manager with 40 commercial buildings might consume modest electricity at each one. But when you add up the energy consumption across the whole corporate group — base building HVAC, common area lighting, lifts — 200 TJ is lower than you'd think. At the national average electricity emission factor of 0.62 kg CO2-e per kWh, 200 TJ of electricity consumption equals roughly 55.6 million kWh. That's a lot. But 40 buildings averaging 1.4 million kWh each gets you there. And plenty of office towers use more than that.

A Quick Back-of-Envelope Threshold Check

You don't need a consultant to estimate whether you're near the thresholds. Here's how to do a rough calculation using your utility bills and fuel records.

Electricity (energy consumption and Scope 2 emissions): Take your total annual kWh across all sites. Multiply by 0.0000036 to convert to TJ. Then multiply the kWh by your state's grid emission factor to get Scope 2 emissions in kg CO2-e (divide by 1,000 for tonnes). For example, 27.8 million kWh across a group of NSW facilities: that's 100 TJ of energy consumption (right at the facility threshold if it's one facility) and about 17,800 tonnes of Scope 2 CO2-e using the NSW factor of 0.64.

Natural gas (energy consumption and Scope 1 emissions): Your gas bills will show consumption in MJ or GJ. Convert to TJ (divide GJ by 1,000). For Scope 1 emissions, multiply GJ by 51.4 and divide by 1,000 to get tonnes CO2-e (using the NGA Factors 2025 emission factor for natural gas distributed in a pipeline).

Diesel and petrol (energy consumption and Scope 1 emissions): Take total litres consumed. For diesel, multiply by 0.0386 to get GJ, then by 0.001 to get TJ. For Scope 1 emissions, diesel is about 2.68 kg CO2-e per litre (NGA Factors 2025). A company burning 500,000 litres of diesel per year generates about 1,340 tonnes of CO2-e and consumes about 19.3 TJ of energy.

Add it all up — electricity, gas, diesel, petrol, LPG, anything else that produces energy or emissions — and compare to the thresholds. If you're within 80% of either threshold, you should be doing proper calculations with the CER's threshold calculator, not relying on napkin maths.

We're honest about this: the rough calculation won't be exact. Emission factors vary by fuel type, state, and year. Choosing the right emission factor matters more than most people realise. But a back-of-envelope check will tell you whether you're in the conversation or nowhere close.

The Registration Deadline Most People Miss

If you cross an NGER threshold in a given financial year (1 July to 30 June), you must register as an NGER reporter by 31 August following that financial year. That gives you two months after the end of the reporting period to determine your obligations and lodge a registration application through the CER's Online Services portal.

Miss that deadline, and you've got a civil penalty problem.

Section 19 of the NGER Act sets the penalty for failure to provide a report to the Regulator at 2,000 penalty units. With the Commonwealth penalty unit currently at $330 (for offences from 7 November 2024), that's a maximum of $660,000. The CER can also issue infringement notices ranging from 12 penalty units to one-fifth of the maximum court penalty — so between $3,960 and $132,000 without going to court.

And these are continuing contraventions. Every day you fail to comply after the deadline can attract additional penalties.

Once registered, you report annually by 31 October. No extensions. The CER publishes a list of late reporters on their website — which means your non-compliance is publicly visible. You also have to keep records for five years from the end of each reporting year, in a format that external auditors can readily access.

Deregistration isn't automatic either. If you drop below the thresholds, you can apply to deregister — but only if you're unlikely to meet thresholds for three or more consecutive years, and only if you're up to date on all reporting obligations. You can't dodge a bad year by deregistering.

The NGER-to-ASRS Pipeline: Why Thresholds Matter More Now

This is the part that changed the entire calculation for companies near the NGER thresholds.

Under the Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Market Infrastructure and Other Measures) Act 2024, which introduced mandatory climate reporting through ASRS, any entity that is a "registered corporation under the NGER Act, or is required to make an application to be registered" is automatically classified as an ASRS Group 2 reporter. That's regardless of your revenue, assets, or employee count.

We wrote in detail about what ASRS Group 2 reporting requires. The short version: you need to prepare climate-related financial disclosures in accordance with AASB S1 and AASB S2, covering governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets. Scope 1 and 2 emissions must be disclosed from your first reporting period (financial years starting from 1 July 2026). Scope 3 gets a one-year deferral. And your Scope 1 and 2 numbers carry full director liability from day one — no modified liability protection.

So a manufacturing company that narrowly crosses the 50 kt corporate group threshold doesn't just pick up an NGER return. It picks up AASB S2 compliance, assurance costs ($30,000 to $80,000 for limited assurance at the mid-market level), and the need for governance structures around climate risk that it probably doesn't have yet. That's not a reporting obligation. That's a strategic event.

The silver lining — if you can call it that — is that AASB S2 explicitly allows companies in scope for NGER to use their NGER emissions calculations for AASB S2 disclosures. So you won't need to calculate emissions twice using different methodologies. But there's a technical wrinkle: NGER uses AR5 global warming potential values while AASB S2 technically requires AR6 (the latest IPCC assessment). For most companies the difference is marginal, but it's the kind of detail that auditors will notice and that we're still helping companies work through in their compliance systems.

What You Should Do This Week

If you're reading this article because you're not sure whether your company triggers NGER thresholds, you probably need to find out. Not next quarter. Now.

Pull your electricity bills, gas invoices, and fuel purchase records for the last financial year. Run the back-of-envelope calculations above. If you're anywhere near the thresholds — even within 20% — download the CER's threshold calculator and do the proper workup. And if you've acquired a business in the last two years, add their energy and emissions data to your group totals.

The 2025–26 financial year ends 30 June 2026. Registration is due 31 August 2026. First NGER report due 31 October 2026. And if you do trigger NGER, your first ASRS Group 2 climate disclosures begin for financial years starting from 1 July 2026.

That's not much runway. And it's less than you think once you factor in the time needed to set up data collection, understand your facility boundaries, and figure out who in the corporate group has operational control over what.

We don't pretend this is easy. We've spent years building data extraction and emissions calculation systems because we've seen — first-hand, at BHP and Rio Tinto and Senex Energy — how messy energy data gets inside large organisations. But getting the threshold question right is step one. Everything else follows from that.

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