UK Sustainability Reporting Standards: the 2026 guide

UK SRS are UK versions of the ISSB’s IFRS S1 and IFRS S2.

They are issued by the Secretary of State for Business and Trade and, in their own words, “have not been prepared or endorsed by the International Sustainability Standards Board”.

The UK-specific differences are set out in Annex A of the government response, whose scoping rule is that where a requirement is not in the table, “there are no differences between the two”.

The largest difference is that there is no effective date in either standard, so they bind nobody until a law or regulation says so.

The standards require disclosure of risks and opportunities that could reasonably be expected to affect an entity’s cash flows, its access to finance or its cost of capital over the short, medium or long term (UK SRS S1 ¶3).

The dedicated editorial site for the UK sustainability reporting standards tracks the standards and their process in detail, and our own page on UK SRS S1 and S2 walks through the two texts.

UK SRS S1 is the foundation: it sets the rules that every UK SRS disclosure follows, climate or not.

Materiality is judged by the decisions of primary users of general purpose financial reports (¶18), and the standard sets no thresholds for it (¶B19).

The disclosures cover the same reporting entity as the financial statements (¶20) and must be connected to them, with consistent data and assumptions (¶¶21–24).

They are provided as part of the general purpose financial reports (¶60), at the same time as the financial statements (¶64), and close with an explicit and unreserved statement of compliance (¶72).

UK SRS S1 ¶E2 requires S1 and S2 to be applied together, and ¶E3 permits an entity to report on climate alone, at the price, under ¶73A, of not asserting compliance with UK SRS S1.

In the standard that climate-first relief has no time limit; for listed companies, PS26/19 limits it to two years.

The rules apply to accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027, with first reporting in 2028.

The date of initial application is the start of a listed company’s first period beginning in 2027 (PS26/19 ¶3.18).

The Scope 3 relief runs for one year from that date and the UK SRS S1 relief for two, so for a company with a calendar year end they cover the 2027 report, and the 2027 and 2028 reports, respectively.

A company whose period began before 1 January 2027 can keep using the TCFD-aligned rules for that period or adopt UK SRS early (¶3.19).

No further phase covering large private companies, AIM companies or others has been proposed by the government or the FCA.

Scope 3 data. Supplier data is often thin in a first year, so the method, the data used and the categories included are disclosed alongside the figure.

Scenario analysis. Climate modelling is specialist work; the depth required scales with the entity’s circumstances, and the scenarios chosen and their sources are disclosed.

Joining up finance and sustainability. The connected-information requirement (UK SRS S1 ¶¶21–24) means the same assumptions must run through both, which is an organisational problem before it is a reporting one.

Systems. Figures rebuilt in spreadsheets each year are hard to evidence; a recorded method and factor version makes each figure traceable, which is what an assurance practitioner tests.