The EEOC Just Broke Ground on EEO-1’s Funeral 🪦

On July 21, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted, publicly, to kill sixty years of federal race, sex, and national origin reporting. Cue the sad violins. This is happening.

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TL;DR: On July 21, 2026, the EEOC voted to issue a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking rescinding the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reporting and recordkeeping requirements, a formal step beyond the informal proposal sent to White House reviewers in May. Filing obligations have not changed yet: current rules stay in effect until a final rule replaces them, and a comment period and August 11 hearing come first.

📄 Read the EEOC’s proposed rule

📄 Read the EEOC’s press release

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What the EEOC Actually Voted to Do

Back in May, the agency sent an informal proposal to White House reviewers to eliminate the EEO-1 requirement, with no rule text and no comment period. That was step one.

On July 21, 2026, the EEOC took step two: a formal vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking rescinding the EEO-1 through EEO-6 reports and the recordkeeping requirements tied to them. This time there’s rule text, a 30-day comment window after Federal Register publication, and a hearing set for August 11, 2026. Employers who want to testify need to ask by August 7.

None of that changes your filing obligation today. The EEO-1 remains mandatory for private employers with 100 or more employees and covered federal contractors with 50 or more, until a final rule says otherwise. The EEOC has not opened the 2025 portal or set a due date.

Why the EEOC Says the Data Has to Go

The EEOC’s core argument: mandatory reporting, collected from every employer with no link to an actual discrimination charge, amounts to government-compelled racial classification. Chair Andrea Lucas framed it as a colorblind reading of Title VII, protecting individuals, not groups, against being sorted into predetermined racial categories. That kind of classification must satisfy strict scrutiny to survive a constitutional challenge, a high bar for the government to clear.

There’s also a cost argument underneath the constitutional one: the EEOC estimates the EEO-1 costs employers roughly $273 million a year, on top of nearly $4 million to administer, for demographic data that rarely proves discrimination without a comparison group.

What Doesn’t Disappear Even If the EEO-1 Does

This rulemaking only touches EEO-1 through EEO-6 reports. California, Illinois, and Massachusetts each impose their own workforce demographic reporting obligations, Colorado’s own requirement takes effect in 2027, and none of those move if the EEOC finalizes this rescission.

The direction is obvious, the timeline isn’t, and that gap is exactly where employers make costly mistakes: dropping something they’re still required to do, or discarding data they’ll wish they’d kept.

Filing Obligations Haven’t Moved, But the Runway Just Got Shorter

• The comment period probably won’t change the outcome, and it’s not clear many employers even want it to, most have spent years complaining about this exact paperwork. What it does produce is a record: this NPRM leans on an aggressive constitutional theory, which makes any final rule a plausible target for a legal challenge, and the administrative record built now is exactly what a reviewing court would examine later.
• State reporting survives regardless of the EEO-1’s fate. Multi-state employers in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, or Colorado (effective 2027) should treat those obligations as untouched by this rulemaking, rather than assume one rescission covers everything.
• Keeping data internally is separate from filing it with the EEOC. Employers who use it for self-audits or defending discrimination claims should decide now whether to keep collecting it if the federal mandate disappears, rather than let a final rule decide by default.

If this rule finalizes as written, the EEOC will have spent sixty years building a dataset it now says was constitutionally suspect to collect, and every employer sitting on that data will have to decide, on its own, what that means for the next discrimination lawsuit.