The EEOC Wants to Kill the EEO-1. Here’s What Employers Should Do in the Meantime.

What the EEOC Actually Proposed

The EEOC submitted a proposed rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) — the White House regulatory review office — titled “Rescission of EEO-1, EEO-2, EEO-3, EEO-4, EEO-5, And Reporting Requirements Under Title VII, the ADA, GINA, and the PWFA.” For employers, the headline is the EEO-1: the annual workforce demographic report required of private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees meeting certain thresholds.

No proposed rule text has been published. No Federal Register notice has been issued. Existing reporting obligations remain in effect.

The proposal is currently under review. No timeline for finalization has been announced. OIRA review can take 90 days or longer.

The Case for Keeping the Data Even If the Filing Goes Away

A coalition of former EEOC officials called EEO Leaders pushed back on the proposal the same day it was announced, and one of their arguments cuts closer to home than you might expect: companies use EEO-1 data for purposes that have nothing to do with federal filing obligations.

Those purposes include understanding workforce composition over time, preparing required state-level workforce reports, identifying potential liability under equal employment opportunity laws, and benchmarking against industry trends using the EEOC’s publicly available aggregate data tool, EEOC Explore.

If the federal filing requirement is ultimately eliminated, none of those internal reasons to collect the data disappear. Employers who stop collecting workforce demographic data entirely because the federal obligation is gone may find themselves without information they need for state compliance, internal risk assessment, or litigation defense.

📄 Read the EEO Leaders response

What Employers Should Do Right Now

The proposal is real, the direction is clear, and the timeline is uncertain. Three things worth doing now:

• Keep filing until a final rule says otherwise: No existing obligation has changed. The EEO-1 filing requirement remains in effect. Employers who stop filing based on a proposal — before the rescission is finalized — are taking a compliance risk with no legal basis.
• State obligations may survive the federal rescission: California, Illinois, and Massachusetts each have independent workforce demographic reporting requirements that exist regardless of the federal EEO-1 obligation. If the federal requirement goes away, those state obligations don’t. Check your state law before assuming your reporting obligations have changed.
• Decide now whether to keep collecting the data internally: If the filing requirement is eliminated, the question of whether to keep collecting workforce demographic data becomes a business and legal decision, not just a compliance one. The reasons to keep collecting — state law obligations, internal risk assessment, litigation defense — don’t disappear with the federal requirement.

The EEO-1 has been a fixture of HR compliance for sixty years. What happens next depends on a regulatory process that is just getting started.