The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wants to delete the government's oldest workforce demographic survey from the books. In a proposed rule published in the Federal Register on July 23, 2026, the Commission would rescind and remove from 29 CFR part 1602 the filing requirements for the EEO-1, EEO-2, EEO-3, EEO-4, EEO-5 and EEO-6 reports, along with the recordkeeping and record-preservation rules attached to them. Comments on the proposal, filed under RIN 3046-AB37, are due August 24, 2026, and the Commission has scheduled a public hearing for August 11, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. Anyone who wants to testify must ask in writing by August 7.
Background
The EEO-1 dates to 1966, when the Commission adopted it at 31 FR 2832 for joint use with the Labor Department's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the office created to implement Executive Order 11246. That joint design is why the report reaches deeper into the contractor base than into the commercial economy: private employers file at 100 or more employees, but federal contractors file at 50 or more employees if they meet certain criteria, and the contract-dollar trigger has stood at $50,000 since the report was adopted.
The legal scaffolding under that arrangement has already come apart. Footnote 2 of the proposed rule notes that Executive Order 14173, signed January 21, 2025, revoked E.O. 11246, and that in July 2025 the Labor Department proposed rescinding the 41 CFR part 60-1 regulations that carry the OFCCP-side EEO-1 obligation, at 90 FR 28472. The EEOC's proposal would close the other half of the loop. Two of the six reports are already dormant in practice: the Commission has not collected the EEO-2 since 1981 or the EEO-6 since 1993, so striking those two changes nothing for anyone.
Key Details
The Commission's own paperwork estimates describe the size of what it proposes to stop collecting. Citing its May 2, 2023 Paperwork Reduction Act notice at 88 FR 27504, the rule puts the EEO-1 at roughly 110,000 filers submitting about 2,235,938 reports each year and generating 5,238,467 aggregate burden hours annually. Roughly 40 percent of filers — 44,257 — are single-establishment employers estimated at 45 minutes each. The remaining 60 percent, or 65,743 filers, are multi-establishment employers with a modal burden of 200 minutes, about 3.33 hours.
On the money side, the rule claims $3,892,230 a year in savings tied to the EEO-1, of which $3,258,616 is attributed to contractor cost, and describes EEO-1 administration as about 6 percent of a line item in the agency's budget. The smaller surveys carry their own per-cycle figures: $378,002 for the EEO-3, $492,635 for the EEO-5 and $327,440 for the EEO-4. Those three reach populations that rarely show up in contracting coverage — 5,999 local unions file the EEO-3, 6,607 state and local governments file the EEO-4, and 10,500 public school systems and districts file the EEO-5. The Commission's July 21, 2026 press release announcing the vote frames the current program more broadly still, citing over two million employers covered, roughly $275 million in annual employer cost and about $4 million in annual EEOC administration cost.
The stated rationale is not primarily about burden. The Commission argues the reports are "inconsistent with equal employment opportunity law and potentially unconstitutional," that the data collected is "not narrowly tailored" and "unnecessary to enforce anti-discrimination laws," and that whatever marginal enforcement value remains is outweighed by the burden on employers and on the agency itself. The rule characterizes the reports' race categories as essentially an administrative racial classification and cites Shaw v. Reno in support. Chair Andrea Lucas put it this way in the July 21 release: "The Commission's proposal to rescind the EEO Data Reports is consistent with the text of Title VII and Supreme Court precedent," adding that the reports "stand in direct tension with Title VII's requirement that employment practices be colorblind." The rule also states the Commission still intends to fold its November 21, 2024 proposed Pregnant Workers Fairness Act references into part 1602 when it issues a final rule.
The Commission treats the action as purely deregulatory, writing that its "sole effect is to eliminate certain data collection and reporting obligations" and imposes no new costs.
What It Means for Contractors
Nothing has changed yet. This is a proposed rule, not a final one, and the obligations in 29 CFR part 1602 remain in force until the Commission issues a final rule removing them. Contractors that treat the EEO-1 as a fixed item on the compliance calendar should keep treating it that way through the comment period rather than assuming the collection is already dead.
The population most affected is the 50-to-99 employee contractor tier. Those firms file only because of the contractor trigger and the $50,000 contract threshold; a commercial company of the same size has never had an EEO-1 obligation at all. If the rule is finalized alongside the Labor Department's parallel rescission of 41 CFR part 60-1, the entire reporting rationale for that tier disappears, not just the EEOC-side filing. Larger contractors at 100 or more employees would still shed the report, but they carry it on the strength of their headcount rather than their contracts.
Note what else goes with it. The proposal removes the related recordkeeping and record-preservation rules, not just the annual filing. Contractors that built retention practices around those provisions will want to read the rule text closely and decide what to keep on their own initiative — obligations under other statutes, contract clauses and state law are untouched by this action and do not move because part 1602 does. Companies that use their own EEO-1 submissions as a data source for internal workforce reporting, prime-to-sub reporting, or responses to solicitation questionnaires should identify those dependencies now, because the underlying report may simply stop existing.
The comment window and hearing are the practical points of leverage. Written comments run to August 24, 2026 through regulations.gov under RIN 3046-AB37, and requests to testify at the August 11 hearing close August 7. Contractors with a concrete view of the compliance cost — or of what they lose if the data stops — have a short window to put it in the record. The Commission's constitutional framing also raises the odds that whatever it finalizes draws a challenge, which is another reason to keep filing systems intact rather than dismantling them on the strength of a proposal.
