EEOC proposes ending decades-old workplace demographic reporting program

Ending the federal EEO-1 report would strip away one of the government’s main ways to see whether workplace demographics are changing, making discrimination harder to prove and long-term hiring patterns harder to spot. The annual filing has forced large private employers and certain federal contractors to break down their workforces by job category, sex, race and ethnicity, creating a record that has helped show who gets hired, promoted and concentrated in which jobs.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent a proposal on May 14, 2026, to the Office of Management and Budget seeking to rescind the EEO-1 reporting requirement. The move would affect the EEO-1 Component 1 report, the mandatory annual data collection for private-sector employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees that meet certain criteria. The proposal reportedly also includes similar reporting requirements for EEO-2, EEO-3, EEO-4 and EEO-5.

That would be a major break from a data series the EEOC says dates to 1966, just after Congress created the agency to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The commission opened its doors in 1965, and its equal-employment data have since been used to track private-sector workforce patterns for decades. EEOC data pages point employers and researchers to EEO-1 data, public-use files and the EEOC Explore tool as ways to analyze employment trends.

The timing matters for employers still preparing for another filing cycle. The EEOC opened the 2024 EEO-1 data collection on May 20, 2025, and set a filing deadline of June 24, 2025. Employers with 100 or more workers had been waiting for the next annual instructions, and the absence of a 2026 filing window has added to the uncertainty around what comes next.

Even if the proposal advances, it still has to clear several hurdles before any reporting change can take effect. Employer-compliance advisers say the process would require review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, publication in the Federal Register, a public comment period and additional approval steps tied to federal information-collection rules.

The rollback also lands as the EEOC under Acting Chair Andrea Lucas has sharpened its focus on DEI-related discrimination. The agency’s website now highlights resources explaining that such discrimination can include an employment action motivated in whole or in part by race, sex or another protected characteristic. Reuters reported in late 2025 that Lucas warned companies using race, sex or other protected characteristics as factors in employment decisions could face enforcement action.

That backdrop has made the EEO-1 proposal politically combustible. Bloomberg Law reported that House Democrats tried and failed to use funding language to protect EEOC race-and-sex data reports, with Republicans offering no support. For policymakers, workers and civil-rights advocates, the stakes are straightforward: if the government stops counting who is in each job, it becomes much harder to measure inequality, challenge bias and see whether progress is real or only claimed.