BLOG OVERVIEW
Expert consultants go over DCI's takeaways and lessons from this year's EEO-1 filing period and instruction booklet, including a shortened timeline for employers with no late submissions accepted, filing with fewer than 100 employees, the elimination of non-binary reporting, changes to acquisition, spinoff, and merger reporting, the future of EEO-1 reports, and more.
On June 24, 2025, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) annual data collection for private employers, known as the EEO-1 report, closed. In a previous blog post covering the new instruction booklet, DCI summarized the changes to this year’s EEO-1 filing. Below is a summary of DCI’s takeaways from this filing period and recommendations on how employers can accommodate this year’s changes in the future.
Shortened Timeline for Employers
The filing period this year was noticeably shorter compared to prior years. The first indication that the Online Filing System (OFS) for the EEO-1 report was opening was when EEOC submitted a proposed instruction booklet on April 15, 2025 for approval by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The OFS officially opened on May 20, 2025, at which time companies required to file EEO-1s were able to submit data until the deadline of June 24, 2025. No late submissions were accepted by the agency, which is a departure from prior years.
Lesson Learned: EEOC provided employers with less notification and less time to prepare for the filing this year than in previous years, while also not allowing for late submissions. Employers should take steps to ensure required data and information are ready in early 2026 in preparation for the 2025 filing. Although it is unclear whether the filing data will be collected in 2026, based on recent filing cycles, the deadline tends to fall in late spring or early summer.
Filing with Fewer Than 100 Employees as a Federal Contractor
As in prior years, the filing instructions indicated that employers must file EEO-1s if they were a private employer with 100 or more employees or if they were a federal contractor with 50 or more employees. However, this requirement for federal contractors stemmed from Executive Order 11246. Thus, it is unclear whether the 50-employee threshold is enforceable following the rescission of EO 11246 per the issuance of Executive Order 14173 on January 21, 2025.
Lesson Learned: During the filing period this year, some federal contractors elected to submit the filing with fewer than 100 employees. Although the OFS did accept these submissions, DCI recommends consulting with counsel before filing as an employer with fewer than 100 employees.
Reporting Employees Who Identify as Non-Binary
EEOC removed the option to report non-binary employees this year and indicated it will only accept “Male” and “Female” sex information. Previously, employers were permitted to include non-binary records in the filing. Employers were able to provide notes in the comments field on how many non-binary employees were included to account for any discrepancies in employee counts by race/ethnicity versus sex. Although the agency has removed the option to report on non-binary employees, many employers still collect this information.
Lesson Learned: In cases when an employer has records that are missing sex or records where only a non-binary self-identification is documented, the EEOC provides the options to either conduct a visual identification or make use of employment records to place each employee in a male or female category. Through the use of employment records, the intention is to populate biological sex for non-binary employees, if available. However, this is contrary to the employee’s self-identification, which is ultimately the preferred method of collecting demographic information.
If the employer is still missing binary sex data for employees after the EEOC-suggested options have been utilized, there are few actions employers typically take. One is for employers to remove non-binary individuals from the submission data. However, choosing this method can be problematic because the overall count of employees reported will not be accurate. Another common action is to default non-binary employees as one sex or the other (most commonly as male). Defaulting sex information, however, inflates the number of employees in the default category (e.g., making it appear that the company has more males represented than it truly employs). Regardless of the approach that is selected, DCI recommends involving counsel in this decision.
Acquisition, Spinoff, and Merger (ASM) Reporting
The EEO-1 instruction booklet also contains updated guidance on reporting acquisitions. The change entails a shift in filing responsibility from the acquired company to the acquiring company if the acquisition occurs after the reporting period ends. In this case, the guidance suggests that the acquiring company is responsible for submitting the filing on behalf of the acquired company, so long as access is granted to the acquired company’s EEO-1 Component 1 data.
This update diverges from EEOC’s previous approach. In the past, companies that were being acquired had to file as a separate employer if the acquisition had taken place after the period being reported. This shift in filing responsibility could have been a response to difficulties in coordinating with personnel from the previously independent organization or to difficulties accessing data from an acquired company’s Human Resources Information System (HRIS).
To add to the confusion, while the acquiring company is now required to submit the acquired company’s reports, they do not have the ability to formally report the acquisition in the portal’s ASM module until the following reporting period. Specifically, in the ASM module this year, EEOC included a drop-down menu where employers were required to indicate the year the acquisition occurred. However, the most recent year on the menu was 2024, not 2025. Therefore, companies with acquisitions in early 2025 were required to report on behalf of the acquired company under the acquired company’s account and will not be able to report the acquisition in the acquiring company’s ASM module until the 2025 filing next year. This nuance in the ASM module this year required that the acquiring company coordinate with the acquired company for the separate filing, which does not align with the shifted responsibility for reporting, nor the dates of company ownership.
Lesson Learned: Should this requirement remain in future filings, companies undertaking acquisitions after the reporting period are required to file for an acquired entity as the acquired entity. This will entail gaining access to the acquired company’s filing account and submitting the filing on their behalf. The acquiring entity will then have to wait until the next filing cycle to report the acquisition in their own OFS account, within the ASM module.
Instruction Booklet Still Contains References to Executive Order 11246
Additionally, this year’s filing instruction booklet frequently referred to Executive Order 11246, and its contents were nearly identical to last year’s booklet. This could be related to Executive Order 11246 still being present in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) at the time of the booklet’s release in April. However, it may be argued that the lack of edits is evidence of the current EEOC’s plans to discontinue the filing in future years, and that the agency is not investing time into the expected edits to align with current regulatory language.
The current administration has since announced the proposed process for removing Executive Order 11246 regulations from the CFR, as the order is no longer in effect.
The Future of EEO-1 Component 1 Reports
Given the abbreviated filing period this year and confusion regarding referenced regulations in the filing instruction materials, there is some question regarding EEOC’s intentions for future collection of EEO-1 Component 1 data. At this time, it is also uncertain how EEOC plans to use the race/ethnicity and sex data that was collected this filing cycle.
DCI will continue to monitor updates to the filing and provide information on our blog as it becomes available.
