EEOC Requests OMB Approval for 2024 EEO-1 Reporting Cycle and Updates to Form 462

Each year companies across the United States await the EEOC portal opening date so that they can manage and plan their resources to meet the deadline to file their EEO-1 form—a report required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in which an employer must break out its workforce by race, ethnicity, gender, and position. Well, the wait is over—after months of silence on the subject, the EEOC included the 2024 filing period in the recently submitted documents to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for approval. The portal is scheduled to open on May 20, 2025, and companies will have until June 24, 2025, to submit their reports. 

With the submission to the OMB, the EEOC seeks to gain approval for a revised Instruction Booklet for EEO-1 Reporting, including removal of the option for reporting on individuals who identify as non-binary. In the 2023 guidance, the EEOC provided instructions for companies to utilize the comment box to voluntarily report on employees who chose non-binary as their gender. The revised 2024 Instruction Booklet would eliminate this as an option, and all employees included in the filing would have to be filed as either male or female. The EEOC’s stated reason for the change is that “in order to comply with EO 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, it must remove the option to report on non-binary employees.”

Aside from this change, the other technical aspects of the EEO-1 report remain unchanged. Employers will continue to be required to provide the EEOC with data about the size, location, race or ethnicity, and gender demographics of their workforce. The 2024 report, like prior reports, will be based on a workforce payroll snapshot taken during the fourth quarter of the prior year. For this year, the snapshot should be a payroll period from October 1, 2024 to December 31, 2024.

All employers with 100 or more U.S. employees are required to submit an EEO-1 report to the EEOC. Under the now-revoked E.O. 11246, federal contractors with at least 50 U.S. employees were also required to submit an EEO-1 Component 1 report. Despite the revocation of E.O. 11246, the EEOC’s 2024 Instruction Booklet makes repeated reference to E.O. 11246 and its implementing regulations for the proposition that federal contractors with 50 or more employees are also required to file an EEO-1 Component 1 report. The reason for this inconsistency in the 2024 Instruction Booklet is unclear, but the EEOC is likely to provide more clarification as to the threshold for filing as we approach the portal opening in May.

As employers continue to face pressure from various groups to make EEO-1 reports public and as certain states (most notably California, Illinois, and most recently, Massachusetts) have linked their own reporting requirements to the EEO-1 format, it is important to pay attention to the EEO-1 reporting process to confirm that the reports are complete and accurate.