The
2026 Draft Taxonomy has been prepared based on the
2026 Revised ESRS Delegated Act as published by the European Commission on 3 July 2026. It is aligned with the
2026 Draft List of Datapoints that have been published by EFRAG Secretariat on 28 July 2026 for fatal flaw comments. Respondents should read the
Explanatory Note that is published together with the
Draft List of Datapoints in conjunction with the 2026 Draft XBRL Taxonomy and the associated
Technical Explanatory Note, before responding to this survey.
While the 2026 Draft List of Datapoints will be used by humans , the corresponding XBRL taxonomy is mainly designed for producing machine-readable digital reports. Therefore, several technical details are again only provided in the XBRL Taxonomy.
EFRAG delivered its final advice on XBRL Taxonomy representing the ESRS adopted in 2023 in September 2024 to the European Commission (EC) and ESMA, but that Taxonomy never went into force, i.e. digital tagging was not made mandatory by ESMA and the EC.
The general design and architecture of the 2026 Draft Taxonomy are outlined in the
Technical Explanatory Note and overall remain similar to the one described in the
Explanatory Note for the 2024 XBRL Taxonomy, but a few simplifications and improvements have been made:
- The file structure of the 2026 Draft Taxonomy has been considerably simplified, and the number of files has been reduced. This will make the processing of the 2026 Draft Taxonomy easier and more performant, without impacting the actual XBRL elements (i.e. XBRL concepts) and the tagging process.
- Validation rules regarding the existence of disclosures have not yet been implemented except for the existence assertion on EU datapoints. EFRAG recommends adding validation rules after the first wave of companies have digitised their reports.
- Regarding overlapping datapoints in the 2023 ESRS Set 1, in the 2026 Revised ESRS these overlaps have been largely eliminated through the simplification process of the ESRS itself, conducted by EFRAG in 2025. This results in more flat narrative tagging hierarchy compared to the old XBRL taxonomy.
- The Level-1 XBRL narrative elements (textblocks) have been included in the Draft XBRL Taxonomy; but pending the assessment of the feedback that will be received through this survey consultation. More information is provided in a dedicated question on this topic within the survey.
- The term “whether and how” has been removed (with some exceptions) in the 2026 Revised ESRS, leading to a much reduced number of Booleans.
- The 2024 XBRL Taxonomy reused a number of XBRL elements across the social standards, repeating in the element names the different stakeholder groups addressed by each topical standard. Since very few of those similar elements are left in the 2026 Revised ESRS, and in order to reduce the use of dimensions, those elements have been modelled as distinct elements in in S1-S4.
- In comparison to the List of Datapoints, line items which are included within the topical sheets in 2026 Draft List (“in accordance with GDR-”), conceived to flag GDR references in the topical standard worksheets, are not included in the 2026 Draft Taxonomy. Instead, the GDR-related XBRL elements are provided only once in the ESRS 2 section, with an option to disaggregate by Policy, Action, Target or Metric.