The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission voted yesterday to propose rescinding the EEO-1 report and five related data collections, a move that would end a requirement dating to 1966 that employers annually submit workforce demographic data broken down by race and sex.
The proposed rule would eliminate the EEO-1, EEO-2, EEO-3, EEO-4, EEO-5, and EEO-6 reports, along with the recordkeeping requirements tied to them. For collection agencies, debt buyers, law firms, and other ARM industry companies with 100 or more employees, the change would remove an annual compliance obligation that the EEOC estimates costs private employers more than $273 million per year.
Why it matters: The EEO-1 has been a fixture of HR compliance for any accounts receivable management company above the 100-employee threshold. The EEOC estimates roughly 110,000 employers file the report each year, submitting more than 2.2 million individual reports and spending a combined 5.2 million hours doing so. The agency pegs the average filer’s cost at hourly wages of $34.87 across the personnel involved, with multi-establishment employers spending upwards of 200 minutes per filing.
The commission’s reasoning goes beyond cost. In the notice of proposed rulemaking, the EEOC preliminarily concluded that the reports are inconsistent with equal employment opportunity law and may violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. The agency argues that requiring employers to classify workers by race and sex, absent any specific charge of discrimination, is not narrowly tailored to its enforcement mission and may actually encourage discrimination, either through racial stereotyping or through employer efforts to correct statistical imbalances that federal courts have said are not, on their own, proof of discrimination.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said the proposal reaffirms the principle that every individual is entitled to equal treatment under the law, and noted the reports stand in tension with Title VII’s requirement that employment practices be colorblind. The agency’s authority to request records during a specific charge investigation would remain unchanged.
The move follows a string of related actions, including President Trump’s revocation of Executive Order 11246 in January 2025 and the Labor Department’s subsequent proposal to rescind the OFCCP regulations that also contain EEO-1 requirements.
What happens next: The public will have 30 days to comment once the proposal is published in the Federal Register, with comments submitted through regulations.gov. A public hearing is scheduled for Aug. 11, 2026, at EEOC headquarters in Washington. Requests to testify must be submitted by Aug. 7. The commission said it will consider all comments before issuing a final rule, which it also intends to use to fold in previously proposed references to the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
