What is aasb s2 readiness assessment?
Where you stand against the climate-reporting standard before your group’s start date — gaps named, evidence mapped, no surprises.
AASB S2 is the climate half of Australia's new sustainability reporting standard (AASB S1/S2, built on the ISSB baseline), and it applies through Chapter 2M of the Corporations Act — the same chapter that already makes a company prepare a financial report and a directors' report each year. From your entity's Group start date, a climate statement sits alongside those existing reports, not instead of them, and it goes through the same annual reporting cycle: prepared, reviewed, signed by directors, lodged with ASIC.
Three groups are phased in by size, and size is worked out under section 292A of the Corporations Act on a 'meets two of three' test against consolidated revenue, consolidated gross assets and employee count — consolidated across the entity and anything it controls, not the standalone figure. Group 1 — consolidated revenue $500 million or more, consolidated gross assets $1 billion or more, or 500 or more employees (any two of the three) — reports for financial years starting on or after 1 January 2025; for a calendar-year reporter that means the first statutory climate statement lodges around 30 September 2026. Group 2 — $200 million revenue, $500 million assets, or 250 employees — starts from financial years beginning on or after 1 July 2026, which for most Australian companies means the year that has just started. Group 3 — $50 million revenue, $25 million assets, or 100 employees — starts from financial years beginning on or after 1 July 2027. NGER Act reporters above the NGER publication threshold and asset owners above $5 billion in assets are pulled into the regime independently of these size tests.
Who does what
Preparation and gap analysis only — directors sign the statement, and assurance belongs to AUASB-registered practitioners we refer to.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | AASB S2 readiness assessment, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your registered BAS or tax agent | Everything that carries a licence in Australia — rendered exactly as written: work out what goes on your bas, or advise you on it — under tasa 2009 that requires registration we do not hold. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
AASB S2 readiness assessment in Australia
Group membership is a two-of-three test, not a single number
Section 292A treats an entity as being in a group if it meets at least two of that group's three thresholds — consolidated revenue, consolidated gross assets, employee count — for the financial year. A business that clears the revenue line for Group 3 but sits well under the assets and employee count lines is not automatically in scope; the test has to be run against all three metrics on a consolidated basis (the entity plus anything it controls), before a start date can be assigned with any confidence.
Group 1's first lodgement window is close, and it sets the pattern for Group 2 and 3
A Group 1 entity with a financial year starting 1 January 2025 has a reporting period ending 31 December 2025, with the climate statement due to lodge with ASIC on the same statutory clock as the annual report — around 30 September 2026 for most calendar-year filers. Group 2 entities whose financial year began 1 July 2026 are now inside their first in-scope reporting period; their statement follows the same four-section structure and lodges on the same cycle roughly a year later.
The modified liability period narrows enforcement, it does not remove the requirement
For the first three reporting years after an entity's Group start date, ASIC — not a private party — is the only body that can act on a misleading or deceptive statement confined to the forward-looking parts of the disclosure: Scope 3 emissions estimates, climate scenario analysis, and transition plan content. Governance disclosures, Scope 1 and 2 emissions, and factual statements sit outside that protection from year one, which is why the readiness assessment treats those sections as the ones to get right first.
A Group 3 entity with no material climate risk can publish a short-form statement instead
An entity that lands in Group 3 but can demonstrate it has no material climate-related risks or opportunities is permitted to publish a short 'no material risk' statement rather than the full four-section disclosure — but reaching that statement still requires doing the assessment work to establish materiality, and the statement still needs director sign-off and an auditor's report. It's a genuinely smaller exercise, not a way to skip the assessment; we describe this as a separate, related service rather than folding it into this one.
What your registered BAS or tax agent receives from us
- A gap assessment mapped against AASB S2's four sections — governance, strategy, risk management, metrics and targets — with each requirement marked closed, partially evidenced, or open.
- A Group-membership working paper: the section 292A two-of-three test run against your consolidated revenue, gross assets and employee count — the entity plus anything it controls — with the resulting start date and first lodgement window stated.
- An evidence index — board papers, risk registers, existing emissions records, supplier and customer data requests already on file — linked against the specific disclosure requirement each one supports.
- A Scope 1 and 2 emissions data inventory: what activity data exists, what is missing, and what needs to be collected before the first reporting period closes.
- A prioritised remediation list ordered by what falls outside the modified liability protection first (governance, Scope 1/2, factual statements), so the highest-exposure gaps get closed before the lower-stakes forward-looking ones.
- A draft climate statement structured to AASB S2, built from the closed and partially-evidenced items in the gap assessment, ready for your board to review, amend and sign.
