Where CPG brands quietly overpaid on packaging EPR in 2026, and how to catch it before the next cycle.
You filed your packaging EPR reports before the deadline. You paid what the portal asked for. And somewhere in the back of your head there’s a question you can’t quite answer: was any of it actually right?
Here’s the honest version. Most of the brands that got hurt this year didn’t get hurt at the deadline. They got hurt by things that never showed up as a problem. A material logged in the wrong category, so the fee came back higher than it should have. An exemption they qualified for and left on the table. A state they didn’t realize was already live. A report filed against the wrong year. None of it threw an error. The portal took it. The invoice looked believable. That’s what makes packaging EPR different from most compliance work you’ve done. The failure is quiet, and quiet failures don’t get caught unless somebody goes looking.
Some context on why this season was rough, in case you need to hear that it wasn’t just you. 2026 was the first time most producers had to report across several states at once. Six of the seven states with packaging EPR laws report through the Circular Action Alliance, and the deadline landed on May 31, with California filings due June 1 because the 31st fell on a Sunday. A lot of the state rules weren’t final until close to the wire. Workbooks and portal guidance turned up with a few weeks of runway when teams needed months. If your filing felt like a scramble, that’s the season, not a knock on your team.
So here’s where the money actually went, and the handful of things I’d check before you file again.
How do I know if I was even obligated to report packaging EPR?
Most brands treat this as a switch. Do we sell there, yes or no, and if yes we report. It isn’t a switch. It’s a stack, and every layer takes a different kind of work.
The bottom of the stack is market presence. Do you put covered packaging into that state at all. Fast to answer, and it’s the one thing you should have settled before you ever signed with a co-manufacturer or a reporting partner, not after. Above that sits the revenue question. Most states use a $5 million global gross revenue floor, but they don’t all use the same logic, and California has its own eligibility rules that won’t line up with the others. Assume they match and you’ve built an error into the foundation.
Then it gets into supply chain, which is where I see smart teams trip. Being a producer depends on your role, not just your name on the label. Brand owner, licensee, importer, private label seller, they can each be the obligated party depending on the state and the deal. An importer that thinks it’s just moving boxes can turn out to be the one on the hook. Get the responsible product lines wrong and every number after that is calculated against the wrong set of products.
Near the top is the tedious layer, the one nobody wants and the one that pays. Which specific SKUs or components can be exempted. That’s slow work, reading program definitions against your actual packaging specs, and it’s usually where the savings hide. Only after all that do you check the last layer: once the exemptions are out, do you still clear the tonnage threshold for covered materials, because low-volume and high-volume producers file differently and owe differently.
The brands that came through clean always knew which layer they were standing on. The ones that overpaid answered “do we sell there” and called it done.
Why does my report say it’s done when it might still be wrong?
Spreadsheet reporting has a nasty habit. The errors don’t arrive together. They surface one at a time, after upload, when a field gets rejected or a total won’t reconcile or a reviewer asks a question nobody prepared for. So “final” doesn’t mean validated. It means nobody’s found the next problem yet.
Three things caused most of the damage. Material misclassification is the first. An HDPE film logged as LDPE. A closure marked as glass that’s really something else. Small on paper, and it can push your packaging up a fee tier while everyone’s looking somewhere else. Component counts are the second, usually coming in low and reading as perfectly fine, which is why they became the number one reason reports got sent back to be redone. And the third isn’t an error at all. It’s the fee reduction that was sitting in your data the whole time and never got claimed, because correcting a material category is only worth something if a person actually goes and checks it. One reclassification done right can be worth well into five figures. It doesn’t wave a flag. Someone has to want to find it.
What separated the clean filings from the expensive ones wasn’t clever. It was three checks, run the same way, on every single report. Is the material right. Are the counts right. Did anyone look for a reduction. Including on the reports that looked too simple to bother with. Those were often the ones hiding the miss.
What happens the second year I have to file?
Nobody asks why a number is what it is the first time you file. The second time, everybody does. Why did the packaging weight move. Why is this component in a different category now. Why did a fee climb when sales didn’t. If the answer lives across old email threads, a couple of retired spreadsheets, and a person who left in March, you don’t have a reporting process. You have a record of what somebody did once.
The fix is cheap right now, while it’s quiet. Go to whoever owns your reporting and ask one thing: if a number changes next year, can you tell me why, in writing, without turning it into a research project? If the honest answer is “we’d have to dig around,” that’s the gap. Better to close it in a slow month than the week before a deadline.
Does packaging EPR apply if I sell into Canada?
It does, and the worst move is to treat it as one more line on your U.S. spreadsheet. Canada isn’t a single program. It runs province by province, which puts you in front of a handful of separate systems, each with its own fees, its own exemption thresholds, and its own material definitions. What counts as a covered material in one province may be defined differently one border over.
There’s a timing reason to care now instead of later. Canada’s heading toward harmonization, and when that lands it’ll rewrite the rules again. The brands building province-level knowledge today get a running start. The ones waiting for harmonization to force their hand will be learning several programs from scratch on a clock that doesn’t care about their Q1. For anyone scaling across North America, this is the blind spot I see most. The U.S. filing gets all the oxygen because its deadline is loud. Canada gets filed under “later,” right up until later becomes a gap.
Is it safe to handle EPR reporting in-house?
It can be. It works when the people doing it know the rules well enough to catch their own mistakes. The filings that worry me aren’t the messy ones. They’re the confident ones.
I talked with a mid-sized brand that ran its own May filings and felt good walking away from them. Then the details started not adding up. They’d read “2025 reporting” as a request for 2025 data, when the filing actually wanted 2024 data, so they submitted the wrong year and the right one never went in at all. They assumed Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington weren’t live yet, so nothing was filed there. They’d taken California’s early fee number as the final one and built a budget around it. Their California component counts left out unit sales, came in badly low, and the portal rejected the report outright. And underneath all of it, they’d leaned on AI to estimate and categorize packaging without knowing the program well enough to tell whether the output was right.
None of that was carelessness. It’s exactly what you’d expect the first year a brand-new, multi-state system switches on and everyone learns it at the same time. But “we submitted it and nothing broke” is not the same sentence as “it was right.” The dangerous mistakes in this work are the polite ones. They don’t throw errors. They look plausible in a spreadsheet, survive a quick review, and only announce themselves when a report bounces, a fee gets recalculated, or next year’s numbers refuse to line up.
“We submitted it and nothing broke” is not the same sentence as “it was right.” The costliest errors this season didn’t look like errors at all.
What should I check before the next EPR reporting cycle?
You don’t need a new system to be in far better shape next season. You need four things nailed down while there’s no deadline breathing on you. Hand this list to your team.
- Know which obligation layer you actually cleared. Market presence, revenue eligibility, product-line responsibility, SKU-level exemptions, tonnage. Most brands only ever settled the first one.
- Write down your QC checklist. Material classification, component quantities, sales-volume inputs, and a deliberate look for fee reductions, run on every report, including the easy-looking ones.
- Give yourself a paper trail. If a number moves next year, you want a plain-English reason for it, on hand, not buried in old threads.
- If you sell into Canada, start mapping it now. Several provincial programs take longer to learn than one, and harmonization isn’t waiting on your calendar.
If you filed this season and you’re not sure it was right, or you suspect you overpaid, now is the time to find out. Not next May, when there’s no room left to fix it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my brand had to report packaging EPR?
Obligation is a stack of questions, not a single yes or no. Do you put covered packaging into the state at all. Do you clear its revenue threshold, which is a $5 million global gross floor in most states but has its own rules in California. Which entity in your supply chain is the responsible producer, since brand owners, licensees, and importers can each be on the hook differently. Can any SKUs be exempted. And after those exemptions, do you still clear the tonnage threshold. Most brands answer the first question and stop, which is usually where they over-report or overpay.
Which states required packaging EPR reporting in 2026?
Seven states have packaging EPR laws on the books: California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. Six of them report through the Circular Action Alliance, everywhere except Maine, and the deadline was May 31, 2026 for 2025 supply data, with California filings landing June 1. How much detail you owed depended on the state, from a simplified pre-program report to a full component-level supply report.
Why did my packaging EPR fees come out higher than I expected?
Usually it traces back to how a material got classified. Log a resin or a component in the wrong category and you can land in a higher fee tier than your packaging actually warrants. The other common cause is an exemption you qualified for and never claimed. Getting a single material reclassified correctly can be worth real money, sometimes well into five figures, but it only surfaces if someone reviews the categorization instead of trusting the first pass.
I think I filed my EPR report for the wrong year. What now?
This one is more common than people admit, because the reports run on the prior calendar year, so a 2026 filing is built on 2025 data. If you submitted the wrong year, odds are the correct year was never filed, and nothing in the portal will tell you that. You can generally fix it, but you have to catch it first, then file the missing year and correct the mismatched one before it turns into an enforcement problem.
Do I have to deal with EPR if I sell into Canada?
Yes, and it isn’t one program you can attach to your U.S. workflow. Canada runs province by province, so you’re looking at several separate systems, each with its own fees, thresholds, and material definitions. It’s also moving toward harmonization, which will shift the rules again, so brands that start learning the provincial picture now will be ahead of the ones who wait.
Can I just handle EPR reporting myself?
You can, as long as the people doing it know the rules well enough to catch their own mistakes. The risk isn’t effort, it’s confidence without a way to check the work, which is exactly what a brand-new multi-state system produces in its first year. A second set of eyes earns its keep by finding the quiet errors, the missed exemptions, and the misclassifications that never look wrong on the page.
About the Author
Tom Fitzgerald is the founder of Access Creative Group and a CPG supply chain consultant with 25+ years inside packaging, manufacturing, and logistics across CPG, specialty food, and life sciences. He helps brands untangle packaging compliance, co-packer sourcing, and supply chain problems before they get expensive. Reach him at Access Creative Group or on LinkedIn.