On July 23, 2026, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published a proposed rule, Removal of Reporting Requirements (RIN 3046-AB37, 91 FR 46332). It would rescind all six EEO reports and the recordkeeping requirements attached to them in 29 CFR Part 1602. The comment period closed on August 24. A final rule has not been published.
The Commission's stated reason is that the reports are "inconsistent with equal employment opportunity law and potentially unconstitutional." The proposal argues that the reports require race-based classifications, focus on some groups rather than all individuals, and may lead employers to take race-conscious action to correct statistical imbalances.
Who this reaches in education
The report that matters most for schools is the EEO-5. It requires public elementary and secondary school systems and districts with 100 or more employees to report, every two years, the number of employees in nineteen activity assignment classifications by race, ethnicity, and sex. The proposal estimates that about 10,500 districts are affected.
The EEO-6, the higher education report, is also on the list. According to the proposal, it has not been collected since 1993, so its removal changes little in practice for colleges and universities.
What changes and what does not
If the proposal becomes final, districts would no longer have a federal obligation to compile and file the EEO-5. Until a final rule is published and states an effective date, the current requirements remain in place. Nothing should be discontinued on the strength of a proposal.
Title VII does not change. An employer's obligation not to discriminate in hiring, assignment, promotion, pay, and discipline is the same obligation it was before the proposal. So is the employer's need to defend its decisions when they are challenged.
That is where workforce data earns its keep. When a charge or complaint arrives, the employer's best evidence is usually its own records: who applied, who was selected, on what criteria, and how outcomes compare across the workforce. An employer that stops keeping those records because a federal form went away will find the gap at the worst possible time.
How to plan
Districts and colleges should treat the proposal as a prompt to decide, on their own terms, what workforce information they keep and why.
Separate the filing from the function. List the uses the data serves today: monitoring hiring and promotion processes, reviewing pay, responding to charges, and reporting to state agencies or boards. Decide which of those uses continue regardless of the federal form.
Check state requirements. Some states impose their own workforce reporting on public employers and school districts. A change in federal reporting does not change those obligations.
Review retention with counsel before changing anything. The proposal addresses reporting and its associated recordkeeping. Other federal and state retention rules, and preservation duties once a charge is filed, are separate questions.
Use the data to test processes, not to set targets. The Commission's caution about race-conscious corrections is worth taking seriously. Data is most defensible when it is used to find and fix a flawed selection process, not to manage demographic outcomes directly.
The EEO-5 may be ending. The questions it was built to answer will still be asked, in charges, audits, and board meetings.