Edited May 20, 2025

Last month, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) submitted a proposed 2024 EEO-1 instruction booklet to the Office of Management and Budget. If the proposal is approved, the EEO-1 reporting period will begin on May 20, 2025 and run through June 24, 2025. As employers prepare to file their 2024 EEO-1 Component 1 reports, they should be aware of two changes for this reporting cycle.

Ambiguity Regarding Reporting Requirement for Small Federal Contractors

First, there is ambiguity regarding EEO-1 reporting requirements for small (50-99 employees) federal contractors.  The published Department of Labor regulations ostensibly require EEO-1 reporting for federal contractors with 50 or more employees. See 41 CFR § 60-1.7. Those regulations were promulgated to enforce Executive Order 11246.  See 41 CFR § 60-1.1 (“The purpose of the regulations in this part is to achieve the aims of parts II, III, and IV of Executive Order 11246 . . . .”). However, Executive Order 14173 revoked Executive Order 11246. (See our January 28, 2025 blog post for more information about that Executive Order.) Accordingly, if you are a small federal contractor with fewer than 100 employees, we recommend contacting your employment attorney for further analysis and guidance.  

Removal of Non-Binary Gender Identity Reporting Option

Second, the EEOC has proposed revising its EEO-1 instruction booklet to explain that the EEO-1 Component 1 data collection process does not include options for reporting non-binary gender identities. This is a non-substantive change that does not impact the data collection template, which only ever included reporting options for male and female. In previous years, however, information about non-binary employees could be noted in the comments section of EEO-1 reports; the proposed changes clarify that such supplemental data will not be processed. This shift is intended to comply with Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

Covered employers should begin taking steps to prepare for EEO-1 reporting. Employers with questions about EEO-1 reporting, generally, or changes to the current reporting cycle should contact their Stoel Rives employment lawyer. We will publish further updates regarding the reporting schedule and other changes to the data collection process as they become available.