If your business has grown past a certain size, energy and carbon reporting stops being optional. Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting — SECR — is the UK framework that requires larger organisations to disclose their energy use and emissions in their annual accounts. It's been in force since April 2019, it sits in the documents you already file at Companies House, and the penalties for getting it wrong are reputational as much as regulatory.

The good news is that SECR is more manageable than it first looks, and the data it asks for is data you should arguably be tracking anyway. Here's who's in scope, what the thresholds actually are in 2025/26, what you have to disclose, and where Aston Energy fits in.

Who has to report

SECR applies to three types of UK organisation:

  • Quoted companies — any UK-incorporated company listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange, an EEA exchange, or the NYSE or NASDAQ. There is no size threshold for quoted companies: if you're quoted, you're in scope, regardless of how small you are. (Companies admitted to AIM are not "quoted" for this purpose.)
  • Large unquoted companies — private companies that meet the "large" test below.
  • Large LLPs — limited liability partnerships meeting the same "large" test. This catches a lot of legal, accountancy, financial advisory and consulting firms.

Public sector bodies are generally exempt, though charities, academies and similar organisations should check whether they meet the qualifying criteria.

What the thresholds are — and the trap to avoid

For unquoted companies and LLPs, you're classed as "large" — and therefore in scope for SECR — if you meet at least two of these three criteria:

  • Turnover of £36 million or more
  • Balance sheet total of £18 million or more
  • 250 or more employees

Here's the part that's catching businesses out right now. In April 2025, the UK raised its general company-size thresholds by roughly 50% — the "medium" company limits moved up to £54m turnover and £27m balance sheet. A lot of finance teams have understandably assumed that if they've dropped into the "medium" bracket for their accounts, they've dropped out of SECR too.

They haven't. The SECR thresholds were deliberately left unchanged. They're still pegged to the old £36m / £18m / 250 figures. It would take separate legislation to move them, and that hasn't happened. The practical effect is that a company now treated as "medium-sized" for its accounts can still be obliged to produce a full SECR disclosure — because it still breaches two of the old, lower thresholds.

If your business sits anywhere near these numbers, this is worth checking deliberately rather than assuming. Misjudging it means either an unnecessary compliance scramble or, worse, a missing disclosure in a filed set of accounts.

Annual report, calculator and carbon emissions charts on a desk

The low energy user exemption

There's one important carve-out. If your organisation consumes 40,000 kWh (40 MWh) or less of energy across the reporting year — counting electricity, gas and transport fuel — you qualify as a "low energy user." You still have to calculate your total energy use to demonstrate this, but you're exempt from the full set of disclosures. You simply state in your directors' report that the low-consumption threshold is the reason a full report isn't included.

SECR also runs on a "comply or explain" principle: if a piece of data is genuinely impractical to obtain or commercially sensitive, you can omit it — provided you explain clearly what you've left out and why.

What you actually have to disclose

The exact requirements depend on whether you're a quoted company or a large unquoted company/LLP, but the building blocks are similar.

Large unquoted companies and LLPs report on a UK (and UK offshore) basis:

  • Total energy consumption in kWh — electricity, gas, and transport fuel
  • Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions, expressed in tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e). Scope 1 is direct emissions from sources you control; Scope 2 is emissions from the electricity, heat or steam you buy.
  • At least one intensity ratio — your emissions set against a business metric, such as tCO₂e per £m of turnover, per employee, or per square metre of floor space. This is what makes the numbers comparable year on year.
  • Prior-year comparatives — from your second reporting year onward.
  • A narrative on energy efficiency actions taken during the year.
  • The methodology you used — ideally a recognised standard such as the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard.

Quoted companies report on a broader, global basis — global Scope 1 and 2 emissions and global energy use — but otherwise cover the same elements. Scope 3 (value-chain) emissions remain voluntary, though increasingly expected.

Energy management dashboard showing electricity and gas consumption trends

Where it goes, and when

SECR isn't a separate submission. The information goes into your existing annual filing:

  • Companies include it in their Directors' Report filed at Companies House (or the Strategic Report, if the board considers it strategically important).
  • LLPs prepare a standalone Energy and Carbon Report, approved by the members.

It's an annual obligation, due alongside your accounts. The work isn't usually in the writing — it's in pulling together accurate, complete energy data in time, which is exactly where most of the effort and most of the errors live.

Why it's worth doing properly

It's tempting to treat SECR as a box to tick. That's a missed opportunity. The discipline of measuring your energy use year on year tends to surface things you'd otherwise never see: sites that are quietly overconsuming, contracts that have drifted onto poor rates, equipment running inefficiently. The intensity ratio, tracked over a few years, becomes a genuine performance metric. Businesses that engage with it properly often find the reporting pays for itself in identified savings — and the energy-efficiency narrative becomes a real story rather than a paragraph of filler.

How Aston Energy can help you prepare

SECR is ultimately signed off by your directors, and the emissions calculations often involve your accountants or a carbon specialist. Where Aston Energy adds value is the energy data layer underneath all of it — the part that's most time-consuming to assemble and most often inaccurate.

We can help you:

  • Pull together accurate annual consumption data across electricity and gas, in the kWh format SECR requires, drawn directly from your supply and meter data rather than estimated.
  • Get visibility across multiple sites or meters, so nothing is missed or double-counted when you consolidate.
  • Identify and document energy efficiency actions — reviewing your usage and procurement to find practical savings, which then feed directly into the efficiency narrative your report needs.
  • Align reporting with procurement, so the decisions you make at contract renewal support both your costs and your reported performance.

In short: we make sure the energy numbers going into your SECR disclosure are accurate, complete, and working in your favour — and we turn the exercise into a chance to cut cost, not just satisfy a filing.

The bottom line

If your business is quoted, or meets two of £36m turnover / £18m balance sheet / 250 employees, you're almost certainly in SECR scope — and the recent threshold uplift doesn't change that. The reporting itself is straightforward once the data is right; the data is where it lives or dies. Start with clean, accurate energy figures and the rest follows.

Not sure whether you're in scope, or want a head start on the energy data behind your next SECR disclosure? Aston Energy can pull your consumption together and flag the savings hiding in it.