The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission holds a public hearing today on a proposal to stop collecting the workforce demographic reports it has required from large employers since 1966. If your nonprofit files an EEO-1 every year, the form may be on its way out. Most of the obligations around it are not.
The commission announced the proposal on July 21 after a 2 to 1 vote, and published the proposed rule in the Federal Register on July 23. Public comments are due August 24. Nothing changes until the commission reviews those comments and issues a final rule, and litigation after that is widely expected. But the direction is clear, and it is worth knowing now what would actually change for your organization and what would not.
If You Have Fewer Than 100 Employees, This Was Never Your Form
Start with who this touches. The EEO-1 Component 1 report is an annual filing by private employers with 100 or more employees, plus federal contractors with 50 or more employees and a federal contract of at least $50,000. It asks for headcounts broken down by job category, race and ethnicity, and sex. Nonprofits are private employers under this rule, so a human services agency with 120 staff files right alongside a manufacturer.
Most nonprofits never crossed that threshold, which means most readers of this piece have nothing to unwind. If you have 40 employees, the EEO-1 was never your form, this proposal does not create any new duty, and you can stop reading at the takeaway. For the roughly 110,000 employers that do file, the rest matters.
The Proposal Ends the Reports and the Recordkeeping Behind Them
The proposed rule would rescind all six of the commission's EEO data collections: the EEO-1 for private employers, the EEO-3 for unions, the EEO-4 for state and local governments, the EEO-5 for public school districts, and two others that have not actually been collected in decades. It would also amend the commission's regulations at 29 CFR part 1602 to remove the recordkeeping requirements tied to those reports, not just the filings themselves. One thing the proposal keeps: the general duty to preserve records of employment actions, like applications and personnel files, stays in part 1602. It is the race and sex categorization that would go, not recordkeeping itself.
The commission's stated reasons: the mandatory race and sex classifications raise constitutional concerns, the collection is not narrowly tailored to enforcement needs, and administering the EEO-1 alone costs the agency about $3.9 million a year. Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal dissented, arguing that six decades of workforce data have supported discrimination investigations and that state civil rights agencies and researchers rely on it. Both positions are in the record, and the comment file will grow before anything is decided.
What Does Not Change, No Matter How the Rule Comes Out
Title VII itself is untouched. The law against employment discrimination generally applies to employers with 15 or more employees whether or not anyone files a report, and losing a filing requirement does not erase the underlying law.
State obligations are also untouched. Employment lawyers count at least nine states, including California, Illinois, and New York, with their own workforce or pay data reporting rules that operate independently of the federal form. If you have employees in one of those states, check your state list before you change any internal process. Outcomes here turn on your specific facts, and this is not legal advice for your situation.
And nothing in the rule stops you from tracking your own workforce data. Nonprofit Quarterly argued this week that organizations should keep doing so voluntarily to see whether their own hiring and promotion practices match their missions. Whether to continue is a real decision with arguments on both sides, and it deserves a deliberate choice by your leadership rather than a default.
This Year's Filing Is in Limbo
Here is the practical wrinkle. The 2024 EEO-1 collection closed last year. The 2025 collection, which based on recent cycles would have been expected to open in late spring, has not opened, and the commission's data collection page says only that updates will be posted as they become available.
That leaves filers in a hold. The cautious posture, and the one most employment counsel are recommending, is to keep your data ready: preserve the fourth quarter workforce snapshot you would normally use and be prepared to file if the commission opens a window while the rule is pending. As with the PSLF employer rule earlier this summer, the safe move during a rule change is to keep doing what you were doing until the new rule is actually final.
The takeaway
If your nonprofit has fewer than 100 employees, this proposal asks nothing of you. If you file an EEO-1, three things are worth doing this month. Keep collecting the data you have always collected, because the rule is not final and state requirements survive it either way. Check whether any state where you have staff runs its own reporting. And if your organization has a view on the change, in either direction, file a comment on the proposed rule by August 24. Regulators read the docket. Your board should hear about this from you, not from a form that quietly never arrives.