Get your B Corp groundwork done before you open the assessment

What does B Corp ask of a small business now?

B Lab introduced new standards in April 2025, and certification on them began in 2026. Instead of reaching an overall points score, companies must now meet requirements across seven Impact Topics, including Climate Action and Purpose and Stakeholder Governance. The requirements scale with company size. The B Lab certification hub sets out the current process.

For climate, smaller companies are expected to publish a climate action plan with specific, time-bound targets and actions that tackle their most significant emission sources. The plan needs approval from the company’s highest governing body and must be updated every three years. Larger companies face extra requirements, such as a full emissions inventory and science-based targets.

Why start with a carbon baseline?

A climate action plan is far easier to write when you know where your emissions come from. Without a baseline, “our most significant sources” is a guess. With one, it is a sentence: “Gas heating and flights make up most of our footprint, so our first two targets address those.”

ESG Now calculates your footprint using the GHG Protocol and the UK government’s official conversion factors. It covers heating fuels, company vehicles and refrigerant leakage, purchased electricity and EV charging, water, waste, business travel, and estimates of commuting and homeworking, with an optional spend-based estimate of purchased goods and services. It does not cover inbound freight paid for by suppliers or downstream categories such as the use of products you sell, and it says so in the methodology appendix. For most office-based small firms, the sources it measures are where the biggest early reductions sit.

The report also records which policies you already have, such as an environmental policy or a code of conduct, and your action plan flags the ones worth adding next. Our environmental policy and code of conduct templates give you a starting point to adapt.

What else the report helps you pull together

Much of B Corp is about showing your practices, not only having them. Your ESG report records them in one place:

• Workforce: Real Living Wage, benefits, training, diversity monitoring, health and safety policy and incident recording
• Community and customers: volunteering, charitable giving and how you handle data under UK GDPR
• Governance: directors, who is responsible for ESG, supplier due diligence, risk management and a code of conduct
• Commitments: any carbon target and your priorities for the year ahead

Your private action plan then lists the gaps in order of priority. That is a useful starting point for a conversation with a B Corp adviser, or for working through the self-assessment on your own. Our guide to getting B Corp ready as a small business explains how to plan the journey.

How long it takes

An office-based SME usually finishes in 20 to 30 minutes. Have a recent energy bill (or your office size), your bin details, headcount and a rough idea of work travel. Answers save as you go. Your first report is free, with no card needed. Start your report and turn a vague ambition into a plan with numbers in it.