Must a UK CBAM verifier visit our plant in India every year?
Usually at least once per verification. HMRC's UK CBAM guidance requires a physical site visit, but a verifier may skip it if the same verifier visited in each of the two previous monitoring periods, nothing significant has changed and everything can be checked remotely. Virtual visits are only for serious, unforeseeable events.
What the visit is for
- Checking meters and monitoring systems.
- Interviewing the staff who record the data.
- Seeing the installation boundary and every production process for the CBAM goods.
- Confirming no fuel, emission source or technical connection is missing.
When the visit can be waived
- The same verifier did a physical visit in the two monitoring periods immediately before this one.
- The verifier understands your processes and control systems well and can get all information remotely.
- Its risk analysis says skipping the visit would not raise risk to an unacceptable level.
- No significant change since the last visit: no new production route, new fuel, new raw material, new heat source, new product, changed equipment or changed monitoring method.
Virtual visits
A virtual visit can replace the physical one only when serious, extraordinary and unforeseeable circumstances outside your control stop the verifier coming. Plan for a real visit in your first year, and again in any year you switch fuels, for example from furnace oil to piped gas.
What Senseible does here
Senseible keeps your fuel and power records, by site and month, in one place, so the verifier can review them before arriving and spend the visit on meters and boundaries. We build the figure from your records and check every figure in-house; for the UK it must then be verified by a verifier accredited for UK CBAM. Have your own verifier? Send it to them.
Sources: HMRC, UK CBAM monitoring, reporting and verification technical guidance (October 2026)
Last reviewed 2026-11-02.