What does the vintage on a carbon credit mean, and can one project's credits carry two vintages?

A vintage is the calendar year a credit's reductions or removals belong to. Verra's rules say that where one verification period spans more than one calendar year, the Verra Registry displays separate vintages for each year. So one round of checking can produce credits with two different vintage years.

Vintage is like the harvest year on a bottle of wine

Verra runs a carbon credit programme, and its registry tracks the credits it issues. Wine labels carry the year the grapes were picked. A credit's vintage is the year its reductions or removals belong to. A project is checked by an independent verifier over a stretch of time, called the verification period, and the credits are issued afterwards.

Verra's registration and issuance rules say: where a verification period includes more than one calendar year, the Verra Registry will display separate vintages for each calendar year.

Verra's own example

• Verification period: 1 January 2020 to 30 June 2021.
• The project proponent would have one issuance record for the 2020 credits and a separate one for the 2021 credits.
• The credits assigned to each vintage would be based on the breakdown of reductions and removals in the monitoring report.
• The two vintages would be 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020 and 1 January 2021 to 30 June 2021.

A special case for forest projects

For projects that plant or restore forests, or manage forests better, and harvest, the rules say that if a year within the verification period has a negative number of reductions or removals, zero credits are issued for that year. A net total is issued in the next year in which enough reductions and removals have been achieved to make up for the negative year or years.

Why an Indian owner should care

• Verra counts calendar years. The financial year in India runs April to March, so a verification period that matches it always touches two calendar years.
• To split a verification period by calendar year, you need the reductions month by month. That is our reading of the monitoring report breakdown the rules mention.
• Buyers often care which year a credit comes from, and the registry shows it. Our page on renewable energy certificates and vintage shows how a different instrument treats the same idea.

Example: an April to March verification period

• Verification period: 1 April 2026 to 31 March 2027, with 1,200 tonnes of reductions in total spread evenly over 12 months, so 100 tonnes a month
• Vintage 2026: April to December, 9 months x 100 = 900 tonnes
• Vintage 2027: January to March, 3 months x 100 = 300 tonnes
• Check: 900 + 300 = 1,200 tonnes

Example numbers only. Real reductions are rarely even each month, and the monitoring report sets the true split.

What Senseible does here

Senseible reads fuel invoices and electricity bills into monthly records, so each month's energy use already sits under its own calendar year. The monitoring report, verification and issuance for Verra are done by you, a verifier and Verra. Senseible is not a registry, and credits come from Verra.

• Which year can a renewable energy certificate cover?
• What nine attributes a Verra credit carries
• What a Verra verification opinion must say
• Sell or retire your own carbon credits?
• Carbon credits for small businesses

Sources: Verra, Registration and Issuance Process, v5.0 (16 December 2025): section 4.1.3 and Box 1

Last reviewed 2026-11-07. Rules are from Verra's Registration and Issuance Process v5.0. The wine comparison and the point about financial years are ours. Verra updates its documents, so check the current version.