Glossary›Emissions accounting and measurement›Business travel emissions (Category 6)
Glossary term
Cluster D · D42
Tier 2
Business travel emissions (Category 6)
Definition
Category 6 covers the emissions of transporting employees for business purposes in vehicles the company does not own or operate: flights, hire cars, taxis and rideshare, rail, and accommodation where the company elects to include it. It excludes commuting, which is Category 7, and excludes travel in the company’s own fleet, which is Scope 1.
· Appendix B, Scope 3 measured per the GHG Protocol Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard · first disclosed in the second reporting period
On this page
In practice
Business travel is almost always immaterial to the total and almost always the first category an entity measures, because a travel management company will hand over a clean flight-segment report on request. That mismatch is worth naming: effort here is disproportionate to impact, and a controller who spends the first quarter of year two perfecting Category 6 while Category 1 is untouched has misallocated the whole programme.
The data quality question is coverage rather than accuracy. The travel agency report covers booked travel. It does not cover the trip an employee booked on a personal card and expensed, the taxi paid in cash, or the regional office that uses a different agency. Those gaps sit in the expense system, and the completeness work is reconciling the two.
Two optional inclusions need a stated decision: hotel nights, and radiative forcing uplift on flights. Both are defensible either way. Neither is defensible if the choice is not disclosed, because both materially move the number and a reader comparing years cannot see the switch.
What the assurer does with it
The assurer treats Category 6 as a completeness test rather than an accuracy test, because the underlying per-kilometre factors are published and stable. They reconcile the travel agency data to the travel expense accounts in the general ledger and ask what explains the difference.
They accept a travel management company report with a disclosed methodology plus a documented top-up for off-system travel. They reject a figure taken from the agency’s own emissions dashboard with no factor source, an inconsistent radiative forcing treatment between years with no restatement, and a population that silently excludes a subsidiary or region inside the reporting boundary.
Where an agency dashboard is the source, expect the third-party data provider questions to be asked of it: what method, what factor set, what edition, and who verified it.
Commonly confused with
Employee commuting, and the company fleet. The distinguishing test is not the purpose of the journey but who owns or operates the vehicle and whether the journey is to and from work.
Timing and relief
The standard Scope 3 position applies. Scope 3, and therefore this category, may be omitted from an entity’s first annual reporting period under AASB S2 Appendix C paragraph C4(b), and under paragraph C5 the entity may keep relying on that relief when presenting the relieved year as comparative information in later periods. Group 1 first discloses Scope 3 for periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026, Group 2 from 1 July 2027 and Group 3 from 1 July 2028.
Sources
1
Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard, full text
GHG Protocol
2
3
Review status
Review required
Last reviewed
15 September 2026
Editorial pass, unsigned
Reviewer required
Carbon accounting specialist
Next scheduled review
1 July 2027
Part of
Cluster D, Emissions accounting and measurement
49 terms from the head term carbon accounting down to individual Scope 3 categories and the mechanics of factors, boundaries and data quality. The largest cluster in the glossary.
Related terms
The home-to-work category Category 6 excludes
Where travel in the company’s own fleet belongs
The questions a travel agency emissions dashboard has to survive
Related questions
How do we work out which Scope 3 categories are material for us?
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You screen all fifteen GHG Protocol categories, estimate each roughly off accounts payable spend, and document why you included or excluded each one. The screen is the deliverable as much as the answer, because the practitioner will test the reasoning behind an exclusion at least as hard as the numbers behind an inclusion. Expect the answer to be concentrated in a handful of categories.
What evidence do we need for each emissions number?
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Every reported number needs a source document you did not create for the report, the activity data drawn from it, the emission factor and its published edition, and the calculation joining them. Fleet fuel needs litres from fuel card statements, electricity needs kWh by site from retailer invoices with the matching state factor, and refrigerants need kilograms by gas type from service records.
How do we tie our emissions data back to the general ledger?
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You reconcile the spend or volume behind each emissions source to the ledger accounts that record it, and you document the differences. It is not a perfect tie and it is not meant to be. The point is completeness: the ledger is the only population in the business already complete and already audited, so it is the natural control total for showing nothing has been left out.
Other terms in this cluster
Business travel emissions (Category 6)