Affirmative Action Plan: Who Still Needs One

If you searched this term and landed on an article explaining job group analyses, availability analyses, and placement goals, you were reading something written before January 2025 that nobody updated. The rule behind all of that was revoked, and a great many guides and plan templates have carried on as though it were still there.

The correction is narrower than the noise suggests. One presidential order went away. Two acts of Congress did not, and those two carry their own written plan obligations, thresholds, and audit exposure. A contractor that concluded in early 2025 that affirmative action planning was finished made a mistake that is still sitting in its files.

Those two programs have since been trimmed by rule rather than by order. Final rules effective 21 September 2026 took the 7 percent utilization goal, the self-identification invitations, and the data analysis out of the disability program and left the veterans program intact, so anything written between the revocation and now is already half a step behind.

This covers what was revoked, what survived and why, which contractors still have to write a plan, what goes in the two surviving programs, and what a small business with no federal contract needs to do, which is usually nothing. I build the people and records tooling for businesses without an HR department at FirstHR. This is general information rather than legal advice, and the position has changed recently and may change again.

What an Affirmative Action Plan Actually Is

An affirmative action plan is a written compliance document that a covered federal contractor prepares for each establishment, updates every year, and hands to a federal investigator on request. It sets out how the contractor will recruit, hire, and advance people in a specified protected group and, where the rules still require a count, what it measured and what it found.

Three features matter more than the rest. It is written, so an intention never typed up is not a plan. It is annual, so it goes stale on a schedule. And it is producible on demand, which means the version existing on the day the request arrives is the only one that counts. What it is not, and never was, is a hiring quota.

What Was Revoked, and What That Left Behind

Executive Order 11246 was revoked outright on 21 January 2025 by Executive Order 14173, which also gave contractors a 90 day window to carry on complying with the old regulatory scheme if they chose (Federal Register). That order, signed in 1965, produced the affirmative action plan most people picture when they hear the phrase.

The agency response was quick. The Secretary of Labor ordered the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to stop enforcing the order on 24 January 2025, and contractors were told to wind down by 21 April 2025. For a year and a half after that the code of federal regulations still printed rules implementing an order that no longer existed.

That gap has now closed. A final rule published on 21 August 2026 removes and reserves 41 CFR parts 60-1, 60-2, 60-3, 60-4, 60-20, 60-40, 60-50, and 60-999 with effect from 26 October 2026, and rewrites the administrative procedures at part 60-30.

The same day brought two more rules, and they are the ones a covered contractor has to act on. Both took effect on 21 September 2026. One strips the measurement half out of the Section 503 rules; the other aligns the veterans rules with the revocation and lifts their dollar thresholds.

One further change belongs in the same picture, and it is less settled than most write-ups suggest. The rule requiring federal contractors with 50 or more employees to file the annual workforce demographic report sat in part 60-1, so it goes on 26 October 2026, and the Department stated plainly that it has no further use for that data.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission runs its own collection under Title VII, has not changed it, and still lists federal contractors at 50 employees among its filers. Check the commission's instructions for the filing year rather than assuming the threshold moved to 100 for everybody.

And federal contracting has acquired an obligation running the other way. Executive Order 14398, signed on 26 March 2026, requires agencies to insert a clause under which contractors undertake not to engage in racially discriminatory diversity activities, defined as disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in recruitment, hiring, promotion, contracting, or training. A contractor now certifies about the absence of one thing while still writing plans for two others.

Who Is Required to Have a Written Plan Now

Only federal contractors and subcontractors meeting the size and contract value thresholds under Section 503 or under the veterans statute. No category of employer is now required to write an affirmative action plan addressing race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Both basic coverage thresholds moved on 1 October 2025, the disability one from $15,000 to $20,000 and the veterans one from $150,000 to $200,000, under the periodic inflation adjustment the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council applies across government contracting. The written plan threshold for the disability program stayed at 50 employees and a $50,000 contract.

For a year those adjusted figures were binding without appearing in the rules, which produced a lot of wrong answers. The August 2026 rulemaking wrote them into 41 CFR part 60-741 and into part 60-300, so the printed thresholds and the operative ones now agree.

One trap survives. Subcontractors are covered on the same terms as prime contractors, and a business that never bid for federal work can be pulled in by one flow-down clause from a customer who did.

Because coverage turns on a contract rather than on anything in your HR file, write down how you reached the answer at the time you reached it. If an agency letter arrives two years later, the useful document is the one showing which contract you read, which headcount you used, and what you concluded.

A Voluntary Diversity Effort Is Not an Affirmative Action Plan

These are two different things governed by two different bodies of law, and collapsing the distinction is causing employers real trouble. A required plan is a regulatory document owed to a federal agency by a contractor. A voluntary diversity effort is a business decision owed to nobody, constrained by ordinary non-discrimination law.

The constraint is the part people miss. Title VII prohibits treating an individual differently because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and it prohibits it in both directions. A program that widens the pool, advertises in more places, or trains interviewers to score consistently is lawful and always has been. One that reserves a slot or lets a protected characteristic decide between two candidates is a different animal.

The shelter voluntary programs relied on has also been withdrawn. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rescinded the guidelines on affirmative action appropriate under Title VII at 29 CFR part 1608, which had stood since 1979, with effect from 6 July 2026 (Federal Register).

The statute itself is unchanged. What changed is that the agency will no longer tell you a voluntary program was appropriate. None of that touches the useful work, which is auditing requirements nobody can justify and scoring every candidate the same way.

The Disability Program: What Goes In It

A Section 503 program is a written document covering qualified individuals with disabilities, prepared within 120 days of the contract commencing, kept at each establishment, and updated every year by a named official. Its contents are prescribed rather than optional.

What the program no longer contains is the part most guides still describe. Until 21 September 2026 it carried an invitation to self-identify before the offer, again after the offer, and by survey every five years, plus an annual count of applicants and hires measured against a 7 percent goal. The rule removed and reserved the invitations and the count alike, and the prescribed federal form went with them.

What survives on the disability side is the outreach and recruitment duty, and it is now the heaviest item in the document. A contractor still names the external sources it uses and reviews them in writing once a year, deciding for each whether it worked and switching to alternatives listed in the regulation when the totality of the effort did not.

The rule added one clarification worth reading twice: a contractor is not required to consider quantitative data on referrals, applicants, or hires of individuals with disabilities when judging that effectiveness. Outreach is now assessed on what you did and what came back qualitatively, not on a percentage. Responses gathered before the change belong in the data analysis file the old rule called for, not in medical files.

The other pillar is the reasonable accommodation procedure, which overlaps almost entirely with what the Americans with Disabilities Act already requires at 15 or more employees. If you run a proper interactive process, the plan documents what you already do. If you do not, the plan is where the gap becomes visible.

The Veterans Program: What Is Different About It

The veterans program shares the same skeleton and is now the larger of the two, because it kept everything the disability rules shed in September 2026. Two of its duties have no counterpart on the disability side at all, and both are operational rather than documentary.

The job listing duty is the one that catches people. A covered contractor must list openings with the appropriate state employment service delivery system, and the exceptions are narrow: executive and top management roles, positions filled internally, and positions lasting three days or fewer. This is a workflow change rather than a policy, and it belongs inside your recruitment process, because an opening that closed without being listed cannot be fixed retrospectively.

The second addition is the annual veterans employment report, a separate federal filing rather than part of the plan. It is due by 30 September each year, the platform opens on 1 August, and it applies at the same $200,000 threshold. The Department of Labor sends no reminders, so it belongs on your own compliance calendar.

Utilization Goals and Hiring Benchmarks Are Not Quotas

One surviving program requires a number and it does not require you to reach it. The veterans benchmark is the last quantitative obligation standing, and the difference between measuring against a benchmark and being held to a target is the most misunderstood feature of this regime.

The disability side no longer has a number. The nationwide 7 percent utilization goal, which a contractor applied to each job group or to its whole workforce at 100 or fewer employees, was removed and reserved on 21 September 2026 along with the count that fed it. Nothing replaced it, so there is no disability percentage to compute, hit, or explain missing.

On the veterans side the published figure is a starting point rather than a target. A contractor sets a benchmark annually, and the simple route is to adopt the national percentage of veterans in the civilian labor force published by the agency, which has stood at 5.1 percent since 30 July 2025.

The alternative is to build your own benchmark from five specified data points covering state level veteran representation, veterans using state employment services, your own applicant and hire ratios, and the effectiveness of your outreach. Either way, the choice and its reasoning are documented and kept three years (41 CFR 60-300.45).

Recordkeeping, Reporting, and What a Review Looks At

Records under the disability regulations are kept two years from the making of the record or the personnel action, whichever is later, dropping to one year for a contractor with fewer than 150 employees or no contract of at least $150,000. The veterans rules run the same way with the second test at $200,000.

Three-year retention is narrower than it used to be. It now covers the outreach records under both programs, and under the veterans program also the applicant and hire analysis and the benchmark documentation. Once a complaint or a compliance evaluation begins, the clock stops applying and the relevant records are preserved until the matter resolves.

The production deadlines are short. A plan must be submitted within 30 days of an agency request and made promptly available on site if asked. Thirty days is enough time to send a document and nowhere near enough to write one, which is the practical reason the annual update matters more than it looks.

On enforcement posture the honest answer is that it is in flux. The administration proposed eliminating the enforcement office for the 2026 fiscal year, Congress funded it instead, and its authority over both statutes survived. None of that changes the obligation, which comes from the statutes rather than from the office enforcing them.

Affirmative Action Reporting Requirements

The affirmative action reporting requirements for a covered contractor come down to three things: one recurring filing tied to the programs, one demographic filing that has nothing to do with them, and a production duty that arrives without notice. The plan itself is never filed on a schedule, which is the part most owners have backwards.

The recurring filing is the annual veterans employment report, due by 30 September with the filing cycle open from 1 August. It applies at the $200,000 contract value with no employee minimum at all, so a five-person contractor can owe the report without ever owing a written program.

The demographic filing is the annual workforce demographic report, owed by any employer at 100 or more employees whether or not it holds a federal contract, and by federal contractors at 50 under rules the commission has not yet revised. The third is the production duty above: a plan handed over within 30 days of a request.

An OFCCP Audit Checklist

An OFCCP audit, meaning a compliance evaluation run by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, comes in four forms: a full compliance review, an off-site review of records, a compliance check, and a focused review (41 CFR 60-741.60 and 60-300.60). The compliance review is the heavy one, and it runs in three stages: a desk audit of the written program, an on-site review to check that it was implemented, and further off-site analysis where that is needed.

That first stage is the one you can prepare for completely, because it is conducted from documents you send in. The checklist below is what those documents are, and the right-hand column is where small contractors are usually short.

Two habits make those 30 days survivable. Keep each plan year together with the numbers behind it rather than scattered across folders, and date the outreach assessment on the day you do it. An assessment put together after the letter arrives reads that way, and the dates on the file confirm it.

How to Actually Put One Together

A first plan for a small contractor is a week of work, not a quarter, and most of that week goes on assembling numbers you already have rather than on writing prose.

Two of those steps produce the records a review actually asks for, and both are usually the ones missing. The outreach assessment has to say what each source produced and what you decided about it, and the veterans data collection analysis has to show the applicant and hire counts you measured against the benchmark. Keep them as rows you add to during the year rather than as prose you write in the last week.

What a Current Affirmative Action Plan Template Contains

A usable affirmative action plan template now covers two programs rather than three, and its sections are the ones the disability and veterans regulations still prescribe. The outline below sets them out in order. Strike the job group analysis, the availability analysis, and the placement goals wherever a downloaded version carries them, and strike the disability utilization analysis alongside.

The outline is a container rather than the work. Every line in it is answered by something produced elsewhere: the coverage record above, the outreach log, and the quarterly count. Fill it in from those, and there is very little left to write.

The element worth taking seriously is the audit and reporting system, because it turns a document into a program. It does not need software. It needs somebody to look at applicant and hire counts once a quarter and record what was done about them. Keeping those records somewhere they survive a laptop change is the part FirstHR is built to carry.

If You Are Not a Federal Contractor, You Need None of This

A private business holding no federal contract and no federal subcontract has no obligation to write an affirmative action plan, has never had one, and does not acquire one by growing. The requirement has always been a condition of federal contracting rather than a general employment law duty.

What does apply is ordinary non-discrimination, and the thresholds are worth knowing precisely because they are lower than most owners assume.

Two edge cases are worth a look before you file this away. State and local government contracts sometimes carry their own equal opportunity conditions, a separate regime with its own thresholds. And a court can impose a remedial plan when resolving a discrimination case, which is the one route by which an ordinary employer ends up with something resembling a plan.

For everyone else the useful work is the unglamorous kind. Write the job requirements before you advertise, ask the same questions in the same order, score against criteria fixed in advance, and keep the notes.

Then review any neutral rule that screens out a group without a job related reason. That is where disparate impact exposure lives, and it does not require anybody to have intended anything.

Where Employers Are Getting This Wrong Right Now

Six patterns, and four of them are new since the revocation.

Concluding that affirmative action planning ended in January 2025 is first and by far the most common. It ended for one of three programs, and a contractor who filed the whole thing away has stopped updating two plans an agency can demand within 30 days.

Using a downloaded template without checking its vintage is second. Templates written before 2025 describe the revoked regime, and templates revised during 2025 still run the disability utilization analysis that the rules dropped on 21 September 2026.

Computing a 7 percent disability utilization figure out of habit is third. The section it came from was removed and reserved, the count behind it went too, and the hours spent on it now buy nothing at all.

Assuming that being a subcontractor is a defense is fourth. Coverage flows down, and the moment to read the clause is before signing rather than after an agency letter arrives.

Treating a diversity initiative as though it discharges a compliance obligation is fifth. It discharges nothing, and since the withdrawal of the old voluntary guidelines it carries more risk than it used to rather than less.

And chasing the number instead of the record is last. A plan that meets its benchmark with no outreach assessment, no applicant and hire computation, and no audit system fails a review. A plan that misses its benchmark with all of that intact does not.

Frequently Asked Questions