OFCCP Rescinds the EO 11246 Regulations and Ends the Section 503 Disability Goal

On Friday, 21 August 2026, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published three final rules in the same issue of the Federal Register (Vol. 91, No. 161). Together they dismantle the regulatory apparatus built around Executive Order 11246, strip the best-known numeric target out of the disability regulations, and move the enforcement-hearing procedures that both surviving programmes relied on. Two of the three take effect on 21 September 2026. Nothing here is proposed, and nothing is open for comment.

What was published, and when each piece bites

Rescission of Executive Order 11246 Implementing Regulations — 91 FR 54444, FR Doc. 2026-17114, Docket No. OFCCP-2025-0001, RIN 1250-AA17. Rescinds 41 CFR parts 60-1, 60-2, 60-3, 60-4, 60-20, 60-40, 60-50 and 60-999, and amends part 60-30 to remove the E.O. 11246 components. Effective 26 October 2026.

Modifications to the Regulations Implementing Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act — 91 FR 54482, FR Doc. 2026-17115, Docket No. OFCCP-2025-0003, RIN 1250-AA18. Effective 21 September 2026, except amendatory instruction 1 (the amendment to 41 CFR part 60-30), which is effective 21 December 2026.

Modifications to the Regulations Implementing VEVRAA — 91 FR 54234, FR Doc. 2026-17116, Docket No. OFCCP-2025-0002, RIN 1250-AA19. Effective 21 September 2026.

The chain of causation is stated plainly in all three preambles. Executive Order 11246, issued in 1965 (30 FR 12319, 28 September 1965), was revoked by Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” on 21 January 2025 (90 FR 8633, 31 January 2025). The regulations were left standing without the order they implemented. DOL proposed the conforming changes to the Section 503 and VEVRAA rules on 1 July 2025 (90 FR 28494 and 90 FR 28485 respectively); these are the final versions of those proposals.

The important thing to understand about the sequencing is that the substantive obligation under E.O. 11246 disappeared in January 2025, not this month. What happened on 21 August 2026 is the clean-up of the Code of Federal Regulations — plus, in the Section 503 rule, a set of genuinely substantive rescissions that go well beyond housekeeping.

Section 503: what is gone, and what is not

Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 793) is a statute. It was not revoked, it is not affected by E.O. 14173, and its requirement that covered contractors take affirmative action to employ and advance qualified individuals with disabilities remains in force. What the final rule removes is the specific machinery the 2013 rulemaking (78 FR 58682, 24 September 2013) built on top of that statute.

Rescinded outright:

41 CFR 60-741.42 — the disability inquiry requirement. The 2013 rule required contractors to ask applicants about disability status at the pre-offer stage (60-741.42(a)) and to re-survey employees every five years (60-741.42(c)), using DOL’s prescribed Form CC-305. All of that goes.

41 CFR 60-741.44(k) — the associated data collection, which required contractors to document computations and comparisons for applicants and hires with disabilities.

41 CFR 60-741.45 — the 7 percent utilization goal, the annual utilization analysis, and the paragraphs (e) and (f) obligations to identify “whether and where impediments to equal employment opportunity exist” and to develop “action-oriented programs” when a job group fell below the goal.

DOL gives two reasons. The first is a legal one: it now takes the position that an employer-initiated disability inquiry of the kind 60-741.42 mandated is impermissible under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that the utilization goal, which necessarily depends on knowing disability status, has the same defect. The second is mechanical, and harder to argue with. 41 CFR 60-741.45(d)(2) required the utilization analysis to be run against the same job groups established for analyses under E.O. 11246. With E.O. 11246 revoked, those job groups no longer have a regulatory source. DOL describes the requirement as “now unworkable.”

Retained — and this is the part most likely to be misread:

41 CFR 60-741.5, the equal opportunity clause, which still requires affirmative action to employ and advance individuals with disabilities and prohibits disability discrimination across all employment practices.

41 CFR 60-741.40(b), the affirmative action programme requirement itself, for contractors with 50 or more employees and a federal contract or subcontract of $50,000 or more. The AAP still has to be developed and maintained annually. It just no longer contains a utilization analysis.

41 CFR 60-741.44(f)(4), documentation of outreach and recruitment activities, with a three-year retention period.

41 CFR 60-741.44(h), the audit and reporting system, including the requirement at 60-741.44(h)(1)(vi) to document the actions taken. In the preamble DOL specifically corrects a commenter who read the proposal as eliminating self-assessment, noting that the audit and reporting system survives and is focused on the effectiveness of the AAP.

The complaint process at 41 CFR part 60-741, subpart D. Applicants and employees can still file disability discrimination complaints.

DOL’s own burden estimate is a useful sense of scale: it expects roughly 29,904 parent companies to need changes to their HRIS and recordkeeping systems to pull the CC-305 form and its data fields out, at an average of 10 hours each — 299,040 burden hours in total. Separately it counts 119,971 covered entities that will continue to carry the outreach documentation obligation.

VEVRAA: mostly plumbing, and the hiring benchmark stays

The VEVRAA rule is the narrowest of the three. VEVRAA (38 U.S.C. 4212) is likewise a statute and remains in effect. The final rule:

Removes the cross-reference at 41 CFR 60-300.65(b) to the E.O. 11246 administrative proceeding procedures in part 60-30, and writes those procedures directly into part 60-300 instead.

Removes the reference to 41 CFR part 60-3, which existed only under the E.O. 11246 authority.

Removes 29 U.S.C. 793 — the Section 503 authority — from the authority citation for part 60-300.

Updates the jurisdictional thresholds to reflect the Federal Acquisition Regulation Council’s inflation adjustment effective 1 October 2025.

Commenters asked DOL to go further and remove the VEVRAA affirmative action programme requirements, or to drop the barrier analysis triggered when a contractor falls below the VEVRAA hiring benchmark at 41 CFR 60-300.45. DOL declined. The hiring benchmark, and the AAP obligation for contractors with 50 or more employees and a single federal contract or subcontract of $200,000 or more, both survive this rulemaking.

That asymmetry is the single most important operational point in the package. The disability utilization goal is gone; the veteran hiring benchmark is not. A compliance office that treats the two programmes as a matched pair and switches both off will be out of compliance from 21 September.

The thresholds moved, and the rules only now say so

Both final rules incorporate coverage thresholds that changed nearly a year ago and were not previously reflected in the regulatory text:

Section 503 basic coverage: $15,000 → $20,000, effective 1 October 2025.

VEVRAA coverage: $150,000 → $200,000, effective 1 October 2025.

Both come from the FAR Council’s inflation adjustment of acquisition-related thresholds under 41 U.S.C. 1908, published at 90 FR 41872 (27 August 2025). DOL made these changes without notice and comment under the “good cause” exemption at 5 U.S.C. 553(b)(B), reasoning that the adjustments had already been through the FAR Council’s own rulemaking and are binding regardless. Note the direction of travel: these are increases, so a small number of contractors holding awards between the old and new figures are no longer covered at all.

Note also that both thresholds are written in terms of a federal contract or subcontract. If your institution’s exposure analysis was last refreshed before October 2025, the dollar figures in it are wrong.

Part 60-30 is being retired on a delay

41 CFR part 60-30 held the administrative enforcement proceeding procedures that all three programmes pointed to. Because those procedures are now written directly into parts 60-300 and 60-741, part 60-30 becomes redundant. Rather than pulling it immediately, DOL used a delayed effective date: the relevant amendatory instruction in the Section 503 rule takes effect 21 December 2026, three months after the rest. If you have an open or anticipated proceeding, the procedural rules that govern it change on a different date from the substantive ones.

What a compliance office should actually do

The near date is 21 September 2026, which is under a month away.

Turn off the CC-305 flow — but check what else it feeds. The pre-offer invitation, the post-offer invitation and the five-year re-survey all lose their regulatory basis. In many applicant tracking systems these are wired into the same workflow as other required disclosures. Removing the wrong one is a live risk.

Do not delete the AAP. The Section 503 affirmative action programme requirement at 60-741.40(b) is unchanged for contractors at 50 employees and $50,000. What comes out of the AAP is the utilization analysis; what stays in is outreach, recruitment, the audit and reporting system, and the documentation that supports them.

Keep the VEVRAA benchmark analysis running. It was not rescinded.

Preserve existing records rather than purging them. Nothing in these rules shortens an existing retention obligation, and the 60-741.44(f)(4) three-year retention for outreach documentation is expressly retained. Data collected under a rescinded requirement may still be relevant to an open charge or proceeding.

Separate federal obligations from everything else. These rules speak only to what OFCCP requires of federal contractors. They do not touch Title VII, the ADA, state fair-employment law, or any accreditation or funder condition your institution is separately subject to. An institution that concludes it may now stop collecting disability data entirely has probably skipped a step.

For institutions that maintain a central civil-rights compliance function, this is worth coordinating with whoever owns the other federal threads — the Title IX coordinator role and the 2 CFR 200 procurement standards both sit adjacent to this and are unaffected by it.

Frequently asked questions

Is any of this open for comment?

No. All three documents are final rules. The comment periods ran on the July 2025 proposals (90 FR 28494 and 90 FR 28485, both 1 July 2025) and closed long ago.

Does this eliminate our obligation to take affirmative action for individuals with disabilities?

No. That obligation is statutory, at 29 U.S.C. 793, and the equal opportunity clause implementing it at 41 CFR 60-741.5 is retained. What is removed is the prescribed method — the 7 percent utilization goal, the utilization analysis, and the mandatory disability inquiry. DOL notes that contractors remain free to conduct utilization analyses at their own discretion, subject to the ADA.

Can we still use the CC-305 form voluntarily?

The rule rescinds the requirement to use it; it does not, in terms, address voluntary use. DOL’s stated legal position is that the employer-initiated inquiry the form embodies is impermissible under the ADA, which is a reason to take legal advice before continuing it rather than to assume it is safe. The preamble does say contractors may continue to assess their workplaces by other means — it gives reviewing responses to reasonable accommodation requests and auditing workplace accessibility as examples.

Why do two rules take effect on 21 September and one on 26 October?

The Federal Register DATES sections set them that way: the Section 503 and VEVRAA rules are effective 21 September 2026, the E.O. 11246 rescission on 26 October 2026, and the part 60-30 amendment in the Section 503 rule on 21 December 2026. There are three separate dates in this package, not one.

Does the E.O. 11246 rescission change anything that was still legally required?

The executive order itself was revoked on 21 January 2025, so the underlying obligation ended then. The 26 October rescission removes the orphaned regulations from 41 CFR. DOL also states in the preamble that it considers significant portions of the E.O. 11246 regulatory framework legally vulnerable independent of the revocation.

Our institution holds federal grants but few contracts. Are we covered?

The coverage tests in both surviving regulations are written in terms of a federal contract or subcontract above a dollar threshold — $20,000 for basic Section 503 coverage, $200,000 for VEVRAA, with the affirmative action programme triggers at 50 employees plus $50,000 (Section 503) or $200,000 (VEVRAA). Whether a particular instrument is a contract for these purposes is a question for your counsel and your contracts office; the answer is not determined by which agency issued it.

Primary sources: Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Department of Labor, “Rescission of Executive Order 11246 Implementing Regulations,” 91 FR 54444 (21 August 2026), RIN 1250-AA17; “Modifications to the Regulations Implementing Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as Amended,” 91 FR 54482 (21 August 2026), RIN 1250-AA18; “Modifications to the Regulations Implementing the Vietnam Era Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, as Amended,” 91 FR 54234 (21 August 2026), RIN 1250-AA19. Cited within: Executive Order 14173, 90 FR 8633 (31 January 2025); Executive Order 14219, 90 FR 10583 (25 February 2025); Executive Order 11246, 30 FR 12319 (28 September 1965); 78 FR 58682 (24 September 2013); 90 FR 28494 and 90 FR 28485 (1 July 2025); 90 FR 41872 (27 August 2025). For more on this, see CASRAI’s guide to the Gold Standard Science executive order (EO 14303).