ESMA delays 2026 work pending MISP negotiations

On 2 June 2026, ESMA published a letter from its Chair, Verena Ross, to the European Commission explaining how it intends to reprioritise certain 2026 workstreams in light of the proposed Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP) and the broader political focus on simplification and burden reduction.

The letter therefore signals that a number of expected ESMA outputs across the MiFIR/MiFID II, EMIR and related frameworks will not arrive as early as previously anticipated, pending clarity on the final shape of the MISP reforms.

Having reviewed the tasks and commitments in its 2026 Annual Work Programme (October 2025), ESMA has identified a series of mandates across the EU financial services rulebook that may either become obsolete or require material adjustment once the MISP reforms are finalised.

These include mandates under:

• AIFMD/UCITS (for example, guidelines on suspensions and other NCA powers),
• MiFIR/MiFID II (notably around market structure and data reporting),
• EMIR 3,
• the Benchmarks Regulation,
• the Credit Rating Agencies Regulation, and
• the Securitisation Regulation.

ESMA feels that several of these technical mandates could be directly affected by the MISP proposals, so it plans to postpone public consultations on these until the MISP legislative acts have been adopted. ESMA invites the Commission to repeal or clarify the relevant existing Level 1 mandates where appropriate.

ESMA also highlights a number of one-off and recurring reporting mandates under sectoral legislation, including

• AIFMD/UCITS (for example, the one-off report on delegation and compliance with certain AIFMD/UCITSD provisions),
• MiFIR/MiFID II,
• EMIR,
• the Short Selling Regulation,
• the Prospectus Regulation, and
• the Transparency Directive

where continuing to produce standalone reports would be of little benefit, either because there is little new data or because the topics will be overtaken by MISP-related changes.

As a result, ESMA intends to cancel the production of most of these reports and proposes that the Commission should consider repealing or making optional some of the recurrent reporting mandates.

The resources freed up by these postponements and proposed repeals will be redirected towards ESMA’s highest priority files for 2026. These include:

• preparations for the supervision and authorisation of consolidated tape providers under MiFIR and ESG rating providers,
• continued work on simplification and burden reduction in the data reporting space,
• T+1 settlement preparation,
• targeted convergence work to support effective MiCA implementation,
• analysis of tokenisation and related risks,
• EMIR 3 implementation,
• delivery of phase 1 of the European Single Access Point (ESAP), and
• initial work on mandates under new legislative initiatives such as the Retail Investment Strategy (RIS).