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The US issues more CCP-approved carbon credits than any other country, and retires more of them too. On the face of it, that's a market in good health.
Then you look at who is actually buying. Most US credits are bought by US companies, and close to a third of everything retired goes to a single one of them. The demand that could broaden the market out - international, compliance-driven, and growing, sits behind a door no US project has yet opened.
So the supply side and the demand side are telling two different stories. Our new report, The US Carbon Market: Buyers, CDR and the Cost of Standing Outside A6, sets out where they part company. Here's what stood out.
Supply is not the constraint
US projects lead the world in CCP-approved credit issuance and retirement, at 93M tons issued and 34M retired, well ahead of the next-largest markets. Bangladesh, Brazil and China are all climbing steadily behind, but none of them is close yet.
That's the part of the story most people already know, and it's the part that flatters the market.
Demand keeps turning inward
The share of US credit volume going to US buyers rose from 63% in 2024 to 82% in 2025, settling at 77% in 2026.
Canada, the UK and Japan lead international demand for US credits, but each remains small by comparison. A market that supplies the world is, in practice, being cleared at home.
One buyer accounts for a third of the market
Within that domestic demand, concentration is high. Microsoft alone accounted for 31% of total US retirements and contracted volumes, almost double the UK's leading buyer, The Co-operative Group, at 16%.
The nuance matters here: strip Microsoft out and the two markets show similar levels of concentration among their remaining top buyers. So this isn't a uniquely American problem, it's a single-buyer problem, which makes what that buyer does next worth watching. In April 2026, having contracted the majority of all technical CDR volume in 2025, Microsoft told carbon removal developers it was pausing new offtake agreements pending a portfolio review. It has since signed at least three new offtake deals, so this reads as a slowdown rather than an exit.
The broadening is happening in CDR, just not in tons yet
There is a genuine widening underway, and it's on the removals side. The US CDR buyer base has grown from 35 buyers in 2022 to 69 in 2026, already more than all of 2025, with the year only just over half done.
Volumes haven't followed. CDR volumes sit at 2.9M tons so far, against 28.6M for the whole of 2025. More buyers, smaller tickets. Whether that converts into volume is one of the more consequential open questions in the market right now.
The demand that exists but can't be reached
The largest source of new demand isn't domestic at all. Even under full CORSIA enforcement, US-hosted supply outpaces US CORSIA demand in every year through 2035, across all three demand scenarios we modeled. Supply climbs from 36M tons in 2024 to a peak of around 92M in 2030 before easing back to 82M by 2035. Demand starts far smaller and grows faster, but never catches up. Read that gap as a market-scale comparison rather than a claim about CORSIA-ready volume specifically, the supply figure covers total projected issuance from US-hosted projects across all registries and sectors.
The bigger constraint isn't volume anyway, it's eligibility. Article 6 authorization is only available to Parties to the Paris Agreement, and the US ceased to be one when its withdrawal took effect on 27 January 2026. No US-hosted project can currently obtain the Letter of Authorization that CORSIA increasingly requires as it moves toward mandatory participation in January 2027. On our price assumptions, that puts $1.5-2.7B a year in potential revenue out of reach, against a full ceiling of $3.9B.
What we're watching next
If you're buying, selling or financing US credits, the questions worth carrying forward aren't about whether the market is big. It is. They're about where the second, third and fourth large buyers come from, whether the widening CDR base starts moving volume, and what changes if US projects gain a route to authorized demand.
The full report covers the buyer breakdown, CDR offtake activity, CORSIA supply and demand scenarios to 2035, and the forecast for US supply by project type through and beyond 2035.