EcoVadis Medals Explained: Tiers, Badges, and Rules

An EcoVadis medal is not a score you clear once and keep. It is a percentile rank, recalculated every assessment cycle against a rated population that keeps getting better. A Bronze medal that held last year can disappear this year even if your own score stayed exactly the same, because the bar moved instead of you. At Sunhat, for example, we observed how a company increased its score from 57 to 73. In 2022, a score of 57 was still enough for a silver medal, but by 2026, a score of 73 was only enough for a bronze medal. That single mechanic explains most of the confusion sustainability teams have about medals: what they measure, how to plan around them, and why last year's cutoff is never a safe assumption for this year.

In this guide, we explain the details of the EcoVadis medal award and provide an overview of the latest changes to the medal program.

What Are EcoVadis Medals, and Why Do They Matter More than the Raw Score?

An EcoVadis medal is a recognition level layered on top of your 0 to 100 sustainability score. EcoVadis awards it based on where that score ranks against every company it has assessed in the previous 12 months. The score itself measures your policies, actions, and results across four themes, and the medal tells a third party, at a glance, how that performance compares to everyone else in the database.

That comparison is what makes medals commercially load-bearing rather than a compliance exercise on the side. A procurement team screening suppliers, an investor running due diligence, or a customer qualifying vendors for an RFP increasingly treats a medal as a gate, not a data point. Below a certain rank, or without a medal at all, a deal can stall regardless of how strong the underlying relationship is. Protecting a medal is protecting revenue, not just protecting a scorecard.

Nevertheless, the following statement from EcoVadis on their resources page about the medals is also important to mention:

An EcoVadis medal or badge is NOT a certification or an endorsement of a company or its products or services, and it does not indicate that the company’s products or services are specifically sustainable or more sustainable than another company’s products or services.

What Do Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze Actually Require?

Since 2024, EcoVadis has awarded medals by percentile rank rather than fixed point thresholds, and it does not publish the cutoff scores in advance. They move every year with the size and performance of the rated population, so last year's cutoff is a reference point, not a target.

Two conditions override the percentile ranking regardless of overall score, and both are covered below: a theme score under 30 disqualifies a company outright, and certain industries are excluded from recognition entirely.

What Are the Committed and Fast Mover Badges?

Two badges exist for companies below medal range, and they matter for a different reason than the medals do. A Committed badge requires a minimum overall score of 45 and signals a credible baseline to a customer running due diligence on a newer supplier. A Fast Mover badge rewards a score between 34 and 44 with an improvement of at least 6 points within an 18 month window, so it recognizes momentum rather than an absolute level.For a company early in its EcoVadis work, targeting a badge first is often the more realistic near term goal than chasing Bronze directly. It gives a customer something concrete to point to while the underlying score climbs toward medal range.

What Disqualifies a Company from Any Medal, Regardless of Score?

Two hard rules sit outside the percentile math entirely. A theme score below 30 in any of the four themes (Environment, Labor and Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement) disqualifies a company from any medal. That holds even if its overall score would otherwise land in Platinum range, since a single weak theme can undo strong performance everywhere else. Closing that one gap first unlocks credit for everything the company already does well.Certain industries are excluded from recognition outright: controversial weapons, tobacco, and companies drawing more than 20 percent of revenue from coal or unconventional oil and gas. A severe finding surfaced through EcoVadis's 360 Watch monitoring can also override an otherwise qualifying score. Reviewing 360 Watch findings on a schedule, rather than only when a scorecard lands lower than expected, protects a medal a company assumed was already earned.

Are You Being Compared to Your Industry, or to Everyone?

Medal rankings compare a company against the whole rated population across all industries, not against its own sector. EcoVadis uses assessments from the trailing 12 months as the reference group, so the benchmark shifts continuously rather than resetting once a year on a fixed date.
This is also why a static score can still cost a company its medal. If the rated population improves faster than a company's own score does, last year's Silver rank can slip to Bronze even though nothing about the company's own performance changed. The medal measures relative standing, not absolute achievement.

What Actually Moves You into the Next Tier?

Three levers do more work than most sustainability teams expect.

• The first is closing any theme sitting below 30 before optimizing a theme that already clears it, since a single disqualifying theme caps the outcome regardless of effort spent elsewhere.
• The second is evidence currency. EcoVadis treats policy and action documents as valid for 8 years, and KPI or reporting data as valid for 2 years. A company sitting on outdated evidence gets scored on what it can currently prove, not on what it actually did.
• The third is responding to 360 Watch findings before the next reassessment rather than after. A finding addressed publicly, with a documented response, carries differently into the next cycle than one left unanswered until a lower scorecard forces the conversation.

Twelve points is frequently the distance between one medal tier and the next. That is exactly why the review step matters as much as the underlying sustainability work. Sunhat's Proof AI helps you close that gap before it costs you a tier, not after. It flags a weak answer against what actually earns points, so a second read happens before submission, not after a lower scorecard arrives.

"We were originally looking for a solution for the ESG questionnaire. Then the EcoVadis issue came up. If I had been alone in answering the EcoVadis questionnaire, I might have scored one or two points more. With Sunhat, we scored 12 additional points.” - Jürgen Reitter, Head of QM at Nestler.

For a deeper walkthrough of specific scorecard improvements — reviewing rejected documents, hitting quantitative targets, aligning reporting to GRI and ESRS — see our guide How to Improve Your EcoVadis Rating.

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Where Can You Actually Use an EcoVadis Medal or Badge?

An EcoVadis medal or badge can appear in several places: a company website, social media, an email signature, a corporate presentation, a sustainability report, or printed materials such as brochures and tender submissions. It cannot appear on a product or its packaging, and it cannot be used for product, brand, or service level marketing claims. EcoVadis is explicit that a medal or badge is not a certification and is not an endorsement of a company's products or services.
Since 2026, every external use must also link to the company's EcoVadis Recognition Page, a page customized to that company's own achievement. Printed materials meet this by including a QR code that points to the same page. The rule applies to communications made from 2026 onward; material shared before 2026 does not need retroactive updating, but any new use from this point forward does. Only companies on EcoVadis's Premium, Select, or Corporate subscription tiers can share externally at all. Official guide on how to use your EcoVadis badge.

Do Medal Thresholds Change Every Cycle?

Yes. Because a medal is a percentile rank rather than a fixed score, the cutoff moves every year as the rated population changes, and EcoVadis does not publish next year's cutoff in advance. A company that tracks only its own score, without also tracking how that score sits against a growing and improving database, can be surprised by a medal it expected to keep.

Sunhat's Proof Platform helps you track both sides of that equation at once: where your score stands today, and where the rated population is heading next. Our EcoVadis experts show you exactly why EcoVadis gave you Silver instead of Gold, and what closing that gap would take, also always against the latest methodology updates. The Proof library turns evidence you already have into something you can find and reuse the next cycle, instead of rebuilding it from scratch. An EcoVadis medal rewards standing still less than most companies assume. Keeping one, or reaching the next tier, means treating the questionnaire as a cycle to manage rather than a form to submit once and forget.

Sunhat is an EcoVadis Accredited Core Consulting Partner. Book a demo to see how Sunhat keeps your EcoVadis submission current between assessments, not just at deadline.