Station Compliance›Field Notes

The FCC announced its 2026 EEO audit on August 26, 2026, selecting 400 radio and television stations, commercial and noncommercial. Stations on the list must upload their response to their online public inspection file by October 20, 2026.

The Commission audits roughly five percent of stations a year, chosen at random. Being selected implies nothing about your station; not responding does.

First: are you exempt?

Yes, if your station employment unit has fewer than five full-time employees. That exemption is real and it covers a large share of small-market stations.

The unit is the employment unit, not the station — commonly owned stations sharing facilities and staff count together. A two-station combo with three full-timers between them is under the threshold. A single station with five full-timers is not.

If you are under five full-time employees, the recruitment and reporting obligations in § 73.2080 do not apply to you, and an audit letter should be answerable by saying so. If you are at or near the line, count carefully and write down how you counted.

What the audit asks for

Audited stations provide their last two years of EEO Annual Public File Reports, plus the backing data showing the reports are accurate. In practice that means:

• Sample notices sent to recruitment sources about each full-time vacancy
• The recruitment sources used, and how they were contacted
• The number of interviewees, and the source each came from
• Documentation of supplemental outreach initiatives

Audit responses go into the public file, so they are publicly readable once filed.

The underlying obligations, briefly

47 CFR § 73.2080 has three layers.

Nondiscrimination — § 73.2080(a). Applies to every station regardless of size. Equal opportunity in employment; no discrimination on race, colour, religion, national origin or sex. Religious broadcasters may require religious affiliation but may not discriminate on the other grounds.

Recruitment — § 73.2080(c)(1). For units of five or more full-time employees. Every full-time vacancy must be recruited through sources sufficient to widely disseminate the opening, and organisations that have asked to be notified of openings must be notified.

Supplemental outreach — § 73.2080(c)(2). A menu of initiatives — job fairs, internships, training programmes, scholarships, mentoring, community events — from which stations select a required number over each two-year period. Larger markets pick four; smaller markets pick two. This obligation applies whether or not you had any vacancies, which is the detail that catches stable stations with no turnover.

Annual EEO Public File Report — § 73.2080(c)(6). Placed in the public file and on the station website, listing vacancies filled, recruitment sources used, total interviewees, and the initiatives undertaken during the year.

What enforcement has looked like

Two examples that show the range:

• In 2024 the Commission fined Cumulus Media $26,000 for uploading a single EEO Annual Public File Report late. One report, late, at a large group with counsel — $26,000.
• In 2023 a group of Kansas stations faced a $25,000 proposed fine for incomplete EEO compliance.

The lesson small stations should take is the first one. The violation was not a hiring practice. It was a filing date.

If you received an audit letter

1. Confirm your full-time headcount first. If you are under five, the answer is short and the rest of this does not apply. Document the count.
2. Pull the last two Annual Public File Reports. If they do not exist, that is the finding, and it is better to know now than on October 19.
3. Assemble the backing data. Vacancy notices, source lists, interview counts. Reconstructing this from memory is difficult and the reconstruction is visible.
4. Check your supplemental initiatives. Two per two-year period in smaller markets, required even with zero vacancies. Community events the station already does often qualify — station presence at a job fair, a high school broadcasting session, an intern. The problem is usually documentation, not activity.
5. Upload by October 20 to the online public inspection file.

If you did not

The useful move is to check whether you could answer it, because next year's 400 is drawn the same way.

The two-minute version: does your unit have five or more full-time employees, and if so, is there an EEO Annual Public File Report in your public file for each of the last two years? If the answer to the first is yes and the second is no, you have a gap that an audit letter would surface and that a renewal will surface eventually regardless.

Fixing it forward is straightforward. Recovering two years of backing data you never collected is not — which is the argument for starting the habit in a quarter when nobody is asking.