In 2026 the EU's CBAM crossed from "report-only" into a phase where importers pay real money. This piece lays out the five newly-landed implementing regulations, the timetable and thresholds, and — using hot-rolled coil, cold-rolled coil, coated sheet and other flagship traded steels as its sample — draws a cost map from the official country default values. For the same coil of HRC, Indonesia's carbon cost is about 581 EUR/tonne while the USA's is about 15 EUR/tonne: a near-40× gap.