On July 22, 2026, the Department of the Interior's Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) published a Federal Register Notice announcing it is retaining its 2025 civil monetary penalty (CMP) amounts for calendar year 2026.

ONRR has published an upward CMP adjustment for every calendar year from at least 2018 through 2025 without exception. This freeze is unprecedented.

Under the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act of 1990, as amended by the 2015 Improvements Act (2015 Act), federal agencies must annually adjust CMPs using the percentage change between the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for October of the prior year and the CPI-U for October of the year before that.

For example, for 2025, ONRR applied a multiplier of 1.02598, thereby increasing its maximum penalties from $76,155 to $78,134 for the most serious violations under the Federal Oil and Gas Royalty Management Act of 1982 (FOGRMA). 

But for 2026, a lapse in appropriations from October 1 through November 12, 2025, prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting CPI data. As a result, no October 2025 CPI-U figure was ever published.

As the Notice explains:
 

OMB Memorandum No. M-26-11 (April 17, 2026) canceled penalty inflation adjustments for 2026 "based on the lack of October 2025 CPI-U data due to the lapse in appropriations."

In the Memorandum itself, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) explained that the statute “does not provide for an alternative calculation in the unusual event that there is no October data" and using substitute data "would subject revised penalty calculations to significant and disruptive litigation risks," thus making this the first year since the 2015 Act took effect that no adjustment has been required. 

(Now, we will note, ONRR is far from alone. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Federal Reserve, Environmental Protection Agency, and Securities and Exchange Commission have all taken identical action.)

ONRR's CMP authority derives from FOGRMA, 30 U.S.C. § 1719(a)-(d), which, as the Notice states, “authorizes the Secretary of the Interior to assess CMPs for royalty reporting and other violations.” Those obligations remain fully operative, and ONRR and the Department of Justice continue to pursue high-dollar enforcement, including a $34.6 million False Claims Act settlement with Hilcorp San Juan in January 2024 for knowingly underpaying royalties on oil and gas produced from federal lands, and a $16 million settlement with XTO Energy in November 2023 for similar conduct on federal and Indian lands.

For oil, gas, and mineral operators on federal and Indian lands, the takeaway is this: the maximum penalty exposure is now fixed and known for 2026.
 

But, we caution, the freeze does not signal relaxed enforcement. While the individual penalty amounts may appear modest, each amount applies per violation, and ONRR treats each line item on a Form ONRR-2014 as a separate violation. A single monthly submission can contain hundreds of line items, meaning exposure can multiply rapidly into six or seven figures. And when October CPI-U data becomes available again, the statutory formula could produce a larger-than-typical catch-up adjustment.

The full Notice is available at: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/22/2026-14799/2026-civil-monetary-penalty-inflation-adjustments.