The AO500: A leading carbon price index

Speak to our team
<h1>The AO500: A leading carbon price index</h1>

What is the AO500 carbon price index?

The AO500 is AlliedOffsets’ leading carbon price index. The AO500 is a weighted average price across the 500 most retired carbon credit projects globally, updated three times a week. It answers the question: what does a carbon credit actually cost, based on what’s really being retired? Below is a comparison between our AO500 index and our Tradable20 Index (the price of the current 20 top most liquid and traded credits int he market).

What goes into the index?

Tailored index for strategy, procurement, risk and market analysis

Top projects

Search page icon
Top 500 projects by retirement volume since Jan 1, 2020

Weighted by retirement

Robot icon
Weighted by number of credits each project has retired (not a simple average)

Unique pricing inputs

Check setting icon
Price inputs from AlliedOffset’s partners including brokers, traders, project developers, buyers and other market places in the global carbon market.

AI pricing model

Tag icon
Priced using AlliedOffsets' pricing model, trained with over 17,000+ price inputs/year, sourced from developers, brokers, and marketplaces

Data featured in

Financial Times logo
The Guardian logo
Bloomberg News logo
Business Green logo
The Wall Street Journal logo

Who uses the AO500 index?

Many actors in the market are relying on the AO500 index to benchmark the latest prices and activity in the market. For example: 

Chart icon

Corporates benchmarking purchase prices against the wider market

Bar chart icon

Journalists and analysts citing a single reference price for "carbon credits"

Pia chart icon

Brokers and developers pricing new deals

Researchers tracking market trends over time

Researchers tracking market trends over time

Why the Ao500 index exists

The AO500 was launched to close a gap in the market: there was no single, reliable answer to the question everyone was asking: “what does a carbon credit actually cost?”

Rather than track the full spread of prices across the market, the AO500 focuses on the most popular projects in the market: it’s a weighted average price across the 500 most-retired projects, weighted by the volume each one has retired.

The index acts an overview and summary of the current activity in the carbon market.

Why the Ao500 index exists
Request a Custom Data Solution

Everything you want to know about the AO500

The AO500 is AlliedOffsets’ price index tracking the 500 most actively traded carbon credits in the carbon market, weighted by the volume each one has retired. It’s designed to give buyers, sellers, and analysts a single reference price for where the broader market sits, rather than relying on any one project or registry’s listing price.