Environmental regulations or lawsuits occasionally force companies to comply by taking measures or acquiring technologies to abate their environmental impact, and the overhead of such projects is called Abatement Cost.

Increasingly over the last 20 years or so more countries and states have begun imposing laws on companies to reduce their carbon emissions, noise pollution, and various other environmental impacts. The costs of enacting measures or technologies to help them comply with such regulations is known as abatement cost.

This may entail the construction of new facilities, the purchasing of new equipment, the hiring and training of new employees, and so forth. The cost is sometimes expressed as the Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC), which is a cost per unit or cost per thousand of pollution that is abated (ie, not emitted).