• We integrate carbon satellite observations into CO 2 compliance monitoring. • We screen CO 2 mitigation goals' statuses in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020). • With 2015 as the baseline year, the national goal should have been attained by 2019. • Most municipalities and provinces had attained their individualized goals by 2019. • China's absolute CO 2 emissions might have been reduced by 8.0–18.3% by 2019. Good-quality emission data are essential to validate national climate commitments and implement domestic policies. However, conventional bottom-up data collection is costly and subject to potential manipulation by stakeholders when data pass through their hands, which could pose challenges on the efficiency and effectiveness of compliance monitoring especially in developing countries. Satellite observations, specifically OCO-2 XCO 2 measurements, are utilized in this study to develop a relatively independent and timely dataset for screening the attainment statuses of national and subnational CO 2 mitigation goals in China's 13th Five-Year Plan (FYP, 2016–2020). We establish CO 2 emission estimation models at both pixel and provincial levels. As interpolated with the pixel-level model, CO 2 emissions of prefecture-level municipalities indicate that approximately three fifth of them had accomplished their individualized FYP mitigation goals by 2019, while our provincial-level estimation suggests that three quarters of provinces had attained theirs. More resources for compliance monitoring could thus be directed to other presumably-unattaining local governments. National aggregate absolute emissions showed 8.0–18.3% reduction in 2019 across three provincial models from the 2015 level, while national CO 2 intensity dropped by 28.8–36.8% to imply attaining the 18% reduction goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]