Long-term targets, such as net-zero pledges, have become ubiquitous in international climate policy. While these targets often hold greater potential for significant greenhouse gas reductions compared to short-term goals, they also carry higher credibility risks. This study introduces a novel approach to evaluate the credibility of countries' long-term climate policy targets based on the temporal consistency of their pledged emissions reductions. The core argument is that frontloaded emissions reduction targets (early action) signals stronger credibility than backloaded targets (postponed action), because backloading defers political accountability to the future. The empirical analysis presents long-term climate policy credibility scores for 67 countries, based on their pledged emissions reductions in Nationally Determined Contributions and Long-term Low Emissions and Development Strategies submitted under the Paris Agreement. The analysis reveals that most countries are backloaders, planning more ambitious emissions reductions post-2030 rather than pre-2030. Additionally, our statistical analysis examines which country characteristics predict variations in long-term policy credibility. Higher levels of regime corruption correlate with backloading, indicating that such targets are less credible. Overall, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse on climate policy credibility by emphasizing the importance of time-consistent targets for the Paris Agreement's success and calls for greater scrutiny of backloaded commitments.