In this work, the binding energy between CH x adsorbates and five fcc(100) transition metal surfaces have been decomposed using the ALMO-EDA scheme to gain more in-depth insights into the linear scaling relations between the adsorption energies of CH x species and that of a C atom. Our main findings are • For CH x molecules, their adsorption to the metal surface can be described reliably using truncated 30-atom clusters (M 30 ) as surrogate models.