We derive constraints on the four dimensional energy-momentum tensor from gravitational and gauge anomalies. Our work can be considered an extension of Duff’s analysis [1] to include parity-odd terms and explicit symmetry breaking. The constraints imply the absence of the parity-odd $R\tilde{R}$ $$ R\overset{\sim }{R} $$ and $F\tilde{F}$ $$ F\overset{\sim }{F} $$ terms, for theories whose symmetries are compatible with dimensional regularisation, in a model-independent way. Remarkably, even in the case of explicit symmetry breaking the □R-anomaly is found to be finite and unambiguous after applying the symmetry constraints. We compute mixed gravity-gauge anomalies at leading order and deduce phenomenological consequences for vector bosons associated with global chiral symmetries.