Welcome back to this week’s Battery Business Insights article on the EU Battery Passport, where the story has quietly inverted. On 18 August 2026 the European Commission is legally required to adopt the implementing act that defines who may access non-public battery passport data. But it won’t. The Commission’s own published timetable now places that act in the fourth quarter of 2026, and no draft has been adopted as of this writing.
This matters for two specific reasons. First, the passport obligation itself does not move: from 18 February 2027, every EV battery, light-means-of-transport battery and industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the EU market must carry a passport, and unlike almost every other date in the Battery Regulation, that one carries no conditional extension. Second, access rights are not a detail that can be bolted on late. They determine which data fields a manufacturer must expose, to whom, and under what authentication — architecture decisions that sit at the bottom of the stack. A company that builds its passport system before the rules land is guessing; a company that waits is out of time.
By the Numbers: The Battery Passport Compliance Calendar
- 18 February 2027 — Battery passport becomes mandatory under Article 77(1). The only major date in the Regulation with no conditional extension clause attached.
- 18 August 2026 — Statutory deadline for the Commission to adopt the Article 77(9) implementing act on access rights. Expected to be missed.
- Q4 2026 — Where the Commission’s own Digital Product Passport timetable now places that act, leaving roughly three months between publication and the passport going live.
- 20 July 2026 — Date the EU Digital Product Passport Registry opened to users, one day after the Commission’s Article 13(1) set-up deadline under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.
- 6 August 2026 — Entry into force of Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, the operating rulebook for the registry.
- 3 years — Maximum validity of the eIDAS-based verified economic operator credential required to register any passport, after which re-verification is mandatory.
- 90 calendar days — Availability window for each proof-of-registration document generated by the registry.
- 18 August 2027 — Revised deadline for supply chain due diligence obligations, postponed from 2025 by Regulation (EU) 2025/1561. The precedent industry now cites when arguing the passport date could move too.
- 17 supply chain partnerships — Participants in the Global Battery Alliance 2026 Operational Trials, whose cell manufacturers account for roughly 80% of global production. Results originally due June 2026, now rolling through the second half of the year.
How the Passport Timeline Was Built to Float — and Why One Date Does Not
Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 entered into force on 17 August 2023, replacing a framework that predated modern lithium-ion chemistry. Its obligations were deliberately phased, and the drafting technique used to phase them is the single most misunderstood feature of the Regulation.
Most deadlines in the Battery Regulation are written as a date or a period after an enabling act enters into force, whichever is later. Article 7’s carbon footprint declaration for electric vehicle batteries reads “18 February 2025 or 12 months after the date of entry into force either of the delegated act or of the implementing act, whichever is the latest.” Because the delegated act establishing the calculation methodology has still not been adopted, that obligation has not started. The same construction governs the carbon footprint performance classes nominally due in August 2026, and the general labelling requirements under Article 13.
This has produced a persistent reporting error across the trade press, including in earlier coverage: carbon footprint declarations are widely described as having been mandatory since February 2025. They have not been. Any compliance calendar that treats these dates as fixed will misallocate resources, and any manufacturer that has been told it is already in breach of a carbon footprint obligation has been told something inaccurate.
Article 77(1) is the exception. Its wording is unconditional: “From 18 February 2027 each LMT battery, each industrial battery with a capacity greater than 2 kWh and each electric vehicle battery placed on the market or put into service shall have an electronic record.” There is no enabling-act clause, no fallback period. The Commission reconfirmed the date publicly on 20 July 2026 when it opened the registry, describing it as “the first implementation deadline.”
What the Registry Actually Went Live With on 20 July
The Commission met its Article 13(1) obligation under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation to set up the registry by 19 July 2026, and opened it to users on 20 July, alongside a testing environment, technical documentation, implementation guidelines and a helpdesk. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, adopted 16 July and in force since 6 August, sets out how it operates.
The architecture is the part most likely to surprise manufacturers who have not read the instrument. The registry is not a database of batteries. Product data remains decentralised, held by the economic operator or a party it has authorised in writing. What the registry stores is unique product identifiers, associated metadata and customs commodity codes — a discovery-and-verification layer, not a repository. The Commission’s own wording is that operators “must register each Digital Product Passport in the Registry, which provides the secure infrastructure needed to register unique product identifiers and associated metadata.”
That distinction is not academic. It is the answer to the data-sovereignty objection that has dominated every conversation between European OEMs and non-EU cell suppliers, and it materially changes what a manufacturer needs to build. It also means that the widely repeated claim that every in-scope battery will be “registered in a central EU database” is wrong in a way that overstates the exposure.
The practical bottleneck sits elsewhere, and it has had almost no coverage. To register anything, an operator must first become a verified economic operator, evidencing identity and establishment through a qualified electronic seal under eIDAS or a qualified electronic attestation of attributes. Verification lasts until credential expiry, to a maximum of three years, then repeats. A verified operator may delegate registration actions to a third party such as a passport platform, provided that party is itself verified — but the credential and the responsibility remain with the operator. For a non-EU manufacturer routing product through an EU importer, this determines who can legally perform registration, and it is a procurement and legal question as much as a technical one.
The Access-Rights Act That Is Not Coming on Time
Article 77(2) and Annex XIII establish three tiers of passport data access: the general public; notified bodies, market surveillance authorities and the Commission; and any natural or legal person with a legitimate interest, together with the Commission. It is that third tier that Article 77(9) requires the Commission to define, by implementing act, by 18 August 2026.
Note the instrument. It is an implementing act adopted under the examination procedure, not a delegated act — a distinction frequently mangled in trade coverage, and one that matters because the two follow different procedural timetables and offer different scope for Parliament and Council intervention.
A draft was circulated to the Commission’s batteries expert group in late April 2026. Nothing has been adopted. The Commission’s published Digital Product Passport timetable now lists the battery access-rights implementing act under Q4 2026. Taken at face value, that leaves manufacturers somewhere between six weeks and three months to implement tiered access control before the passport becomes mandatory.
It is worth being precise about what remains undefined. Until the act lands, “person with a legitimate interest” has no legal content. Trade commentary routinely glosses the third tier as covering repairers, remanufacturers and end-of-life operators. That is a reasonable expectation and it may well prove correct, but it pre-judges the instrument that has not been adopted. A manufacturer designing role-based access today is designing against an assumption.
The Commission is not idle elsewhere. On 14 July 2026 it adopted Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736, citing six harmonised Digital Product Passport standards — EN 18216 and EN 18219 through EN 18223 — covering unique identifiers, interoperability, data carriers, APIs, data exchange protocols and data storage. Conformity with them now carries a presumption of conformity with Articles 10 and 11 of the Ecodesign Regulation. Two further standards, on authentication and access-rights management, are expected to be cited in September 2026. Those are precisely the two that the access-rights act depends on, which is the most plausible explanation for the delay.
What Manufacturers Can Do Before the Rules Land
A useful distinction, given the uncertainty, is between work that the missing act cannot invalidate and work that it can.
Not dependent on the access-rights act. Scope determination — identifying which product lines are in scope and which economic operator is responsible for each. eIDAS verified-operator credentialing, which is required regardless of what the access tiers eventually contain and which has its own lead time. Unique identifier generation and physical marking. Supplier data agreements for material composition and upstream carbon footprint contributions. Alignment to EN 18219 and EN 18220 for identifiers and data carriers, both now cited.
Dependent on it. Role-based access control design. Authentication flows for third-party data consumers. Any decision about which fields sit behind which permission layer. Contractual terms with platform providers covering who may read what.
One point of relief is worth recording, because the burden is routinely overstated. At its 27 May 2026 webinar — and again at a second session on 7 July — the Commission confirmed that not every Annex XIII field must be populated on day one. Fields that cross-reference obligations not yet in application may be left empty. The due diligence report, for instance, is required in the passport only by August 2028. For most operators, carbon footprint fields will not be populated in February 2027 either, because the underlying Article 7 obligations have not commenced.
What Is Not Yet Settled
Several things in this picture could still move, and an honest reading has to name them.
The date itself. EUROBAT is publicly lobbying for a stop-the-clock to 2030 and for industrial batteries to be excluded from the first phase. That is currently a lobbying position, not a legislative proposal. But Regulation (EU) 2025/1561 did exactly this to the due diligence obligation in July 2025, moving it two years at short notice, and the Omnibus deregulation agenda that produced it is still running. Anyone treating February 2027 as immovable should hold that view with the knowledge that a precedent exists.
Cross-border data transfer. For European manufacturers sourcing Chinese cells, China’s Data Security Law constrains what can leave the country. The Lin’gang pilot involving CATL, BMW and Catena-X achieved what is described as the first compliant China-to-EU passport transfer, covering roughly 80% of static requirements — approximately 43 data points. The excluded remainder was detailed material composition and the disassembly manual, both of which the passport requires. No general solution has been demonstrated.
Verification methodology. The Global Battery Alliance’s 2026 Operational Trials, run on the UN Transparency Protocol with seventeen supply chain partnerships, were expected to report in June 2026. The GBA now describes case studies and third-party-verified dashboards as publishing across the second half of the year, and attaches an explicit disclaimer that its methodologies remain developmental and that no sustainability conclusions may be drawn from trial data. Its certification scheme is targeted at 2027.
Labelling. The Article 13(10) harmonised labelling implementing act, itself due in August 2025, has not been adopted. Because the Annex VI Part A labelling obligation is conditional on it, the commonly cited 18 August 2026 labelling date is unlikely to apply as written. The QR code requirement under Article 13(6) is separate and applies from 18 February 2027 — to all batteries, not only those requiring a passport.
Implementation timelines. The frequently quoted “12 to 24 months” figure for building passport infrastructure originates with compliance software vendors and consultancies. No trade association, regulator or independent survey underpins it, and vendor estimates in circulation range from six months for basic infrastructure to thirty-six for a full Tier 1 enterprise deployment. It is a useful order of magnitude, not a finding.
Bottom Line
The regulatory architecture for the battery passport is now substantially in place: the registry is live, its operating rules are in force, and six of eight harmonised standards have been cited. What is missing is the instrument that tells manufacturers who is allowed to see what — and the Commission is about to miss its own statutory deadline to produce it, with its revised timetable leaving the industry roughly a quarter to implement.
The asymmetry is the story. Article 77(1) binds manufacturers unconditionally on 18 February 2027. Almost every obligation placed on the Commission has slipped, and several obligations placed on industry have quietly not commenced because the Commission’s enabling acts never arrived. Manufacturers should build what the missing act cannot invalidate, credential themselves under eIDAS now because that has its own lead time, and resist compliance advice built on dates that are conditional. The deadline that matters is fixed. Most of the others are not, and knowing which is which is currently worth more than any single piece of software.
Battery Business Insights is an independent industry publication. Regulatory dates cited reflect the legal instruments and official Commission communications available as of the publication date. Where an obligation is conditional on an enabling act not yet adopted, this is stated in the text. Readers should verify current status before making compliance decisions.
References: Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 (Batteries Regulation); Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 (Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation); Regulation (EU) 2025/1561; Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778; Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736; European Commission — Digital Product Passport; European Commission — Digital Product Passport for Batteries; European Commission — The Digital Product Passport Registry is now live; DG GROW — EU Digital Product Passport for Batteries, second webinar; Global Battery Alliance — Battery Passport; EUROBAT — feedback on the draft implementing act under Article 77(9); BatteryPass-Ready; Catena-X — cross-border China–Europe data ecosystem.
