What a delegated act will actually decide about your products
The framework you keep being told about creates no product duties. A delegated act does, and none setting ecodesign requirements has been adopted for any product group. What that act will contain is already written down, in two provisions almost nobody quotes. Twelve elements every act must specify, nine of them about the passport, and two of those nine decide which actors may read your product data and which may write to it.
On this page
The short answer
Nearly everything published about ecodesign delegated acts is about when. This page is about what.
That is a more useful question, and it is also the answerable one. The date an act arrives is genuinely unknown, and how the framework's warning period works is set out at what already applies to a clothing brand today. The contents are a different matter. The framework tells you, in advance and in ordinary language, the list of things any act must decide. Every one of those is a question you can put to your own product data today, years before anybody answers it for you.
Two provisions carry it. Article 8 of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation sets out twelve elements a delegated act "shall specify at least". Article 9(2) sets out nine more that any act touching the passport must specify as well.
One thing to be clear about before the detail. No delegated act setting ecodesign requirements has been adopted for any product group. One delegated regulation has been made under the framework, and it concerns derogations from the prohibition on destroying unsold consumer products rather than product requirements. It was made under a different provision of the framework and it contains no ecodesign requirements, no information requirements and nothing about passports.
Twelve things every act has to specify
Article 8 is a checklist. Read as a business rather than as a lawyer, it is a list of decisions somebody else is going to make about your products, and a list of things you can start finding out about your own.
| What Article 8 requires an act to specify | What that decides for you |
|---|---|
| (a) The product group definition, including the commodity codes and product descriptions | Whether you are in scope at all. Scope is set by code, not by what you call the product |
| (b) The ecodesign requirements themselves | The substance |
| (c) Any product parameters for which the Commission states no requirement is necessary | What was considered and deliberately left alone, which is as informative as what was included |
| (d) The test, measurement or calculation standards or methods to be used | Whether your existing figures were produced the right way |
| (e) Where relevant, requirements for the use of digital tools | Whether a calculation has to run in a specified tool |
| (f) Where relevant, the transitional methods, the harmonised standards whose references have been published in the Official Journal, or the common specifications | Which standards carry weight, and published in the Official Journal is the operative phrase |
| (g) The format, manner and order in which verification information is made available | How a market surveillance authority expects to receive it |
| (h) The conformity assessment module, and where it differs from the default, the reasons | Who assesses conformity, and whether a third party is involved |
| (i) The information manufacturers must provide, including which technical documentation is needed to verify compliance | What you have to be able to produce on request |
| (j) Where relevant, additional information requirements | Anything the act adds beyond the standard set |
| (k) The duration of the transitional period during which existing national measures continue to be permitted | How long the old position survives alongside the new one |
| (l) The date for reviewing the act, taking account of the market, the need to make products more sustainable, Union policy objectives, technical progress and the availability of methods | When it changes again |
Two of those repay attention because they are routinely missed.
(a) sets scope by commodity code. Not by product description alone, and not by market segment. If you do not know the codes your goods are declared under, you cannot answer whether an act reaches you, and that is a question for whoever files your customs declarations rather than for your product team.
(k) is a transitional period. Published commentary frequently describes a delegated act as taking direct effect across the Union on entry into force, without mentioning that the act itself has to specify how long national measures continue to be permitted. That is a provision written into the framework precisely because a clean switch is not how these things work.
Nine things it has to decide about the passport
Article 9(2) is the one to read twice. It requires a delegated act, as appropriate for the product groups covered, to specify:
(a) the data to be included in the digital product passport pursuant to Annex III; (b) one or more data carriers to be used; (c) the layout in which the data carrier is to be presented and its positioning; (d) whether the digital product passport is to be established at model, batch or item level, and the definition of such levels; (e) the manner in which the digital product passport is to be made accessible to customers before they are bound by a contract for sale, hire or hire purchase, including in the event of distance selling; (f) the actors that are to have access to data in the digital product passport and to what data they are to have access; (g) the actors that are to create a digital product passport or update the data in a digital product passport and what data they may introduce or update; (h) the detailed arrangements for introducing or updating data; (i) the period during which the digital product passport is to remain available, which shall correspond to at least the expected lifetime of a specific product.
Article 9(2) is the one to read twice, quoted verbatim.Nine decisions. Not one of them is currently settled for any product group that reaches this readership, and every one of them changes the cost of a programme.
Point (a) is the attribute list, and every published list including our own is therefore an anticipation rather than a requirement, which is why the attributes we track are described the way they are. Points (b) and (c) decide the carrier and where it physically goes on the product, which is a manufacturing question long before it is a data question. Point (d) is the one that moves the arithmetic more than any other, because it decides whether a range needs a handful of passports or hundreds of thousands, and it is worked through at how many passports a range needs. Point (i) is the only one already fixed by the framework rather than left open, and it is fixed at a floor rather than a number.
The two that decide who can see your data
Points (f) and (g) are the most commercially consequential provisions in this whole subject, and nothing found in current published coverage explains them.
(f) decides which actors get access to which data. Not whether the passport is public or private, which is how the question is usually framed. Which actors, and to what data. That is a per role, per field decision, and it will be made by product group.
(g) decides which actors may create a passport or update data in one, and what they may introduce or update. So the question of whether a repairer can write a service record into your passport, or a recycler can read your bill of materials, is not a technology question and not a platform decision. It is a line in a delegated act that has not been written yet.
Two things follow from that, and they run in opposite directions.
The first is that this is where the access question actually gets answered. The registry regulation gives repairers, refurbishers, remanufacturers and recyclers a verified identity and an account, but limits their actions to what the relevant Union law specifies, and for most product groups that law is the delegated act. So an identity layer exists and the permissions layer does not, which is a real state of the system rather than an oversight. What the registry does and does not hold is set out at where your passport data actually lives.
The second is that this is decided per product group rather than once. There is no horizontal passport act coming that settles access for everybody. Two product groups can reach opposite answers on who sees a bill of materials, and both will be correct.
The practical consequence for a business is narrow and worth acting on. Work out now which fields you would object to a competitor reading, and which you would be content for a repairer to write to. Nobody has asked you yet. The moment a draft act appears there is a short window in which that position is useful, and businesses that have not formed one will not form it in four weeks.
What no act can do
Three limits are worth knowing, because they bound the anxiety.
An act may state that no performance requirements, no information requirements or neither apply to particular product parameters where requirements would negatively affect the product group. So an act can deliberately leave a parameter alone, and Article 8(c) makes it say so on the face of the instrument.
An act may not establish that no ecodesign requirements are necessary for a product group at all. The framework closes that door.
And an act sets performance requirements only through the procedure the framework lays down, on the parameters the framework lists, which include durability, repairability, recycled content, carbon footprint and recyclability among others. The menu is not open ended.
There is also a floor on the runway. The date of application of a delegated act may not be earlier than eighteen months after its entry into force, other than in duly justified cases and for amendments. What that floor does and does not let you calculate is worked through on the page named above, and every date in this area is kept on the status record rather than asserted here.
Where an act comes from, and the three chances to see one
An act does not appear from nowhere. The framework requires the Commission to take into account the views of the Ecodesign Forum, an expert group with balanced participation from Member States and from parties with an interest in the product group, and of the Member States expert group, and to carry out an impact assessment.
In practice a business gets three separate windows, and only the last shows actual text.
- The preparatory study. The Commission's research service runs a preparatory study per product group and registers stakeholders. This is the earliest and least visible window, and it is open for some groups now.
- The Ecodesign Forum. Membership is by application through the Commission's expert group register. This is where priorities and draft requirements are discussed.
- The public feedback period on the draft act. Draft delegated acts are published on the Commission's own feedback portal, which is what happened with the unsold goods act. This is the only one of the three where the text exists and anybody can read it.
The Commission's working plan names the product groups in the queue and gives indicative adoption years. Indicative is the operative word and the document says so itself. It also carries a review, so the queue is not fixed, and it gives the passport no adoption date of its own, which is the structural point: the passport questions in Article 9(2) are settled per product group and not once for everybody.
What to do now
The questions are knowable even where the answers are not, and that is the whole argument for doing anything at all today.
- Find your commodity codes. Scope is set by code under Article 8(a). This is a half hour question for whoever files your declarations and most product teams cannot answer it.
- Form a position on Article 9(2)(f) and (g). Which fields would you object to a competitor reading. Which would you accept a repairer writing to. Write it down before somebody asks.
- Ask how your existing figures were produced. Article 8(d) fixes the method. A number produced by the wrong method is not a number that survives the act, however accurate it looked.
- Decide who is watching for the draft. Somebody in the business needs to be on the feedback portal for your product group, and the window is short.
- Do not buy against a specification that does not exist. Nine of the decisions that determine what a passport programme costs are open. A vendor quoting a fixed scope is quoting against assumptions, and the honest ones will tell you which.
What remains genuinely unresolved, as opposed to merely unread by us, is set out at how we know. And which standards carry a presumption of conformity, which Article 8(f) turns on, is kept at which passport standards carry a presumption.
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Sources
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Relevant provisions reviewed
Carries almost the whole page. Article 8 and Article 9(2) obtained verbatim from the enacting terms. Articles 4, 6, 7, 19 and 20 were read for how the powers are conferred and for the consultation duties, together with Annexes I and III for structure.
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Relevant provisions reviewed
The queue of product groups, and that its adoption years are indicative on the face of the document. No year from it appears on this page.
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Official source confirmed, detailed review pending
One proposition only: that the delegated regulation made under the framework so far concerns derogations from the destruction prohibition, rests on a different provision of the framework and sets no ecodesign requirements.
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Official source confirmed, detailed review pending
Used to establish what has been adopted. On this page as at 28 August 2026 we found no delegated act setting ecodesign requirements for any product group. That is a statement about where we looked.
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Reviewed in full
Used for one point and one absence: the Commission's own statement that data carriers will be specified in the delegated act per product group, and the fact that its answer on access is framed in privacy terms rather than in the role terms of Article 9(2)(f).
Help someone else make sense of product passports.