EU DPP Registry
Since July 2026 there has been a European registry of digital passports, and with it a new wave of alarmed messaging aimed even at cosmetics brands. Here is what the rules actually say, what they mean for you today, and from when they will concern you.
27 May 2026
CEN and CENELEC publish the passport's horizontal standards — EN 18216, 18219, 18220, 18221, 18222 and 18223 — later cited in the Union's Official Journal on 15 July 2026. They govern identifiers, physical carriers, storage, data exchange and the semantic model.
20 July 2026
The Commission opens the European registry and its related test environment. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, adopted on 16 July, is in force from 6 August 2026.
Then, one sector at a time
Registration obligations do not all kick in at once: they arise group by group, with the ESPR delegated act or the sector-specific law that introduces them. Batteries lead the way from 18 February 2027, under a law of their own (Regulation (EU) 2023/1542).
This is the most common misunderstanding. The European registry does not store product data: it holds the unique identifiers, the commodity codes of products intended for release for free circulation, a semantic repository and a register of operations.
It works like a directory linking the product's identifier to the address of the server where the passport actually lives. Your data stays where you published it.
Whoever has to register a passport does so as a "verified economic operator": identity is proven with the tools provided by the eIDAS framework, and the status has a limited duration, after which it must be renewed.
It is a step that takes time and a trust service provider: worth knowing now if you sell products that will have a mandatory passport, not if you sell cosmetics.
The digital passport comes from the ESPR, which introduces it for product groups through delegated acts. The Commission's 2025-2030 working plan lists six of them — iron and steel, aluminium, textiles, furniture, tyres and mattresses — and cosmetics is not among them.
With no delegated act there is no passport obligation; with no passport obligation there is no registration obligation, and no qualified electronic seal is needed. For cosmetics there is no obligation: a cosmetics passport today is voluntary. You publish it because you need the data anyway for allergens and packaging, and because having it in order now costs less than chasing it later.
Whoever sells you the cosmetics passport as a 2026 requirement is selling you a deadline that does not exist. The ones that do exist are others: the allergens of Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 and the packaging of the PPWR. These are the ones we handle.
Clothing is among the six priority groups: the delegated act is expected in 2027, with application not before the end of 2028. From that moment textile passports will need to be registered, and whoever registers them will have to be a verified operator.
The dedicated textile page explains what FormulaPass already handles today on fibre composition, which has been law for years and is independent of the passport.
The EN 18216-18223 standards are voluntary, and in practice they are the recognised path.
We do not claim certifications we do not have, and we do not say we comply with a standard until we do. What we do today: the QR code is readable by an ordinary smartphone with no app to install, and the passport's data is structured field by field and exportable.
Then we will show you the two obligations that really do have a date, and how you handle them without re-typing anything by hand.