Originally published on Medium.
Article 77 of the Batteries Regulation gave the European Commission until August 18, 2026 to adopt the rules on who may read a battery passport. The Commission’s own FAQ, finished in September, now promises a draft in October or November. The date the same article binds manufacturers, February 18, 2027, has no such clause. It is 140 days away, it is the only digital product passport deadline in the EU that is fixed, and in the Commission’s own July survey, 15 percent of the companies asked said they were very confident of having the data in time.
Aeroz Editorial, October 2026.
August 18, 2026 came and went without an implementing act. Under Article 77(9) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, that was the day by which the European Commission was to adopt the rules on access rights for the battery passport: who counts as having a “legitimate interest” in the non-public data, how a claimed professional role is verified, and how far someone granted access may go. A draft had gone to the Commission’s batteries expert group in late April. On August 14, Battery-Tech Network reported that the Commission’s own published timetable had slipped the act to the fourth quarter.
The Commission’s FAQ on the battery passport, with a manuscript date of September 2026, now says the act “is still being developed following stakeholder consultation and is expected in draft form for public feedback” in October or November 2026.
Nothing else in the Commission’s messaging has moved. In May, the Commission’s internal market directorate held a webinar on implementing the regulation, and Minespider’s summary of it leads with one line: “the obligation remains on track for 18 February 2027.” The Commission’s second industry webinar, on July 7, worked from the same date. So does the guidance document on data points that the Commission updated on August 15. The only date that slipped was the Commission’s own.
Now put yourself at the desk of the person at a battery maker who owns the February date. Article 77(1) says that from February 18, 2027, every electric vehicle battery, every light means of transport battery and every industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the market or put into service must have a passport. Battery-Tech Network’s reading of the text is blunt and, as far as we can tell, correct: Article 77(1) “binds manufacturers unconditionally on 18 February 2027,” with “no enabling-act clause.” The Commission’s deadline slipped because it could. Yours cannot, because nothing in the article lets it.
What is on time, and what is not
It is worth being exact, because most of the machinery is in place, and some of it arrived this summer.
The registry is live. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 of July 16, 2026 set out how it works, it entered into force on August 6, and the registry itself has been operational since July 20, with a test environment that companies can use now. A helpdesk has run since launch, from 08:00 to 20:00 Central European Time, to help with onboarding. Registration can be done through an API or by hand, and the FAQ says companies “may also export Battery Passports from their own systems and upload them in bulk.” Before any of that, the operator proves who it is with a qualified electronic seal or certificate.
The standards are mostly in place. In July the Commission adopted an implementing decision citing six of the eight harmonised standards that support the passport, developed by CEN-CENELEC JTC 24. Two remain, and, per Minespider’s account of the May webinar, one of them covers access-rights management, which is the subject of the act that is late.
The data list exists. The Commission’s guidance document on data points by category, last updated August 15, sets out 71 data points and, in Battery-Tech Network’s description, “indicates whether the information is mandatory, optional, only relevant in certain circumstances, or not required to be completed or displayed as of February 2027.” That last category matters. The FAQ sets a smaller February scope than many vendor pages suggest: core product information and performance parameters are required from February 2027, while “carbon footprint, recycled content and due diligence information will not yet be required. Those requirements have their own application dates.” The due diligence report, for one, “is required from August 2027 (in line with Article 48(2) of the Batteries Regulation).”
What is late is the one act that decides who may open the door to the restricted data. For a manufacturer, that means building the passport, the identifier, the registry entry and the public data now, and building access control against rules that will arrive as a draft with roughly three months left.
Who may read what
The missing act is narrower than the word “access” suggests, and it is worth knowing exactly which part of the passport is in limbo.
Annex XIII of the regulation sorts the passport’s contents into four groups. The FAQ is clear about two of them. “Part of the Battery Passport is public (point 1 of Annex XIII of the Batteries Regulation).” And: “Another part can only be accessed by notified bodies, market surveillance authorities and the Commission (point 3 of Annex XIII).” Those two tiers a manufacturer can build today.
The other two, points 2 and 4, are the ones that wait. Access to them “will depend on the forthcoming implementing act on the Battery Passport. This act will define access rights and specify which of those parts of the Passport may be accessed by different users, such as recyclers and repairers.” The act “is intended to clarify which users may be regarded as persons with a legitimate interest for accessing restricted information.”
That is the fight. EUROBAT’s position paper lists what its members do not want in a recycler’s or a repairer’s hands by right: “minimal and maximum voltage, original power capability, internal battery cell resistance,” the “name of the electrode and electrolyte materials,” and “battery pack design specifications, and cell-level recipes.” It asks for access to cell-level information to be limited under “carefully designed confidentiality provisions,” and for no “mass collection of dynamic performance data.” It also asks the Commission to “clarify the respective roles of industry initiatives like Catena-X and GAIA-X,” the data spaces through which much of the industry expects to exchange this information.
One design decision softens the problem without solving it. The passport is decentralised. In Minespider’s words, “The complete passport dataset stays with the economic operator or its authorised operator. The central DPP Registry and the Commission’s web portal act as a discovery and identifier layer.” The sensitive data never leaves the manufacturer’s own system. What the act decides is who may knock on that system’s door, and what the door must open.
Whose name is on the passport
The FAQ also settles a question that comes up in every supply chain with more than one country in it: who is responsible for the passport when the cell maker, the pack assembler and the company selling the product are three different firms.
The answer is the last one. “The economic operator placing the battery on the EU market remains responsible for compliance and for the data included.” That operator may give another company written authorisation to act on its behalf, but “Written authorisation does not transfer the ultimate legal responsibility.” A non-EU operator can register a passport itself, once it has completed verification under Article 4 of the registry regulation. And the regulation, the FAQ notes, “does not use ‘liability’ in this context. Liability for defective products is governed by relevant Union law.”
Two consequences follow for anyone building a passport programme.
The first is about second life. “A new Battery Passport is required when a battery is repurposed or remanufactured, or when it has become waste but is then prepared for reuse or repurposing. Normally, a new economic operator then assumes responsibility.” And “The new Battery Passport must be linked to the previous Battery Passport.” A passport is not a certificate issued once at the factory gate. It is a record that changes hands, and the regulation expects the chain of custody to be visible in the links between one passport and the next.
The second is about staying verified. If an operator’s registry verification lapses, the FAQ says it “would no longer be able to perform additional Registry actions, such as updating or transferring the Battery Passport, until it renews its verification.” A passport whose owner cannot update it is a passport that will drift from the battery it describes.
And for the many European products whose cells come from China, there is a third problem that no EU act can resolve. Minespider puts it directly: “For global OEMs and manufacturers working with Chinese cell suppliers, Battery Passport readiness collides with China’s data-export controls.” China’s Data Security Law and Cybersecurity Law “together can require security assessments before certain categories of ‘Important Data’ leave the country.” The reference the Commission’s webinar pointed to is a pilot in Shanghai’s Lin’gang Special Area, with CATL and BMW and run with Catena-X, which “achieved the world’s first compliant cross-border Battery Passport data transfer between China and Europe.” It covered “roughly 80% of the EU’s static passport requirements (about 43 static data points).” What it left out was “detailed material composition and the disassembly manual.” For the European operator whose name is on the passport, the missing fifth is still its responsibility.
How ready the industry says it is
On July 7, at its second industry webinar, the Commission shared the results of a survey of 91 industry participants. The CDX Regulatory News summary of the session gives the number that matters: “Only 15% of respondents said they feel very confident that the necessary battery passport data will be available within their value chain by February 2027.” The biggest obstacle was not software. “Data availability and quality was identified as the single biggest implementation challenge, cited by 63% of respondents, followed by unclear roles and responsibilities across the value chain (59%) and dynamic data and lifecycle management (58%).” Ninety-one people is a small sample. It is also the Commission’s own, and it was gathered seven months before the date.
The European automotive and industrial battery manufacturers’ association has asked for the clock to stop. In a position paper dated September 11, 2025, EUROBAT urged “a ‘stop-the-clock’ initiative” that would “postpone enforcement to 2030,” and asked the Commission to “exclude industrial batteries from the initial phase of implementation of the Battery Passport.” Its reasons are specific. “Harmonised standards must be in place before the Battery passport can be implemented.” Delays elsewhere in the regulation, “such as carbon footprint declaration and due diligence obligations are intensifying uncertainty.” Industrial batteries are “custom-built to meet specific end uses,” “most industrial batteries are not repurposed,” and a passport for each of them is, in EUROBAT’s phrase, a “disproportionate administrative burden on manufacturers.”
As of this writing that remains a request. No proposal to move February 18, 2027 is on the table, the Commission said in May that the obligation is on track, and the regulation contains no mechanism for the Commission to move the date on its own.
Every battery gets a code. Three kinds get a passport.
There is a second February 18 obligation that gets less attention than the passport, and it reaches far more companies.
Article 13(6) of the regulation requires all batteries placed on the EU market to carry a QR code from February 18, 2027. Neil Oliver of Ultralife Corporation, writing in Battery Technology in March, put it plainly: “From February 2027, every battery placed on the EU market will need to carry a QR code. This requirement stems from Article 13 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542.” For the three passport categories, the code resolves to the passport. For every other battery, the code must give access to the information Article 13 already requires, to the EU declaration of conformity under Article 18, and to the compliance report. The code goes on the battery, or on the packaging where direct marking is impractical.
So a maker of portable or medical-device batteries that correctly concludes it needs no passport still needs a code on every unit by the same date, resolving to a document set it controls. The passport scope is three categories. The code scope is everything.
The only fixed DPP date
The battery passport is often described as the first of the EU’s digital product passports, which is true, and as the first of many deadlines, which is not yet.
Under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, no other product group has a passport obligation today. Each arrives with its own delegated act, and Article 4 of that regulation says: “The date of application of a delegated act shall not be earlier than 18 months from its entry into force, except in duly justified cases.” The Commission’s indicative timeline for the acts runs iron and steel in 2026, textiles, tyres and aluminium in 2027, furniture in 2028, mattresses and ICT in 2029. Add at least eighteen months to each. A brand reading “textiles 2027” as a 2027 deadline is planning to the wrong year.
So when someone asks for “the DPP deadline,” the honest answer has one date in it. February 18, 2027, for batteries, under their own law. Everything else is a delegated act that has not been adopted plus eighteen months. The battery makers are the only companies in Europe whose passport date is on a calendar, and they are the ones currently waiting on Brussels for a rule.
What to build while the rule is late
The parts of the passport that do not depend on the missing act are most of it, and they are the parts that take longest. In order.
Verify the operator in the registry, with a qualified electronic seal, and decide who will hold written authorisation for which actions, knowing that the responsibility stays with the operator placing the battery on the market. Assign a unique identifier per battery, not per model. Put the QR code on the pack that resolves to it; the Commission’s page says the passport “will be linked to a battery through a QR code, in line with the requirements set out in the Batteries Regulation and the applicable DPP technical framework.” Register the identifier, which is open now. Map the 71 data points against the Commission’s own categories, populate the February set, and schedule the later ones. Stand up a decentralised store for the passport itself, since the registry holds identifiers and metadata, not the passports. Build access control in three tiers, public, authorities and legitimate interest, with the membership of the third left open until the draft lands. Build the link from any new passport to the one before it, for remanufactured and repurposed packs. And make one decision the regulation leaves entirely to the manufacturer: whether the identifier on the pack can be copied.
That last one is where our two September pieces on batteries land. The registry can confirm that an identifier exists and who registered it. It cannot confirm that the pack in your hand is the one the identifier was issued to. A QR code is a picture, and pictures copy, so a passport reached through a printed code is a passport that can be borrowed by a rebuilt pack, a rewrapped cell, or a counterfeit that photographed a genuine label. The access rights act, when it arrives, will decide who may read the record. The carrier decides whether what they read belongs to the pack in front of them. And the second-life rule makes the problem sharper, not softer: a passport that must be linked to the passport before it is only as good as the link between each passport and its physical pack.
The regulation requires a QR code and names no other carrier, and Aeroz will not tell you otherwise. Nothing in it stops a manufacturer from putting a second identity on the pack beside the code, one that answers a challenge rather than displaying a number, embedded in the pack or module, so that the link between record and object holds at assembly, at sale, at service and at second life. The mechanism is in tap to passport. The readiness work for the February scope is on our EU Battery Passport checklist and the EU Battery Passport page.
What the manufacturer should be able to prove on February 18
Per battery, five things. That this passport belongs to this pack and to no other. That the data in it is the manufacturer’s own record, for this unit. That the identifier is in the registry, as the implementing regulation requires. That whoever is responsible for the passport today can be named, including after a remanufacture, with the link to the passport before it. And, once the access rules exist, who read what and under which legitimate interest.
Four of the five can be built today, and the fifth cannot be built until Brussels finishes a document that was due in August. That is an uncomfortable position for a manufacturer, and the right response is not to wait for the fifth. It is to make the first four unarguable, so that when the access rules land in draft this autumn, the only work left is the part the Commission was late on, rather than the part that was always yours.
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