ESPR and the Digital Product Passport: the legal engine behind the DPP

The Digital Product Passport has no regulation of its own. It is a mechanism built inside the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation of 13 June 2024 (OJ L, 2024/1781, 28.6.2024; CELEX 32024R1781) — ESPR — which entered into force on 18 July 2024. Everything the DPP does for a given product category exists only once ESPR's machinery has been pointed at that category.

Most of what circulates about "the DPP" is really about ESPR's plumbing: which article requires a passport, which article sets its technical shape, and which article turns the general obligation into rules a specific product has to follow. For the wider passport landscape across sectors, see our pillar guide to the EU Digital Product Passport. This post stays narrowly on ESPR itself — the legal engine, not the destination.

The mechanism: Article 4 delegated acts, not the Regulation directly

ESPR does not itself impose ecodesign or passport requirements on any product. Article 4 empowers the Commission to adopt delegated acts that set binding ecodesign requirements — performance requirements, information requirements, or both — for a specific product group or horizontally across several. Article 5 constrains what those delegated acts can address: durability, reliability, reusability, upgradability, reparability, maintainability, and energy and resource efficiency, among others.

This is the piece that trips people up: ESPR is a framework regulation and does nothing to your product on its own. A product only gains a Digital Product Passport obligation once a delegated act under Article 4 names that product group and switches the passport requirement on.

What ESPR says about the passport itself

Chapter III of ESPR (Articles 9 to 15) is where the DPP is actually built, and it splits cleanly into two halves.

The "what" — mandate and content. Article 9 makes the passport a market-access condition: a product may only be placed on the market or put into service with a Digital Product Passport once a delegated act adopted under Article 4 requires one, and the passport must meet the essential requirements set out in Articles 10 and 11 — the DPP's technical design and functionality, and the minimum information it must carry. Which fields actually appear in the passport is left to the product-specific delegated act; ESPR sets the shape of the container, not its contents.

The "how" — shared infrastructure. Article 13 requires the Commission to establish and operate the digital registry that holds the unique identifiers of every passport placed on the EU market, and Article 14 requires a public web portal so that data can be searched and compared consistent with each user's access rights. These two are built once, horizontally, for every product group ESPR ever reaches — batteries included.

That registry is not hypothetical infrastructure any more. Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 of 16 July 2026 (OJ L, 2026/1778, 17.7.2026; CELEX 32026R1778), in force 6 August 2026, lays down the implementation arrangements for the Article 13 registry — and batteries under Article 77 of the Batteries Regulation are named expressly within its scope. That is the hinge for battery passports specifically: Article 77(10) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 requires the operator placing a battery on the market to upload its unique identifier into this same ESPR registry. A battery passport and an ESPR passport are one workflow, not two filings.

The standards that make the registry and portal machine-readable in practice sit one layer further out again. Six CEN/CLC harmonised standards — EN 18216, 18219, 18220, 18221, 18222 and 18223 — were cited in support of ESPR by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 of 14 July 2026 (CELEX 32026D1736). We cover that stack in detail in EN 18216 and the DPP standards stack, explained — worth reading alongside this post if you are scoping the technical build, since that citation currently supports ESPR only, not the Batteries Regulation directly.

The working plan: how ESPR decides whose turn it is

Article 18 requires the Commission to adopt a multiannual working plan setting out the product groups it intends to prioritise for delegated acts, and the first working plan was due before 19 April 2025. The Commission published it on 16 April 2025 as COM(2025) 187 final, covering 2025–2030.

1. 18 July 2024In force

   ESPR enters into force

   Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 becomes applicable across the EU. No product yet has a passport obligation — that requires a delegated act under Article 4.

2. 16 April 2025In force

   First ESPR working plan adopted

   COM(2025) 187 final sets priorities for 2025–2030: final products textiles/apparel, furniture, tyres and mattresses; intermediate products iron & steel and aluminium; plus horizontal repairability and recycled-content-in-electronics work.

3. 6 August 2026In force

   ESPR DPP registry implementation rules in force

   Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 sets the operating rules for the Article 13 registry, expressly naming batteries within its scope.

4. Indicative 2026–2027Expected

   First non-battery delegated acts expected

   Iron and steel is the working plan's first target, followed by textiles, tyres and aluminium. As of 27 July 2026 we have found no record that any of these has actually been adopted — treat the dates as working-plan targets, not confirmed acts.

"Indicative" is doing real work in that table: a working plan is the Commission's stated intent, not a binding deadline the way Article 77(1) of the Batteries Regulation is binding on 18 February 2027. Ecodesign delegated acts under the original 2009 Directive routinely ran a year or more behind their own working-plan targets, and nothing in ESPR's architecture prevents the same here. The plan also folds in 14 energy-related product categories — lighting, electric motors, space heaters, electronic displays and others — already prioritised under the 2022–2024 Ecodesign and Energy Labelling Working Plan, which continue under existing Ecodesign Directive measures during a transition to 31 December 2026 before migrating to ESPR delegated acts.

What "the DPP is coming for your product" actually means

Concretely, three separate things have to happen before your product needs a passport, in this order:

1. Your product group appears in a working plan — a statement of intent under Article 18, revisable, and no obligation by itself.
2. The Commission adopts a delegated act under Article 4 naming your product group, setting the ecodesign and information requirements that apply and, critically, whether a passport is required at all — ESPR permits information-only or performance-only delegated acts that never trigger Article 9.
3. The delegated act's own transition period runs out. Delegated acts typically build in 18 months or more between adoption and the compliance date, on top of whatever gap already exists between working-plan target and actual adoption.

For batteries, all three steps are already resolved: the requirement lives directly in Article 77(1) of the Batteries Regulation rather than an ESPR delegated act, and the date is fixed at 18 February 2027. For a product group waiting on Article 4 — iron and steel, textiles, or any other working-plan entry — none of the three steps is complete yet. That gap between "prioritised" and "obligated" is the most common source of DPP misinformation we encounter: a working-plan mention reported as a deadline.

Our compliance tracker follows each instrument against its Official Journal source, and the data requirements breakdown walks through what a passport has to contain once an obligation applies.

What to do while you wait for your delegated act

Even without an adopted delegated act, you can do the parts of this that are not date-dependent: map your bill of materials against the Article 10/11 shape of a passport, decide how you will generate a unique identifier under Article 13's registry model, and treat supplier evidence collection as a lead-time problem rather than a compliance-date problem. None of that work is wasted if your delegated act lands later than the working plan suggests — and on ESPR's own history, waiting for certainty before starting is the more expensive bet.