Twelve days to the battery passport access deadline, and there is still no draft

By Łukasz Głuch · 6 August 2026 · DPPera

In twelve days the European Commission is due to answer the one battery passport question nobody can build around: who counts as a person with a "legitimate interest" in your battery data, and what they may do with it. As of this morning the draft has not been published. The passport itself is still mandatory on 18 February 2027, and that date is not the one at risk.

What Article 77(9) asks the Commission to do

The battery passport under Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 is not one dataset. It is three, stacked by who is allowed to see them:

• Public. Anyone who scans the QR code: model, chemistry, capacity, carbon footprint, recycled content, basic performance and sustainability information.
• Authorities and the Commission. The compliance layer - conformity documentation and the evidence behind the declarations.
• Persons with a legitimate interest. Detailed composition, dismantling information, state of health and the rest of the data that only makes sense to someone repairing, remanufacturing, repurposing or recycling the battery.

Article 77(9) of that Regulation requires the Commission, by 18 August 2026, to adopt implementing acts specifying which persons are to be considered persons with a legitimate interest, which information they get access to, and to what extent they may download, share, publish and re-use it. Those acts run through the examination procedure in Article 90(3), which means a vote by the Member State committee before anything is adopted.

The Commission describes its own planned act in plain language: from February 2027 large batteries carry a digital passport with public performance and sustainability information, compliance information for authorities, and repair, remanufacturing, repurposing and recycling information that "should only be accessible to those companies and persons that have a legitimate interest in the information. This act will define who can access it."

Where the file actually stands on 6 August 2026

The act exists. It exists as a plan. In the Commission's Have Your Say register it is PLAN/2026/107, "Commission Implementing Regulation on access rights to certain parts of the battery passport", reference Ares(2026)568530, lead department DG GROW, legal basis Article 77(9) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542. It was entered on 23 January 2026.

Six and a half months later the entry is still in the planning stage. The file is flagged as one whose draft is to be published for public feedback, and that feedback period has not opened. There is no draft text to read.

That is the detail worth sitting with. Draft implementing acts are normally published for four weeks of public feedback, and adoption then needs the committee vote. Four weeks of feedback plus a comitology vote does not fit inside twelve days. Unless the Commission skips its own feedback step, 18 August is a date the access rules will pass rather than meet.

Why the missing tier is the expensive one

If you are a battery maker, the public tier is a solved problem. It is a page behind a QR code, and the six harmonised standards cited on 15 July 2026 already tell you how to build the identifier, the carrier, the transport and the storage behind it. The authority tier is paperwork you produce anyway.

The restricted tier is not a publishing problem, it is an identity problem. Someone in another Member State who says they are a recycler asks for your detailed composition and your dismantling instructions. You need to authenticate them, assign them a role, know what they may re-publish, be able to revoke it, and log the whole thing. You cannot sensibly procure any of that until you know whether "legitimate interest" turns out to mean a closed list of registered operators, a self-declaration with liability attached, or a status verified against some national or EU register. Those three answers produce three different systems and three different price tags.

There is a second gap pointing the same way. The technical standard for this exact layer, prEN 18239 on access rights management, information system security and business confidentiality, is also still a draft; its formal vote closed on 16 July 2026. So today the legal answer to "who may see this" and the technical answer to "how do we enforce that" are both open, while everything around them - identifiers, QR codes, protocols, persistence - has settled. The unfinished layer is the same layer in both processes, and that is not a coincidence. Access rights are where confidentiality, competition law and circular economy ambitions collide.

What does not move

The obligation date sits in the Regulation itself, not in this implementing act. LMT batteries, industrial batteries above 2 kWh and EV batteries placed on the EU market from 18 February 2027 need a battery passport whether or not the access rules arrived on schedule. A late implementing act does not buy you a late passport. It does the opposite: it compresses the window you have to implement whatever the act ends up saying, because the deadline at the end stays where it is.

What to build now, if batteries are your problem

• Ship the public tier. Nothing about it depends on the missing act, and it is most of what a customer or a customs officer will ever scan.
• Model the restricted tier as configuration, not code. Roles, claims and a policy that says which role sees which field. When the act lands you want to edit a table, not refactor an application.
• Do not hardcode who qualifies. Any list you write today is a guess, and guesses become migrations.
• Log access from day one. Whatever the act says, you will have to show who reached your data and when. Retrofitting an audit trail over live passports is worse than building it early.
• Keep the settled parts settled. Identifiers, data carrier, hosting and persistence follow the six cited standards and can be locked down now. Keep the access layer soft.

If you are not in batteries, this still tells you something

Two things, in fact.

It is the template. Whatever the Commission decides "legitimate interest" means for battery data becomes the reference point for every category that follows. The textile delegated act will not reinvent the concept from scratch, it will inherit it. If you want to know how your supplier list will be protected in 2029, watch this act rather than the textile file.

It is a timing signal. Batteries is the best-resourced file with the hardest date in the whole product passport programme. If the access rules for that one slide past a legal deadline in the Regulation, apply the same generosity to every softer timeline. Our position on apparel has not changed: delegated act expected in 2027, obligations realistically landing 2028-2029.

Two other files on the same desk this month. Iron and steel, the first ESPR product delegated act, has its public consultation closing on 12 August 2026, with adoption indicatively in Q4 2026 - that will be the first act to spell out passport content for a real product group. Apparel textiles has been in the register since 18 December 2025 and has not opened for feedback at all.

What to do with this

• In batteries: separate the three tiers in your architecture this month, ship the public one, park the restricted one behind configuration.
• In any other category: nothing urgent. Put your own date in the deadline calendar and check back when the draft appears.
• Evaluating a vendor: ask how their access model changes when this act publishes. "We will re-tier by configuration" is the right answer. "We are already fully compliant" is not, because there is nothing yet to comply with.

If you want to see the public tier of a passport in practice, our free passport generator builds a live page with a working QR code in about a minute.

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