The Commission just missed a legal deadline. Your deadline did not move.
Today is 18 August 2026. Article 77(9) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 required the Commission to adopt, by today, an implementing act setting out who may access the restricted parts of a battery passport and on what basis. Nothing has been published. The file sits at the earliest planning stage and has not moved since January. Meanwhile the date that binds you - 18 February 2027 - has not moved by a single day.
What was due today
The battery passport is not one flat page. Part of it is public. Part of it is visible only to specific groups: notified bodies, market surveillance authorities, and persons with a "legitimate interest". Article 77(9) leaves it to the Commission to define what that legitimate interest is and how the tiers work in practice.
Without that act, a manufacturer building a battery passport knows what has to be in it, but does not know who will be entitled to see the restricted fields, nor how access will be proved.
Where the file actually stands
We check this against the Commission’s own initiatives register rather than second-hand reporting, because intermediaries repeat each other and get stale fast.
As of our last check, the initiative - reference Ares(2026)568530 - is still at the planning stage. The public feedback window has never opened. It has been in that state since 23 January 2026.
Before adoption, the draft still has to go through public feedback and, in all likelihood, WTO notification. Neither is a matter of days. Adoption in the fourth quarter of 2026 is the realistic reading.
You can verify this yourself without trusting anyone, including us. The register has a public API:
https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/brpapi/searchInitiatives?text=battery+passport&size=10&language=ENLook at currentStatuses. INIT_PLANNED with feedback disabled means nothing has started yet.
The asymmetry nobody mentions
Here is the part worth internalising. A deadline imposed on the Commission and a deadline imposed on you are not the same kind of object.
When the Commission misses a date in a regulation, there is no automatic consequence. No sanction, no default rule, no extension granted to anyone else. The work simply arrives later.
When you miss 18 February 2027, your product cannot lawfully be placed on the EU market. That date lives in the regulation itself. It is not conditional on the implementing act existing.
So the practical position is uncomfortable but clear: you are expected to build to a specification that is not finished, on a fixed date. Complaining about it is reasonable. Waiting for clarity is not a strategy.
What to build while the rules are missing
The good news is that the missing piece is narrower than it looks. What is undecided is who sees the restricted fields. What is already decided is almost everything else.
- Build the public part completely. It is the larger part, it is specified, and it is what consumers actually scan. Nothing about the delayed act touches it.
- Treat access tiers as configuration, not as schema. Store which tier a field belongs to as data you can change, not as table structure you would have to migrate. When the act lands, you want to edit a mapping, not rebuild a database.
- Do not guess the mapping and hard-code it. Every guess you bake in is a guess you will have to unpick, and unpicking is more expensive than waiting.
- Keep the identifier layer separate from the access layer. They change on different clocks. Identifiers are settled; access is not.
One more thing arriving before the act
The European standard on access rights management, information system security and business confidentiality - prEN 18239 - completed formal voting in July 2026, with publication expected around September. It is plausible that the standard describing how access tiers should work arrives before the act saying who belongs in them.
If that happens, the standard is the better thing to design against. It will not tell you who has a legitimate interest, but it will tell you how to structure the mechanism so that answer becomes a setting rather than a rebuild.
What to do with this
If batteries are your product group, nothing here changes your February date, and that is the message to take to whoever holds your budget. The delay is not relief. It compresses the time available to react once the rules do land, because the end date is fixed.
If you are outside batteries, this is still informative. Batteries are the pilot for every other product group. The pattern visible here - hard obligation dates, soft rule-making dates - is the pattern you should expect for textiles, steel and the rest.
FAQ
Does the missed deadline postpone 18 February 2027?
No. That date is set in the regulation, not in the implementing act, and nothing published so far changes it.
Can I be penalised for something the act has not defined yet?
You cannot be required to implement rules that do not exist. You can be required to comply with the parts of the regulation that already do, on time.
Is a missed Commission deadline unusual?
Not particularly. It is common enough that planning around it is more useful than being surprised by it.
Should I wait for the act before choosing a supplier?
No. Choose a supplier who can express access tiers as configuration. That is a question you can ask today and evaluate today.
Where can I check the status myself?
The initiatives register API above. It is public, it is current, and it does not require an account.