EU Digital Product Passport: technical framework takes shape with registry launch and six harmonized standards

July 2026 brought together the pieces needed to make the Digital Product Passport operational under Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. Three developments in the same month give manufacturers a concrete technical basis to start building DPP compliant systems rather than working from the Regulation's general requirements alone.

Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736 of 14 July 2026 was published and entered into force on 15 July 2026, citing references to six harmonized standards developed by CEN and CENELEC under Commission mandate M/604. These standards support Articles 10 and 11 of the ESPR, which set the substantive requirements for the DPP and its technical design and operation:

• EN 18216:2026 — Data exchange protocols
• EN 18219:2026 — Unique identifiers
• EN 18220:2026 — Data carriers
• EN 18221:2026 — Data storage, archiving and persistence
• EN 18222:2026 — Application programming interfaces (APIs) for product passport lifecycle management and searchability
• EN 18223:2026 — System interoperability

A product passport that follows these standards benefits from a presumption of conformity with the corresponding requirements of Articles 10 and 11, though this presumption only extends as far as each standard actually covers those requirements and does not amount to a general certificate of compliance. Manufacturers of products already in scope, batteries being the clearest example, can now begin adapting their data structures, data carriers and APIs against a fixed technical reference rather than an evolving draft.

Two further standards in the same CEN and CENELEC series, covering access rights and data authentication and integrity, remain in draft form as prEN 18239 and prEN 18246 and have not yet been cited in the Official Journal. Companies building DPP systems around the six published standards should expect the security and access control layer to follow later, and should design their architecture with room to incorporate it once finalized.

Alongside the standards, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 of 16 July 2026 lays down the implementation arrangements for the digital product passport registry established under Article 13(5) of the ESPR. This Regulation governs how the central registry actually functions, including how economic operators are verified and enrolled and how registration data is handled, and becomes applicable on 6 August 2026. The registry itself, together with a testing environment, went live on 20 July 2026 at the Commission's dedicated DPP website, alongside a user guide for economic operators covering enrollment, identity verification and passport registration.

Taken together, the current state of the DPP framework is that the registry and its testing environment are live, the six horizontal technical standards apply from 15 July 2026, and the registry's operating rules under Implementing Regulation 2026/1778 apply from 6 August 2026. The remaining gap is the security and authentication layer, still pending as draft standards. For manufacturers and suppliers preparing product level data for the DPP, this is the point at which passport design work can move from anticipating future requirements to building against a published, citable technical reference.

Source: Official Journal, Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/1736, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778, and the European Commission's DPP Registry