EU Digital Product Passport Registry Goes Live

The European Commission’s Digital Product Passport Registry went live on 20 July 2026, together with a testing environment for manufacturers and importers. The Registry is the central infrastructure that makes the EU’s Digital Product Passport (DPP) operational for products placed on the EU market. The Commission says the first product group required to actually carry a passport is certain large batteries, from 18 February 2027; home appliances are covered by the same law but have no fixed start date yet.

The DPP itself is created by the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, known as ESPR. It is a broad law: its product groups include batteries, textiles, steel and aluminium, tyres, furniture, ICT products, construction products, toys, detergents, end-user surfactants, and a category called energy-related products, which is where washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators and ovens sit.

What went live on 20 July?

Two things launched together: the Registry itself and a testing environment. The Registry is a central directory that stores each product’s unique identifier and associated metadata, according to the Commission. It is not where the detailed passport data lives; that data stays decentralised, held by the manufacturers and importers who created it. The Registry’s job is to let authorities and the public locate a given product’s passport by its identifier, functioning as an index rather than a database of specifications.

What does the Registry actually do?

Manufacturers and importers must register each Digital Product Passport in the Registry, either through a secure user interface or an API, once a product group’s DPP obligation applies to them. They can then request a proof of registration, a secure electronic document they can use to demonstrate compliance to authorities or business customers. The Commission has also published a free semantic repository of interoperable data models and technical documentation, intended to give operators a shared format to register against rather than each building a bespoke one.

When will it reach home appliances?

Only one date is confirmed anywhere in this rollout: 18 February 2027, for certain large batteries, the first product group ESPR requires to carry a passport. Home appliances are in scope of the regulation as energy-related products, but their specific Digital Product Passport requirements, including what data they must carry and when the obligation starts, will be set later through product-specific delegated acts. No such act has been issued for appliances, and no date has been announced. Buyers should treat any appliance DPP timeline as unconfirmed until the Commission publishes one.

Why it matters when you buy

This is the same direction of travel as two rules CHA has already covered: the 10-year spare-parts guarantee for washing machines and dishwashers and the right-to-repair directive that applied from 31 July 2026. ESPR’s stated aim for the Digital Product Passport is to give consumers, repairers and recyclers one place to find a product’s durability, reparability, spare-part and material information alongside its environmental and energy performance. That is the regulation’s intent, not something an appliance ships with today.

The building block that already exists for appliances is EPREL, the EU’s public energy-label database, where every washing machine, dishwasher, fridge and oven sold in the EU must be registered with its energy class and core specifications. It is a narrower tool than a full Digital Product Passport, but it works the same way in practice: a public lookup a shopper can check before buying. When appliance-specific DPP rules eventually land, they would extend that same idea to repair and material data, accessible from the product itself rather than a separate energy label.

For now, the practical takeaway is simple. The infrastructure that will eventually carry an appliance’s digital passport is live, but the appliance obligation itself is not yet scheduled. Before buying a washing machine, dishwasher or refrigerator today, EPREL remains the official source to check a specific model’s registered details; a Digital Product Passport for these categories is a future addition, not a current requirement.