The EU Battery Regulation, explained

Key dates

Who it applies to

The digital passport requirement targets industrial batteries, electric vehicle batteries, and light means of transport (LMT) batteries — e-bikes, e-scooters — with a capacity above 2 kWh. That covers manufacturers selling directly into the EU and, just as often, importers bringing batteries in from suppliers outside the EU who now need to get compliance data out of a manufacturer that has no reason to care about EU paperwork on its own.

What Annex XIII requires

Annex XIII sets the field list for the passport itself. In practice it splits into data you fill in once per battery model — chemistry, material composition, origin of critical raw materials, carbon footprint per lifecycle stage, recycled content — and data specific to one serial number: manufacturing date and site, test results, and dynamic data added after sale like state of health and usage. See our full model-level vs item-level breakdown for a worked example, or the battery-specific field list.

Who sees what

The regulation splits access into tiers. Consumers scanning the QR code without logging in see a public layer — chemistry, capacity, carbon footprint, recycled content. Repairers and recyclers get a deeper technical layer after authenticating: disassembly instructions and safety data. Regulators and the European Commission get full access, including the complete compliance record.

The registry doesn't host your data

The EU's central registry, live since 19 July 2026, exists so customs and market surveillance authorities can verify an identifier is real — it stores identifiers, not passport content. The actual data stays with the manufacturer or their hosting provider, for the life of the battery plus a mandatory retention period, backed by a required back-up hosting arrangement in case the original manufacturer stops trading. Read more in our Digital Product Passport guide.

How this relates to ESPR

Batteries are covered by their own dedicated regulation rather than the broader Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) — the Battery Regulation is lex specialis and takes precedence for this category. The two share the same underlying registry and identifier infrastructure, which is why the passport architecture Matrikel built for batteries extends to the categories ESPR brings in next. See our ESPR guide for how that rollout works.