Most battery-passport news this year has been about the passport existing at all — the 18 February 2027 deadline, what Annex XIII requires, the registry it plugs into. A quieter Commission deadline lands this week: a statutory date for defining exactly who is allowed to read the parts of a battery passport that aren’t meant for everyone. Here’s what it actually covers.
Not every field in a battery passport is public
It’s easy to assume a Digital Product Passport means “all the data, visible to anyone who scans the QR code.” The battery passport was never built that way. Article 77 of the Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 already sets out several tiers of access to the content Annex XIII requires: some information is public to any scanner, some is limited to authorised bodies such as market-surveillance authorities, and some specific Annex XIII data points — detailed material composition and dismantling and safety information — are restricted to verified professionals who have a genuine reason to need them.
What Article 77(9) actually requires by 18 August 2026
Article 77(9) already names, in broad terms, who a “person with a legitimate interest” is: independent repairers, remanufacturers, second-life operators and recyclers accessing dismantling and composition data in order to do their work, plus a battery’s purchaser (or someone acting on their behalf) needing access to make an individual battery available to independent energy aggregators or market participants. What the Regulation leaves for later is the operational detail — and Article 77(9) gives the Commission until 18 August 2026 to adopt implementing rules filling that in: how a claimed professional role gets verified, and precisely how far someone with legitimate-interest access can go — downloading, sharing, publishing or reusing the data they’re granted.
In other words: the who and why is already written into law and has been since the Regulation entered into force in 2023. The how — verification procedure, exact scope of reuse — is what this specific deadline is about.
This is a different deadline from the registry rulebook
If this sounds similar to something we covered a couple of weeks ago — the rules on how businesses verify their identity to register a passport in the EU DPP registry — it’s worth being precise about the difference. Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 governs who can register a product in the registry and how the registry itself works. Article 77(9)’s access rules govern something else entirely: once a battery passport exists, who is allowed to read its restricted fields, and what they can do with what they read. One is about creating an entry; the other is about consuming one.
What this does — and doesn't — mean for you
For the vast majority of battery brands, this deadline changes nothing about your plan. Whether the Commission’s implementing act is adopted exactly on 18 August, a few weeks earlier, or a few weeks later doesn’t move the date that actually binds you: 18 February 2027, when EV, light-means-of-transport and industrial batteries above 2 kWh need a passport in the first place. A drafting deadline for the Commission is not a compliance deadline for you.
- ✓Nothing to file, nothing to register. This implementing act is about the Commission finishing a rulebook, not about any action a battery manufacturer needs to take this week.
- ✓One planning detail worth banking. When you structure your Annex XIII data ahead of February 2027, build with access tiers in mind from the start — which fields are meant for any scanner, and which are meant only for a verified repairer or recycler — rather than treating the passport as one flat, fully public record.
- ✓Watch for the actual text, not just the deadline. The practically useful part — the exact verification mechanism for proving someone really is a certified recycler or repairer — only becomes concrete once the implementing act itself is published. The 18 August deadline is when the Commission is due to have finished drafting it, not when the detail becomes known.
The short version
A battery passport was never meant to be one flat page of public data — it has tiers built in from the start, and Article 77(9) is the part of the Regulation that hands the Commission a deadline to spell out exactly how the most sensitive tier works in practice. That deadline is this week. Your deadline is still 18 February 2027, and nothing about it just changed.