The EU DPP Registry is live in production since 20 July 2026, governed by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778. Here is the Commission's User Guide for Economic Operators condensed into plain steps: EU Login, enrolment, the seven-step verification, and passport registration.

Two months ago we wrote about a draft. On 27 May 2026, Regen Studio and the CircularTech Forum filed a joint submission with eleven asks to sharpen the draft Implementing Regulation for the EU Digital Product Passport Registry (see our earlier post). That draft is now law. The Commission adopted it as Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 on 16 July, in force 6 August 2026, and on 20 July 2026 the Registry went live in production at registry.product-passport.ec.europa.eu.

The EU Digital Product Passport Registry is the central registry required by Article 13 of the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR). It is horizontal infrastructure: one platform that verifies economic operators, issues registration identifiers, holds the shared semantic definitions, and keeps the audit log for every Digital Product Passport across batteries, ESPR delegated acts, construction products, toys, and detergents. It indexes passports. It does not store their content, which stays hosted by the operator or its service provider, who must keep it available, accurate, and resolvable.

Alongside the Registry, the Commission published a User Guide for Economic Operators (v1.0), 51 pages, dated 17 July 2026. This post condenses that guide into the steps an operator actually walks: sign in, enrol, get verified, and register a passport. Everything below follows the official guide and Regulation. Where a rule is easy to miss, we flag it.

Getting verified, in plain steps

Only verified economic operators may register or manage passports, so verification is the gate you clear first. The interface and the sealed declaration are in English only, and no subscription fee is expected. There is a separate test environment at registry.acc.product-passport.ec.europa.eu that needs its own EU Login account and applies the same verification rigor as production, so you need real qualified seals even to test. If you get stuck, the Commission runs a helpdesk at EC-HELPDESK-DPP@ec.europa.eu and +32 2 296 0431, Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 20:00 CET.

Verification proves your organisation is who it claims to be, using a qualified electronic seal or signature under eIDAS. The path has three parts: sign in, describe your organisation, then complete the verification itself.

Sign in and start · EU Login

Visiting the registry redirects you to EU Login, the Commission's central authentication service, which enforces multi-factor sign-in. Once in, choose Enrol New Organisation. The person who completes a successful verification becomes the Administrator of that organisation in the Registry.

Describe your organisation

You declare whether the operator is a legal person (a company) or a natural person acting as a sole trader, then give the registered name, registration address, country, and a compliance contact. The choice that matters most is the identifier:

  • Legal person: the National Trade Register number (NTR) is preferred, which in the Netherlands is your KvK number. LEI, VAT, an eID identifier, or a local definition are the alternatives.
  • Natural person: the Tax Identification Number (TIN) is preferred, with personal number, eID, national ID card, or passport as alternatives.

Get this right before you proceed, because editing your organisation details later restarts the verification process from the top.

Complete the seven verification steps

The guide breaks verification into seven steps:

  1. Provide the legal representative's informationThe name and email of the person who can legally represent the organisation. This is the signer, and it can differ from the applicant filling in the form.
  2. Request the sealed PDF declarationThe system generates a declaration locking in your organisation data, and the Commission applies its institutional seal for authenticity.
  3. Download the declarationThe EC-sealed PDF becomes available to download.
  4. Sign or seal it, outside the RegistryA legal person adds a qualified electronic seal (QSeal); a sole trader adds a qualified electronic signature (QES). Either must come from a qualified trust service provider on an EU or EEA trusted list. You can find one through the Trusted List Browser.
  5. Upload the countersigned PDFPDF only, up to 1 GB.
  6. Submit the applicationSend it for processing.
  7. Check the statusThe Activity Dashboard shows the outcome: processing, success, or failure.

The rules that trip people up

The verification checks are strict, and most failures come down to a handful of rules:

  • The finished PDF must carry exactly two signatures: the Commission's institutional seal, plus your countersignature or counterseal.
  • Adding your seal is the only change you may make to the downloaded PDF. Any other edit breaks the integrity check and invalidates the declaration.
  • Both seals must be at qualified level and conform to PAdES Baseline (B, T, LT, or LTA). Missing trusted timestamps or long-term validation data are named causes of failure.
  • The certificate attributes must match the declaration: the organisation identifier, the country of registration, and the legal or natural name.

On success, the report carries the expiration day of your seal. When the seal expires, re-verification falls due.

Registering a passport

Once verified, you register passports from the DPP Registration menu. Two identifiers do the work. You supply the Unique Product Identifier (UPI): a URL that conforms to the JTC 24 standards, at most 50 characters, resolving to where your passport data is hosted. In return the Registry issues the Unique Registration Identifier (URI), which identifies the central registration record and binds it to your passport through the UPI.

You can register one passport at a time through an online form, or submit a batch by file upload in XML or JSON. A file holds at most 100 passports, up to 1 GB, and it is all or nothing: one failing passport rejects the whole submission. Registration is offered at the level of model, batch, or item.

No API for operators yet

Today you register through the secure web interface. The Regulation also provides for an API as an alternative channel, both for registering a passport and for receiving information back from the registry (Article 3(b) and Article 8(6)). At v1.0 the User Guide documents only the web-interface path, and the machine-to-machine API for economic operators is not yet published. Expect it to follow, and to matter most for anyone registering passports at volume or wiring the registry into their own systems.

Batteries come first, but registration cannot complete yet

Batteries are the first product group in the Registry. For them the registry offers only the item level of registration, which the guide describes as the agreed level for that product group, consistent with the Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 under which each individual battery carries its own passport. As of the User Guide v1.0 (17 July 2026), the Commission states plainly that "successful registration of DPPs for batteries is not currently available, as the semantic catalogue for this product group has not yet been defined." The Commission frames the current period as a testing phase ahead of the first battery passport obligations on 18 February 2027. Further product groups follow progressively under the ESPR Working Plan, with detergent passports from 23 September 2029 and toy passports from August 2030.

What this means if you place products on the EU market

The headline is that the infrastructure is no longer a plan. If you will need a passport this decade, you can enrol and get verified now, and there is good reason to. The gating dependency is the qualified seal. Procuring a QSeal or QES from a trusted-list provider takes time, and nothing in the verification flow moves until you have one, so that is the item to start on this week rather than the week before your deadline.

The second thing to internalise is that verification is a living status, not a one-off. It is tied to the life of your seal, and it lapses when the seal does. Build the renewal into your compliance calendar the same way you would a certificate rotation.

The open gap is registration itself. The clock to 18 February 2027 is running, yet the battery semantic catalogue that would let a registration actually succeed is not defined at v1.0 of the guide, and the operator API is not published. Getting verified is available today and worth doing. Completing a live battery registration is not, and that catalogue is the milestone to watch. We are enrolled and following it closely, and we will report back when the first real registrations become possible.

How Regen Studio helps economic operators prepare

Regen Studio helps companies prepare for Digital Product Passport compliance. We stay on top of the regulatory developments as they land, across the ESPR, the Battery Regulation, and the sectoral delegated acts, so you do not have to track every Official Journal notice and User Guide revision yourself.

For a given product, we determine which DPP requirements apply and when, map the data you already hold against what a passport will demand, and surface the gaps. From there we build a roadmap to compliance with concrete milestones, from a first requirements assessment through to a live, registrable passport. If you make batteries, textiles, furniture, construction products, detergents, or another regulated group, and you want to know where you stand and what to do next, that is the work we do.

See it in action

Want to see what a DPP System actually looks like end to end?

Explore our interactive demo: sustainable furniture traced from Brazilian forests through manufacturing, with verifiable credentials and ESPR-aligned compliance data threaded all the way through.

Explore the DPP System Demo →

Sources: Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 (OJ, 17 July 2026); DPP Registry User Guide for Economic Operators v1.0 (DG GROW, 17 July 2026); European Commission news, "The Digital Product Passport Registry is now live" (20 July 2026). This post condenses those sources; the intro, closing analysis, and services section are Regen Studio's own.