The 18 August Access-Rights Deadline Has Slipped: What It Means for Importers

A deadline in the EU Battery Regulation passed this week with little noise. By 18 August 2026, the European Commission was required to adopt the implementing act that settles who may see the restricted parts of a battery passport. As this is published, that act has not been adopted. This is what it means if you are preparing passports for February 2027, and, more importantly, what it does not mean.

What was due

The battery passport serves its data in tiers. Some information is public, some is reserved for parties with a legitimate interest, and some is for notified bodies, market surveillance authorities and the Commission. The tiers themselves are set out in the regulation (Art. 77(2) and Annex XIII). See battery passport access tiers.

What the regulation deliberately left open is the middle tier. Art. 77(9) requires the Commission to adopt an implementing act specifying who counts as having a legitimate interest, exactly which of the reserved fields those parties may access, and for what purposes. The regulation put a date on it: 18 August 2026.

That is the deadline that has passed. The Commission's own published roadmap from May 2026 points to adoption in the final quarter of 2026, and its working document went to the battery expert group in April 2026, so the act is in progress rather than abandoned. It is late, not cancelled.

What has not changed

This is the part worth being clear about, because a missed deadline invites the wrong conclusion.

The 18 February 2027 date has not moved. The passport obligation in Art. 77(1) carries no clause making it conditional on the access-rights act. Nor does the QR code requirement in Art. 13(6). Both apply from 18 February 2027 regardless of whether the implementing act lands first.

The tiered structure still applies. The requirement to serve public, legitimate-interest and authority information as separate tiers is in the regulation itself, not in the pending act. You still have to build a passport that can distinguish between them.

So the practical position is awkward but clear: you must ship the access tiers on time, while the definitive list of who qualifies for the middle one is still being written.

What it changes in practice

For importers preparing now, the slip has three real consequences:

1. The middle tier has to be built to change. You know the tier must exist and roughly who it serves, such as repairers, remanufacturers and recyclers. You do not yet have the legally binding list. Treat who qualifies as something that will be set later, not as something you hard-code into a process now.
2. Do not solve the uncertainty by publishing more. The temptation, when it is unclear who may see a restricted field, is to make it public and move on. That is the wrong direction. The restricted tiers exist partly to protect commercially sensitive detail, such as the composition of your cells, and once something is on the open web it cannot be recalled.
3. The public and authority tiers are unaffected. Both ends of the range are defined in the regulation. Most of the work you can do today, gathering the data and getting the public tier right, is not blocked by the missing act.

There is a related point on completeness. Commission guidance published in August 2026 indicates that some Annex XIII fields are not expected to be filled in or displayed at February 2027, because the formats they depend on are still to be specified. The carbon footprint declaration is one of them. A passport with those fields empty at launch is not necessarily an incomplete passport, and for LMT batteries the carbon footprint obligation does not begin before 18 August 2028 in any case. See the carbon footprint declaration.

What to do while you wait

• Carry on with the data. Nothing about the slip changes the Annex XIII collection work, which is the long pole. See what your supplier must send you.
• Get the public tier right. It is defined, it is the most exposed surface, and it is fully buildable today.
• Keep the restricted fields restricted by default rather than publishing them while the rules are unsettled.
• Do not delay your own timeline on the assumption that the February date will move with the act. Nothing in the regulation ties them together.
• Watch for the act in the final quarter of 2026, and expect the eligible-party list to arrive close to the deadline rather than comfortably before it.

In short

The Commission missed its 18 August 2026 deadline to define who has a legitimate interest in the restricted parts of a battery passport, with adoption now signalled for the final quarter of 2026. The passport deadline of 18 February 2027 is untouched, and the tiered access requirement still applies, so the work continues as before. Build the middle tier so it can absorb the eligible-party list when it lands, keep restricted data restricted in the meantime, and do not read a late implementing act as a reprieve on the deadline itself.