When Does a Battery Count as Placed on the EU Market?

The battery passport requirement is tied to a specific moment: when a battery is placed on the EU market. Get that moment right and the deadline is clear. Get it wrong and you can either miss the duty or worry about batteries that were never caught. This guide explains the concept in plain terms for importers.

What "placing on the market" means

Under the EU Battery Regulation, placing on the market is the first making available of a battery on the EU market. Making available, in turn, is supplying the battery for distribution or use in the course of a commercial activity, whether for payment or free of charge. Both are defined in Art. 3 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542.

Two things follow from that definition:

• It is about the first time a specific battery enters the EU market, not every later sale of it.
• It is about commercial supply into the EU, not about manufacture. A battery made years earlier is placed on the market when it is first supplied in the EU, not when it was built.

Why the date, not the manufacture date, matters

The passport duty applies to batteries placed on the EU market from 18 February 2027. That is a placing-on-the-market test, so the manufacture date and the shipping date are not what decides it.

In practice this means a battery manufactured before the deadline can still need a passport if you first supply it in the EU on or after 18 February 2027. Conversely, stock genuinely placed on the market before that date follows the rules in force at the time. If your inventory straddles the deadline, treat the placing date of each unit as the deciding factor and plan your cut-over around it. The mechanism is the trigger date, not a special exemption: the regulation does not carry a blanket clause letting pre-deadline stock stay on sale, it simply applies each obligation to batteries placed on the market from that obligation's own start date (the passport from 18 February 2027, under Art. 77). The old Batteries Directive 2006/66/EC was repealed from 18 August 2025 (Art. 95). For a shipment sitting right on the line, the placing date of each unit is what decides it.

The importer is usually the one who places it

For imported batteries, the act of placing on the market normally happens when you, the importer, first supply the goods in the EU. That is why the passport obligation lands on you as the economic operator, under your own EORI number. See who is responsible for the battery passport.

The manufacturer outside the EU does not place the battery on the EU market; you do. That is a large part of why the duty cannot be handed back up the chain.

What this means for planning

Because the trigger is the placing date, timing is something you can plan around:

1. Map your models against the deadline. Anything you will first supply in the EU on or after 18 February 2027 needs a passport.
2. Watch inventory that spans the date. Know which units were placed on the market before the deadline and which after.
3. Do the data work ahead of the placing date, not after, so a battery is passport-ready the moment it is supplied.

To settle whether a specific model is caught at all, combine this timing test with the type and capacity checks in is my battery in scope, or run it through the scope checker.

In short

A battery is placed on the EU market when it is first made available for distribution or use in the EU. The passport duty applies from 18 February 2027 on that basis, not on the manufacture or shipping date. For imports, you are usually the one placing it on the market, which is why the obligation is yours. Plan around the placing date of each model, especially for stock that straddles the deadline.