EU Central Registry

ESPR Art. 13 establishes a central registry, run by the European Commission, as the directory of registered passports. It lets authorities and others find a passport from a product without knowing which system issued it. Art. 13(1) required the Commission to set it up by 19 July 2026, and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 sets out how registration works.

A directory, not a store

The registry holds identifiers and where each passport lives. It does not hold the passport’s content, which stays with the issuer. Finding a passport goes through one central place; the data does not.

What registering a passport involves

Under the implementing act, the economic operator uploads the passport’s unique identifiers; the registry checks some of them itself (Art. 8(7)(c)–(d)), and the granularity of the passport follows the most granular level any applicable act requires (Art. 8(3)). A battery’s operator must upload its unique identifier under Battery Regulation Art. 77(10). A successful registration returns a proof of registration (Art. 9).

How the node handles it

Every published passport commits its registration to a durable queue in the same database transaction as the publish itself, and a background worker drains that queue with retries. Publishing never waits on the registry, a crash never loses a registration, and after an outage the backlog is worked through without skipping any passport. odal registry shows the sync state, operator-wide or for one passport.

How long an identifier may be

The limit on a unique product identifier comes from the Commission’s registry user guide, not from law or from EN 18219. Version 1.01 of the guide (28 July 2026) said 50 characters, shorter than any GS1 Digital Link a node builds; version 1.02 (24 August 2026) says 2,000. The core library checks a registration against the current figure, and because it lives in a user guide rather than in the Official Journal, it is treated as current rather than settled.