in which language must I provide the product passport of my piece of furniture

The language of the member state where the furniture is sold

The product passport will be made available in the language or languages that the member state where the product is placed on the market requires. For the Dutch market, this means in practice Dutch, and for the Belgian market, Dutch, French and German are added, depending on the regional language regime. If a manufacturer or importer sells in multiple EU countries, the passport will be available in multiple language versions — one for each market where the product is offered. This is laid down as a general principle in the ESPR, Article 10, which sets out the requirements for the digital product passport.

Which furniture is covered and what still needs to be determined

This language rule applies in principle to each product for which the digital product passport becomes mandatory, including furniture once a delegated act comes into force for it. The precise, product-specific implementation — which data fields are mandatory, and whether a specific language provision applies that deviates from the general principle — will only follow from that delegated act for furniture itself. The ESPR, Articles 5 to 7, provides the framework within which such an act is drawn up, but the furniture-specific text does not yet exist. What therefore remains uncertain: whether an exception or addition to the general language rule will apply for furniture, and which data exactly must be translated versus which remain language-neutral as code, number or pictogram. What is already reasonably foreseeable based on the general system: part of the content of a product passport — brand name, article number, technical coding — is by definition not language-dependent, while descriptive information (material composition, maintenance instructions, processing instructions) is indeed provided in the language of the market.

No fixed date yet, but an established framework

There is no definitive date yet on which the digital product passport for furniture becomes mandatory; the ESPR work plan 2025-2030 mentions a delegated act for furniture as expected around 2028, but this is a projection and not an established obligation. Once the delegated act for furniture has been published, the actual date will be posted here. Until then, the general framework of the ESPR is already fixed, including the principle that a product passport is offered in the language of the sales market. Manufacturers and importers who begin now to organise their product information do so within a framework whose main lines are known, even though the furniture-specific final date has not yet been determined.

How to implement this in practice

Anyone preparing for this begins by identifying the countries where the furniture is sold — because that determines which language versions are needed, not the language of the head office or factory. Next, it is useful to distinguish between data that must be translated (material descriptions, maintenance advice, warranty terms) and data that remains language-neutral (article codes, dimensions in figures, GS1 identification codes). For the latter, it is helpful to know how each product receives a unique, language-independent code — see how each product receives a unique identification code — because that code forms the fixed core of the passport, regardless of which language version the buyer opens. After that, it is practical to determine how the different language versions are technically offered: as a separate document per language, or as one passport with language selection when scanning the QR code. Anyone already managing product data in an ERP or inventory system can already check how multilingual fields are recorded in it — this connects to the question of whether the product passport can be linked to your own ERP or inventory system. For sales via a platform or webshop, it is moreover relevant that the provider of an online marketplace has its own role in making product information visible to the consumer, regulated in the ESPR, Article 35 — which means that the language choice is not only a matter for the manufacturer, but also for the party offering the product online. Distributors and traders furthermore have their own obligation to verify that the passport is present and accessible before a product is sold, as described in the ESPR, Articles 30 and 31 — which indirectly also relates to the question of whether the offered language version is suited to the market in which the product is sold.

Based on: Article 10 and Articles 5-7 of the ESPR

The language rule for the digital product passport follows from Article 10 of the ESPR, Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, which sets out the general requirements for the passport, including the languages in which it must be available. The product-specific implementation for furniture — including any particularities concerning language — follows from a delegated act to be drawn up within the framework of Articles 5 to 7 of the same regulation. That delegated act does not yet exist for furniture; once it is published, that will be the source for the furniture-specific details.

Businesses already selling furniture in multiple EU Member States would be well advised to inventory the product information per language version and separate it from language-neutral data such as identification codes and technical encodings, so that the furnipas.eu platform can process that information directly into the passport once the furniture-specific rules are published.