What is a delegated act and why does it determine what I must do?

What you concretely have to do

What is expected of you

The ESPR itself (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) does not impose a product passport on furniture. The regulation is a framework law: it governs how the European Commission may establish specific requirements per product group, but it does not fill in those requirements itself. This happens in a separate document, the delegated act. For furniture, this act does not yet exist. What is thus "expected of you" at present is mainly: understanding how this process works, so that action is neither taken too early nor too late.

Knowing that the ESPR is a framework law, not a set of requirements

Article 4 of the ESPR gives the Commission the authority to adopt delegated acts per product group. For a company of 10 to 100 employees, this practically means that reading the ESPR text itself does not answer the question of which data must go into a passport later, how long data must be retained, or what the exact scope is. Those answers come only with the delegated act for furniture. Anyone now looking for concrete requirements in the ESPR text itself is looking in the wrong place.

Knowing what such an act will contain

Article 8 of the ESPR describes which subjects a delegated act must regulate: among other things, the product parameters for which requirements are set, the information that must go into the product passport, and who may access which data. For a company, this is mainly useful as a reading guide: it gives a picture of the structure that will come, without the content for furniture yet being established. This way it is already clear that questions about what data will be included in the product passport for furniture and about who is allowed to view which data from the product passport will be answered in the act itself, and not in the ESPR as such.

Knowing how planning and prioritisation works

Article 18 of the ESPR regulates how the Commission determines which product groups are addressed when. Furniture is on the list, but the delegated act for furniture has not yet been published. For business operations, this means that a concrete obligation date does not yet exist. Anyone who now wants to set an internal deadline is well advised to link it to publication of the act, not to speculation. More on this is found at when the product passport becomes mandatory for furniture.

Where things go wrong in practice

A first situation: a company reads the ESPR text, finds no concrete requirements for furniture, and concludes that there is therefore nothing to do yet. This is correct for direct obligations, but not for preparation — data structuring and internal responsibilities take time, and that time will no longer be available once the act has been published.

A second situation: a buyer or project manager assumes that the requirements for furniture will be comparable to another product group for which a delegated act already exists, and begins to act accordingly. However, each delegated act is drawn up separately per product group, with its own parameters and its own information requirements. What has been established for, say, textiles or electronics says nothing definite about what will come for furniture.

A third situation: a company confuses the ESPR regulation with the delegated act in communication to customers, and states that it "complies with the ESPR requirements for furniture". As long as there is no delegated act for furniture, those requirements do not yet exist, and that statement cannot be substantiated.

A fourth situation: there is a delay in setting up product data because "the date is not set anyway". This is factually correct, but the risk is that the period between publication of the act and the moment of obligation turns out to be too short to get all product data in order, especially with a broad assortment or many variants. See also the question which products from the furniture industry fall under the ESPR — not every item in an assortment needs to be subject to the same rules.

A fifth situation: a company assumes that small scale automatically means exemption, without checking this against what will come to be stated in the final act. That question will be addressed at or whether the product passport also applies to small businesses, but a definitive answer there too depends on the text still to be published.

What you can put in order now

• An internal note on the distinction between the ESPR as framework legislation and the delegated act as an implementing document, so that these two are not confused in communication with customers or supervisory authorities.
• An overview of the company's own product range, with an indication of which products might potentially fall under a future delegated act for furniture — to be linked to the question whether the digital product passport applies to the company's own furniture.
• A list of product data that are now already available (material, origin, composition) versus data that would still need to be collected, so that publication of the delegated act does not start from scratch.
• An agreement on who within the company monitors the publication of the delegated act for furniture, and how that person signals this to the rest of the organisation.
• A template for internal communication making clear that "preparing for the product passport" is something different from "complying with the product passport" — relevant for those already receiving questions from customers or project planners.