According to the regulation, the digital product passport for furniture must remain accessible for ten years via the QR code on the product. If the link goes offline in the interim, for example because a hosting party ceases operations, a website moves without a redirect, or a company ceases to exist, then that availability obligation is not met. What that concretely means depends on the situation and on the supervisory authority examining it, but the core is: the obligation does not end at the moment of sale.
That is a different kind of risk than failing to create a passport in time. With creation, it is a one-off action before the sale. With availability, it is an obligation that runs for ten years, even if the company has since been taken over, ceased operations, or switched software providers. Precisely because this is a long-running obligation, it is often underestimated in practice.
Why the retention period carries its own risk
A product passport that must continue to exist years after sale is technically and organizationally different from a passport that you create once. Domain names expire, contracts with hosting parties end, employees who managed the QR codes leave. None of that needs to happen intentionally; it often happens precisely because nobody is explicitly responsible for those ten years anymore. The regulation makes no distinction there: the user of the furniture must be able to access the information, regardless of whether the company is still actively involved with it or not.
Anyone wishing to examine how this applies to their own situation can calmly work through the structure of the obligation in the knowledge base with explanation per subject. It also indicates where in the official text this retention obligation can be found.
What changes if a company ceases operations or is taken over
A common situation is that a company stops selling a particular furniture line, goes bankrupt, or is taken over by another company. The regulation provides that the information must remain available, but who is responsible for that at that point in time can become a legal question separate from day-to-day business operations. That is precisely why it is wise to think about what happens if the company itself no longer exists at the start of a passport process, rather than only when that scenario actually occurs.
Here too lies the difference between hosting yourself and outsourcing it to a party specifically set up for a ten-year term. An internal server, a standalone WordPress plugin, or a domain name in the name of one employee are more vulnerable to interruption than a service structurally designed for that purpose. Furnipas.eu is built with that in mind; how that hosting works exactly and where the data comes from is explained on the page how the passport is created and continues to exist.
What supervision examines in general terms
The regulation assigns supervision and enforcement to the competent authorities in the EU Member States. They can, in general terms, check whether a product on the market is provided with a working passport, even years after the sale. What a concrete inspection entails, how strictly it is carried out, and what consequences an interruption has in practice cannot be predicted in this article and depends on the supervisory authority in the country concerned. For an assessment of one's own situation, the competent supervisory authority or a lawyer is the appropriate party.
How this relates to the rest of the passport
The ten-year availability is not separate from the other components of the product passport. A correctly completed product passport that can no longer be consulted provides little value to the end-user, and that is precisely what the regulation wants to address: information that exists but is not accessible does not count as available. This makes the choice of a hosting provider, and the agreements about it in a contract, just as important as correctly filling in the data itself.
If you want to see what this looks like for your own company, and whether the retention period has already been taken into account in existing plans, you can have the situation run through in a few questions via the product scan with a preliminary indication. For general questions about what is available free of charge and what falls under a subscription, an overview is available on the page frequently asked questions about the furniture passport.
Do you want to check how the ten-year availability is arranged for your products, or still needs to be arranged? Run through the free quick-scan or read through the topics in the knowledge base before you make a choice for a hosting provider.