Battery Passport: Who Can Access Which Data?

A mandatory data point in the battery passport is not a public data point. Article 77(2) of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 splits the information into three access levels — general public, authorities and notified bodies, persons with a legitimate interest — and Annex XIII assigns every data item to one of them. Of the 46 mandatory data points for an electric vehicle battery on 18 February 2027, 31 are public and 15 are access-restricted. The implementing act that was due to name the holders of legitimate interest by 18 August 2026 has not been adopted.

What does Article 77(2) actually say?

The text creates three categories of information inside a single passport:

• •information accessible to the general public, in accordance with point 1 of Annex XIII;
• •information accessible only to notified bodies, market surveillance authorities and the Commission, in accordance with points 2 and 3 of Annex XIII;
• •information accessible to any natural or legal person with a legitimate interest in accessing and processing it, in accordance with points 2 and 4 of Annex XIII.

The practical consequence is structural: the battery passport is not a public web page, it is a record with differentiated read access. One QR code serves several views.

Who sees what, point by point?

Cross-referencing Annex XIII with the 71 data points of the Commission guidance of 15 August 2026 makes the split readable.

Applied to the core genuinely due on 18 February 2027:

In other words: between a quarter and a third of the mandatory battery passport data is not meant for the public. Designing the passport as a public product sheet is a category error — and, for points 45 to 50, publishes industrial property with no obligation to do so.

What is a "person with a legitimate interest"?

The Regulation gives no list. It sets out purposes, in the third subparagraph of Article 77(2):

• •dismantling of the battery, including the safety measures to be taken during dismantling, and the detailed composition of the battery model, where this is essential to allow repairers, remanufacturers, second-life operators and recyclers to conduct their respective economic activities;
• •for individual batteries, what is essential to the purchaser or parties acting on the purchaser's behalf in order to make the battery available to independent energy aggregators or energy market participants.

Article 77(9) then sets three criteria the Commission must apply when naming those persons: the necessity of the information to evaluate the status and residual value of the battery and its capability for further use; the necessity for preparation for re-use, repurposing, remanufacturing or recycling; and the requirement to limit access to commercially sensitive information to the minimum necessary.

The missing implementing act of 18 August 2026

Article 77(9) gave the Commission until 18 August 2026 to adopt the implementing acts naming those persons and bounding what they may download, share, publish and re-use.

That deadline passed without adoption. The Commission's timetable now places the act in Q4 2026. The passport deadline has not moved: it remains 18 February 2027.

The gap creates an uncomfortable asymmetry — the obligation to publish has a date, the rule saying who to publish to no longer does. Two operational consequences:

1. 01.Do not wait for the act to start building. The three levels of Article 77(2) have been in the Regulation since 2023 and will not change. What the implementing act will specify is the list of roles eligible for the third level — not the existence of the levels.
2. 02.Treat role membership as a parameter, not as code. An infrastructure that hardcodes "recycler = access X" will need reworking in 2027. An infrastructure that manages roles and access policies will absorb the implementing act through configuration.

What the technical design must guarantee

Article 78 adds essential requirements that bear directly on architecture:

• •access is free of charge for consumers, economic operators and other relevant actors, based on their respective access rights — Article 78(b);
• •the rights to access, introduce, modify or update information are restricted based on Annex XIII and the implementing act — Article 78(f);
• •a provider acting on behalf of the economic operator may not sell, re-use or process that data beyond what is necessary for the service provided — Article 78(d);
• •the passport must remain available after the responsible economic operator ceases to exist or ceases its activity in the Union — Article 78(e).

That last point is worth reading twice: it effectively forbids a battery passport from disappearing along with its software vendor's contract.

In short

The battery passport is a record with three reading levels, defined in Article 77(2) and assigned data point by data point in Annex XIII. The public core is roughly two thirds of the mandatory points; detailed composition, dismantling and dynamic state-of-health data are reserved for legitimate interest and authorities; test reports never leave the circle of notified bodies and authorities. The implementing act naming the holders of legitimate interest is late, while the 18 February 2027 deadline stands.

Arianee enforces these access levels natively, by managing roles and policies rather than a fixed display. See our Battery Pass page, our 5-level DPP access model, or request a demo.

Sources: Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, Articles 77 and 78 and Annex XIII (EUR-Lex) · Guidance Document: Digital Batteries Passport – data points by category, v2.0, 15 August 2026 (European Commission) · Digital Product Passport — Batteries, European Commission.