Under the EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), every fashion and textile brand selling in the EU will need a Digital Product Passport. Choosing a provider in 2026 means reading a young, fast-moving market. This is an objective map of the main players, with detailed, factual comparisons.
Regulation and infrastructure are not moving at the same speed, and that asymmetry defines what you can actually demand from a provider in 2026. The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR, EU 2024/1781) is in force, but the delegated act specific to textiles is expected in 2027, with the Digital Product Passport becoming mandatory from 2028 for garments sold in the Union. The precise requirements — which attributes, at what granularity, in what format — are not law yet.
The infrastructure, by contrast, has already arrived. On 19 July 2026 the European Union's central Digital Product Passport Registry went live, on time against its legal deadline. It is an index and a resolver: it records that a passport exists and lets you find it from an identifier. The trust layer that would establish who may declare what, and under which guarantee, remains an open consultation document.
For anyone selecting a provider, the practical consequence is this: nobody can show certified ESPR compliance for textiles today, because the text to certify against has not been published. A provider promising it is selling an expectation. What can be verified right now, without waiting, is how the system behaves when a figure does not add up.
The Registry does not verify whether the data inside a passport is correct. That is not an omission, it is a design decision. A passport declaring 40% recycled content with no supporting evidence registers exactly as smoothly as a truthful one, provided it is semantically complete. The index answers “does this passport exist?”, not “is what it says true?”.
The Commission acknowledges the point itself: its question and answer document (Q25) states that there is currently no universal requirement for third-party certification or conformity assessment of the information disclosed in a DPP. Such requirements may come later, product group by product group, through delegated acts, if the preparatory studies find them necessary.
Between the infrastructure layer, which arrived on a fixed date, and the actor-governance layer, which is still an open survey, sits a market. That is the space DPP providers operate in during 2026, and it is where the differences between them become substantive rather than cosmetic.
If verifying the data is not imposed by the regulation, then verifying or not verifying is a product decision the provider makes, not an obligation everyone discharges the same way. That is why two platforms can both be technically compliant and behave in opposite ways when handed the same wrong figure.
The two families separate like this. The first collects supplier declarations, organises them and publishes them: the value lies in supply-chain coverage and in the quality of the consumer-facing experience. The second checks every declaration against the documentary evidence that should support it before issuing the passport: the value lies in what the system refuses to issue.
The difference does not show up in a demo, because in demos the numbers always add up. It shows up at audit, when a tier-two or tier-three supplier has declared more certified material than their Transaction Certificate covers, and someone needs to know whether that garment was labelled or stopped.
For anyone advising a buyer this year, one test cuts through the commercial noise: ask the provider to demonstrate, on live infrastructure rather than slides, how a declared claim is verified against evidence — and what the system reports at the moment the evidence runs out. The answer tells you the rest.
Four questions make that test concrete. What happens when the quantity covered by a Transaction Certificate is exhausted and another order arrives to be labelled? Is the block binding, or a warning an operator can dismiss? Which verifiable credential is the passport issued as, and on which public specification is it built? Is the endpoint exposing it reachable and queryable by a third party, or does it exist only inside the platform?
None of these questions requires waiting for the 2027 delegated act to be answerable. All of them are verifiable in 2026, on systems that either work this way today or do not. That is why this page compares providers on observable behaviour rather than on declarations of future compliance.
Yes. It went live on 19 July 2026, on time against its legal deadline. It is an index that records the existence of passports and allows them to be resolved: it does not verify that the data declared inside them is correct.
The ESPR delegated act for textiles is expected in 2027, with enforcement of the Digital Product Passport from 2028 for garments sold in the EU.
Not in the sense of a certification: the textile delegated act has not been published, so there is no text to certify against. What can be verified today is how the system behaves when handed a claim with no supporting evidence.
Not at present. The Commission's question and answer document (Q25) states that there is no universal requirement for third-party certification or conformity assessment of the information disclosed in a DPP. It may arrive later, product group by product group, via delegated acts.