Battery passports around the world: EU, China, US, UK and beyond

On 1 April 2026, China switched on a mandatory national traceability platform that assigns every EV battery a digital identity and follows it from production to dismantling. Less than a year later, on 18 February 2027, the EU's Digital Battery Passport under Regulation 2023/1542 becomes a condition of market access. The world's two largest battery markets are converging on the same instrument, a per-unit digital record that travels with the battery through its life, and they are not alone. For a company selling into several markets, the question is no longer whether to build a battery passport but how many, and the right answer is one.

Why is the EU battery passport the reference model?

Regulation 2023/1542 entered into force on 17 August 2023 and has applied since 18 February 2024, directly in every member state with no national transposition. From 18 February 2027, every EV battery, LMT battery and industrial battery above 2 kWh placed on the EU market needs a passport: a per-unit record behind a QR code and unique identifier, with the importer carrying the obligation for non-EU manufacturers.

What makes the EU scheme the reference is its data depth. Annex XIII lists more than 90 mandatory attributes covering identity, chemistry and composition, recycled-content shares, carbon footprint, performance and durability, state of health and usage data, and dismantling and safety information. Access is tiered between the public, persons with a legitimate interest such as recyclers and second-life operators, and market-surveillance authorities. Several obligations are already live: the carbon-footprint declaration for EV batteries has been mandatory since 18 February 2025. No other scheme currently demands a richer record, which makes Annex XIII the practical superset to design against.

What is China's battery traceability platform?

China has run battery traceability longer than anyone. A national coding standard and a government traceability system for new-energy-vehicle batteries have existed since 2018, requiring producers and recyclers to report battery movements. What changed in 2026 is the binding force. On 16 January 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and five other ministries published Interim Measures on the recycling and utilisation of retired NEV power batteries, effective 1 April 2026, alongside the launch of an upgraded national traceability platform.

The platform gives each battery a unique digital identity and requires manufacturers, users and recyclers to upload data across production, sale, maintenance, replacement, dismantling and reuse. The motivation is the same end-of-life wave Europe is preparing for: Chinese regulators cite projections of more than 1 million tonnes of retired power batteries per year by 2030. The architecture differs from the EU's, a state-run platform that operators report into rather than passports that economic operators publish, but the data being demanded, identity, lifecycle events and end-of-life routing, overlaps heavily.

Where do the US and UK stand?

The United States has no federal battery passport mandate, but traceability obligations have arrived through tax law instead of product law. The Section 30D clean-vehicle credit excludes batteries with content from foreign entities of concern, applied to battery components since 2024 and to critical minerals since 2025, which forces automakers to document the origin of materials deep in the supply chain. A transition exemption for hard-to-trace materials such as anode graphite runs out at the end of 2026. At state level, California's SB 615, which would have added traceability and reuse obligations for traction batteries, passed the Senate but failed in the Assembly in September 2025; similar proposals are expected to return. The practical effect: US-market batteries already need chain-of-custody data, whatever the paperwork is called.

The UK still operates under battery regulations from 2008 and 2009, written before lithium chemistries dominated. DEFRA is expected to consult during 2026 on a reformed framework covering producer obligations, higher collection targets, supply-chain due diligence and battery passports. The direction of travel points to broad alignment with the EU model on a later timeline, which for exporters means the same data, requested twice.

What are South Korea, Japan and the Global Battery Alliance doing?

South Korea moved early on identity. Revisions to the Automobile Management Act, in force since February 2025, require every EV battery to carry a unique identifier registered in a national tracking system, undergo government-led safety certification, and disclose key characteristics such as capacity and composition. A fuller digital-passport scheme is under discussion, but the identifier spine is already law.

Japan has no mandate yet and is building infrastructure instead. The METI-backed Ouranos Ecosystem is an industrial data space whose first battery use case is exchanging carbon-footprint and due-diligence data across supply chains, explicitly aimed at EU Battery Regulation compliance. In April 2025, NTT DATA demonstrated interoperability between Japan's battery traceability platform and Catena-X, the European automotive data space, so that Japanese suppliers can feed EU passports from their domestic systems.

Above the national schemes sits the Global Battery Alliance, an industry initiative rather than a regulator. After a proof of concept in 2023 and two pilot waves in 2024, the GBA launched operational trials on 8 December 2025 with 17 consortia running through the first half of 2026, testing its rulebooks for greenhouse-gas accounting and sustainability benchmarks on real supply chains. Its goal is a certification and scoring layer that works across jurisdictions, another reader of the same underlying record.

How should exporters build for five overlapping schemes?

The schemes differ in legal form: EU product law, Chinese platform reporting, US tax-credit documentation, Korean vehicle-safety law, a UK consultation, a GBA scoring overlay. They converge on the data. Every one of them needs a unique identifier, composition and chemistry, material provenance, carbon footprint, lifecycle events and end-of-life routing. Building a separate compliance silo per market means collecting the same facts several times, reconciling them forever, and watching them drift apart.

The alternative is one canonical per-unit record, mapped outward:

• One identifier spine. Assign each battery a single internal identity and link every market-facing identifier to it: the EU passport's unique identifier, China's platform ID, Korea's registered battery ID.
• Collect once at the strictest depth. Annex XIII is today's superset; a record structured to it already contains what China's platform, Section 30D documentation and Korea's disclosure rules ask for.
• Treat each scheme as an output format. The EU passport is a publication, the Chinese platform a submission, the US credit file a query against chain of custody. Formats change; the foundation should not.
• Keep lifecycle events flowing. The EU requires state of health kept updatable through life and China's platform tracks maintenance, replacement and dismantling. A record written once at the factory satisfies neither.

The mapping work is real, but it is translation, not re-collection. Companies that did the same exercise for chemical regulations learned the lesson a decade ago: the cost lives in the data, not the forms.

Conclusion: one record, many readers

The battery passport is not an EU eccentricity. It is the shape that battery regulation is taking on three continents at once, under different names and legal instruments but with a shared core: a per-unit record of identity, materials, carbon and condition, kept alive through the battery's life. Exporters who build that record once, at the deepest required grain, will spend 2027 mapping fields while their competitors are still chasing data.

Passoria's passport engine structures the full Annex XIII record to the EU taxonomy and speaks Catena-X, so one data foundation can serve every scheme that reads it. If you place batteries on more than one market, our pilot program is open to a limited number of manufacturers, resellers and recyclers.