eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, amends Regulation (EU) 910/2014 and significantly changes how identity is verified in the education sector by introducing standardised, cross-border digital identity tools that replace fragmented, paper-based processes. The regulation requires EU Member States to provide every citizen, resident, and business with a European Digital Identity Wallet by 24 December 2026, which includes the ability to store and share educational credentials digitally. This article walks through the key questions educational institutions and their stakeholders are asking right now.
What does eIDAS 2.0 change about how identity is verified in education?
eIDAS 2.0 shifts identity verification in education from a patchwork of national systems and paper documents to a unified, interoperable digital framework. Under the updated regulation, electronic identification schemes must be mutually recognised across all EU Member States, and the new European Digital Identity Wallet gives individuals a single, secure way to prove who they are in any digital context, including education.
Under the original eIDAS framework, there was no obligation for every country to build a national eID or ensure it worked across borders. This created significant inconsistency. A student applying to a university in another EU country might face entirely different identity requirements than at home. eIDAS 2.0 closes that gap by making cross-border recognition mandatory and extending the framework to private sector services, including educational institutions.
For education, this means that identity checks tied to enrolment, exam registration, credential issuance, and access to student services can now be built on a legally recognised, technically standardised foundation. Institutions no longer need to rely solely on physical documents or locally developed digital systems that do not work well across borders.
How does the EUDI Wallet affect students and educational institutions?
The European Digital Identity Wallet gives students a secure, user-controlled app to store and share their identity data and educational credentials. For educational institutions, it provides a trusted, standardised channel to verify student identities and issue digital qualifications that are recognised across the EU.
From a student perspective, the EUDI Wallet is designed to make everyday interactions simpler and more private. Students can store their academic credentials, such as diplomas, degrees, and certificates, directly in the wallet and share only the specific information a service requires. This selective disclosure means that applying for a job or enrolling in further education no longer requires gathering physical documents from multiple sources. A verified digital credential in the wallet is enough.
For institutions, the wallet creates an opportunity to modernise processes that have historically relied on manual verification. Admissions teams, student services, and examination bodies can connect to a trusted digital infrastructure. The DC4EU large-scale pilot, which ran from April 2023 to 2025, tested exactly this kind of use case, exploring how the wallet can support educational certification and cross-border access to services.
Governance of the EUDI Wallet ecosystem is a shared responsibility. The European Commission manages the legal framework and adopts implementing acts that contain legally binding requirements. EU Member States are responsible for providing or mandating wallet solutions, certifying and notifying them, and supervising actors within their jurisdiction. The European Digital Identity Cooperation Group supports cross-border alignment and cooperation between Member States. National competent authorities, wallet providers, issuers of Person Identification Data and attestations, qualified trust service providers, and relying parties each carry distinct roles within this structure. No single central European authority operationally manages all EUDI Wallets.
Privacy is a core design principle. Students control what data is shared and with whom. Information that is not necessary for a specific interaction is not disclosed, which reduces the risk of unnecessary data exposure and aligns with GDPR requirements.
What are verifiable credentials and how are they used in education?
Verifiable credentials are digital documents that contain cryptographically secured claims about a person, issued by a trusted authority and independently verifiable by anyone who receives them. In education, they are used to represent qualifications such as degrees, diplomas, certificates, and course completions in a tamper-evident, machine-readable format.
Traditional academic credentials rely on paper certificates or PDF documents that are easy to forge and difficult to verify quickly. Verifiable credentials solve this by binding the credential to a cryptographic proof. When a graduate shares a verifiable degree certificate with an employer or another institution, the recipient can confirm that it was issued by the stated institution and has not been altered. Verification involves checking the issuer’s signature against the relevant national trusted list, which feeds into the EU List of Trusted Lists (LOTL), checking the revocation status through the issuer’s status information, and confirming that the presenting wallet runs on a certified wallet solution by checking the wallet unit attestation. Only the first of these checks can be performed fully offline.
Within the eIDAS 2.0 framework and the EUDI Wallet ecosystem, verifiable credentials become part of a legally recognised infrastructure. Educational institutions that issue credentials in this format are participating in a trust chain that extends across the EU. This makes cross-border recognition of qualifications significantly more reliable and efficient. The legal consequence of a credential may still vary depending on national or sector-specific legislation in the receiving country. The EUDI Wallet framework establishes interoperability at the European level; it does not automatically override national recognition rules or sector-specific requirements.
For students, the practical benefit is clear. A digital credential stored in the EUDI Wallet can be shared and verified without requiring the receiving party to contact the issuing university directly, subject to the verification steps described above. You can learn more about how digital identity supports the science and education sector in practice.
Which educational processes are most impacted by eIDAS 2.0 compliance?
The educational processes most impacted by eIDAS 2.0 are those that involve identity verification, credential issuance, and cross-border data exchange. These include student enrolment, examination access, diploma issuance, and applications to other institutions or employers.
Here is a closer look at the key areas where change is most significant:
- Student enrolment and admission: Verifying the identity of applicants, especially international students, can now draw on eIDAS-compliant eIDs and wallet-based credentials rather than physical document checks.
- Examination and assessment access: Institutions can use trusted digital identity to confirm that the right student is sitting an exam, reducing fraud in both in-person and remote assessment contexts.
- Diploma and certificate issuance: Issuing credentials as verifiable, wallet-compatible digital documents replaces paper certificates and PDF files that are difficult to verify at scale. Institutions issuing attestations of attributes act as issuers within the EUDI Wallet trust framework, and must make revocation status available and support re-issuance when a student moves to a new device.
- Cross-border recognition of qualifications: Students moving between EU countries for work or further study can share their credentials digitally, with verification by receiving institutions or employers. The EUDI Wallet framework enables this interoperability at the European level, though the legal recognition of specific qualifications may still depend on national frameworks, including Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications, in the receiving country.
- Access to student services: Portals for grants, housing, healthcare, and library access can connect to the EUDI Wallet for seamless, privacy-respecting authentication. Each time a student uses the wallet to access a service, they approve that specific presentation individually.
Each of these processes benefits from the same underlying shift: replacing repeated, manual identity checks with a single, trusted digital identity that is accepted everywhere the relevant relying-party infrastructure is in place.
What should educational institutions do to prepare for eIDAS 2.0?
Educational institutions should start by assessing which of their current processes rely on identity verification or credential exchange, and then map those against the requirements and opportunities introduced by eIDAS 2.0. Early preparation avoids last-minute compliance pressure and positions institutions to benefit from the efficiency gains the regulation enables.
A practical preparation approach looks like this:
- Audit existing identity and credential processes: Identify where identity is currently verified, how credentials are issued, and where paper or legacy digital systems are still in use.
- Understand the regulatory timeline: Know when your institution needs to be compliant and what specific obligations apply to your role as either a relying party (accepting credentials) or an issuer (issuing credentials). Deadlines differ depending on whether your institution operates as a public body or a regulated private-sector party. Under CIR (EU) 2025/848, adopted on 6 May 2025, relying parties must register with the national authority of their Member State of establishment before requesting wallet data, and must specify per intended use which attributes and attestations they will request.
- Engage with the EUDI Wallet ecosystem: Monitor the implementing acts adopted by the European Commission, which contain the legally binding requirements, and consult the Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF) as the technical elaboration of those requirements. The DC4EU pilot, which concluded in 2025, addressed education and social security use cases and fed into the final specifications now being rolled out across the EU.
- Evaluate your technical infrastructure: Assess whether your current systems can integrate with wallet-compatible identity verification and verifiable credential standards, including the mdoc and SD-JWT VC formats supported by the ARF, or whether investment in new infrastructure is needed.
- Involve the right stakeholders: Compliance, IT, student services, and governance teams all have a role to play. Digital identity affects policy, privacy, and the student experience.
Institutions that take a structured approach now will be better positioned to offer students a modern, trusted digital experience while meeting their regulatory obligations. Exploring identity solutions built for regulated sectors can help institutions understand what implementation looks like in practice.
When do educational institutions need to comply with eIDAS 2.0?
EU Member States are legally required to make the European Digital Identity Wallet available to all citizens, residents, and businesses by 24 December 2026. This is the legal deadline for Member States’ wallet issuance and public-sector acceptance obligations; it does not guarantee that every national wallet will have reached the same level of maturity or that every possible cross-border use case will be fully operational throughout Europe on that date. Practical interoperability and national rollout are expected to develop in phases, reflecting differences in certification, notification, and relying-party registration across Member States.
From 24 December 2026, public bodies and public service providers must accept notified wallets as a means of identification for online services requiring electronic identification. For educational institutions operating as regulated private-sector parties, education is explicitly listed among the sectors covered, and the obligation to accept the EUDI Wallet under Article 5f applies from 24 December 2027, in contexts where strong user authentication is legally or contractually required. This deadline falls twelve months after the wallet issuance and public-sector acceptance deadline, and thirty-six months after the relevant implementing acts entered into force in late 2024. Micro and small enterprises, defined as organisations with fewer than 50 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding ten million euros, are exempt from this obligation.
The regulation itself entered into force on 20 May 2024, and Member States have been working through implementation milestones since then. The first implementing acts, covering technical specifications, security standards, and interoperability rules for the EUDI Wallet, were adopted by the end of 2024. A second wave of technical implementing acts was published in 2025, addressing areas including qualified electronic archiving, validation, certificates, and qualified trust service providers. CIR (EU) 2025/848, adopted on 6 May 2025, established the registration requirements for relying parties. The DC4EU large-scale pilot, which ran from April 2023 to 2025, tested the wallet across education and social security use cases and fed into the final specifications now being rolled out.
In practical terms, educational institutions should not wait for a single European go-live moment before acting. Legal deadlines are not predictions of actual market rollout. The period leading up to 24 December 2026 is also the point at which wallets begin to become available in practice across Member States, giving institutions the opportunity to test acceptance and integration before their own compliance deadline arrives in December 2027. The organisations that are already preparing their infrastructure, reviewing their credential issuance processes, and engaging with digital identity standards will be ready as the wallet ecosystem reaches broader deployment. Those that delay risk both compliance gaps and a competitive disadvantage as students and employers increasingly expect digital-first credential handling.
For institutions operating across multiple EU countries, or those that regularly interact with students from other Member States, the urgency is even greater. Cross-border interoperability is one of the central design goals of eIDAS 2.0. A certified wallet from one Member State is designed to be usable with an appropriate relying party in another Member State, but national registration requirements under CIR (EU) 2025/848 still apply, and sector-specific legislation is not overridden. Relying parties must register in the Member State where they are established and specify the attributes and attestations they intend to request. Institutions best placed to benefit are those that have already built compatible systems and understand both the European-level interoperability rules and the national requirements that apply in each country where they operate. Understanding how a structured approach to digital identity can support this transition is a useful starting point.
How TrustTech helps educational institutions prepare for eIDAS 2.0
Preparing for eIDAS 2.0 in the education sector means rethinking how your institution verifies identity, issues credentials, and enables students to manage their own data securely across borders. That is where the ID Connector from TrustTech comes in.
The ID Connector is an integration that lets relying parties accept every certified European wallet, whatever Member State issued it, for identification, login and qualified signing. EUDI Wallet acceptance comes first; the same interface also carries other IDs, such as national eIDs, bank IDs and identity documents, inside and outside the EU.
Concretely, the ID Connector helps educational institutions:
- Verify student identities during enrolment and access to services using wallet-compatible and eIDAS-compliant methods, with verification against national trusted lists and revocation status checks built in
- Accept verifiable credentials for diplomas, certificates, and qualifications that students store in the EUDI Wallet and share with employers or other institutions
- Manage trust by validating wallet unit attestations to confirm that a presenting wallet runs on a certified wallet solution
- Enforce registered attribute scope, so that only the attributes and attestations specified in the institution’s relying-party registration are requested
- Reduce repeated identity checks by enabling reusable, trusted identity across your institution and beyond
- Integrate digital identity into existing workflows without rebuilding your entire infrastructure
The same integration is available to organisations in financial services, healthcare, pharma, and government. Whether you are starting to explore what eIDAS 2.0 means for your institution or are ready to move into implementation, the ID Connector provides the technical foundation to make it practical. You can find relevant resources and insights to support your organisation’s digital identity strategy. Get in touch with TrustTech to discuss how your institution can prepare for the future of digital identity in education.