The EUDI Wallet must be made available by 24 December 2026. That is the legally binding deadline set by eIDAS 2.0, which amends Regulation (EU) 910/2014 and requires every EU member state to provide a digital identity wallet to all citizens, residents, and businesses. While the deadline is clear, the pace of progress varies significantly across countries, and several important steps still need to happen before each national wallet is fully operational. The legal deadline does not guarantee that every national wallet will reach the same level of maturity on that date, or that every cross-border use case will be fully operational throughout Europe from that date.
This article walks through the key questions organizations are asking about the EUDI Wallet rollout, from which countries have already piloted it to what your organization should be doing right now to prepare.
Which EU countries have already piloted the EUDI Wallet?
Twenty-six EU member states participated in the first wave of large-scale pilots for the European Digital Identity Wallet, alongside Norway, Iceland, and Ukraine. These pilots ran from April 2023 to 2025 under the European Commission’s DIGITAL Europe Programme and involved more than 350 entities from both the public and private sectors.
The pilots were organized into four major consortia, each testing different use cases:
- EWC (EU Digital Identity Wallet Consortium): Focused on Digital Travel Credentials, payments, and organisational digital identity across sectors including banking, telecoms, healthcare, and government services.
- NOBID Consortium: A group of Nordic and Baltic countries, together with Italy and Germany, testing the EUDI Wallet for authorizing domestic and cross-border payments.
- POTENTIAL: Explored identity use cases across government services, opening a bank account, SIM registration, mobile driving licenses, remote qualified electronic signatures, and e-prescriptions.
- DC4EU: Focused on education and social security, testing how the wallet can be used to share diplomas, degrees, and social benefit information across borders.
Together, these pilots tested the wallet across a range of real-world scenarios, from opening a bank account and claiming prescriptions to signing contracts and accessing social security benefits. The insights gathered fed directly into the final design and technical specifications of the EUDI Wallet.
A second wave of pilots started in 2025. The WE BUILD consortium focuses on business wallets and payments. APTITUDE covers travel, ticketing, vehicle registration, and payments. Digital Travel Credentials were piloted in the first wave; wallet-based use at border or airport controls is not yet operational functionality.
What is the official deadline for EUDI Wallet availability?
The legal deadline for member states to make an EUDI Wallet available is 24 December 2026. Under eIDAS 2.0, Regulation (EU) 2024/1183, which amends Regulation (EU) 910/2014, all EU member states are legally required to issue a digital identity wallet to every citizen, resident, and business by that date. This is a binding legal obligation for all 27 member states, not a target or recommendation.
It is important to distinguish between the legal deadline and what it means in practice. The deadline requires member states to have a certified and notified wallet solution available. It does not guarantee that every national wallet will have reached the same level of maturity on that date, that all cross-border use cases will be fully operational across Europe from 24 December 2026, or that relying party acceptance will be uniform from the outset. Practical interoperability and national rollout are expected to develop in phases beyond that date.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 entered into force on 20 May 2024 and establishes a clear framework for what the wallet must do, how it must be secured, and what standards it must meet. Responsibility for this framework is shared across several actors. The European Commission manages the legal framework and adopts implementing acts, which contain the legally binding requirements. The Architecture and Reference Framework (ARF) provides the technical elaboration of those requirements and guides national wallet implementations, but it is not itself legislation. The European Digital Identity Cooperation Group (EDICG) supports cooperation and cross-border alignment among member states. Member states are responsible for providing or mandating wallet solutions, certifying and notifying them, and supervising actors within their jurisdiction.
Two acceptance deadlines apply. From 24 December 2026, public sector bodies must accept notified EUDI Wallets for online services that require electronic identification. From 24 December 2027, Article 5f of the amended regulation applies to relevant regulated private sectors where strong user authentication is legally or contractually required. Those sectors include banking and financial services, healthcare, telecoms, energy, transport, education, social security, drinking water, postal services, digital infrastructure, and digital services. Very large online platforms fall under a separate provision of Article 5f: where a platform requires user authentication, it must accept the EUDI Wallet on voluntary request from the user and for the minimum necessary data. Micro and small enterprises, defined as fewer than 50 employees and an annual turnover or balance sheet total not exceeding ten million euros, are exempt.
For organizations planning around the EUDI Wallet, 24 December 2026 is the legal baseline to plan toward, while recognizing that national rollout maturity and cross-border interoperability will continue to develop in the period that follows.
Why are some EU countries further ahead than others?
Some EU countries are further ahead in their EUDI Wallet development because they already had mature national digital identity infrastructure in place before eIDAS 2.0 was adopted. Countries with established eID systems, strong government investment in digital services, and existing interoperability frameworks have a natural head start. It is important to distinguish between an existing national eID system and an EUDI Wallet. Having a national digital identity tool does not automatically mean a country has an operational EUDI Wallet. The two are separate, even where one may inform the other, and an existing system cannot be treated as an EUDI Wallet until it has been certified and notified under the eIDAS 2.0 framework.
Several factors explain the variation in progress across member states:
- Existing digital identity maturity: Countries like Denmark, with its MitID system, or Austria, with its ID Austria digital identity infrastructure, have built high-assurance digital identity tools that can inform their EUDI Wallet development. Countries starting from scratch face a steeper implementation curve. These existing systems are not the same as an EUDI Wallet and should not be treated as such until they have been certified and notified under the eIDAS 2.0 framework.
- Government prioritization and funding: National political will and dedicated budgets for digital transformation play a major role. Countries that have invested early in digital public services tend to move faster.
- Technical capacity and ecosystem readiness: Building a compliant wallet requires certified components, qualified trust service providers, and integration with existing systems. Countries with a developed ecosystem of technology providers and QTSPs can move more quickly.
- Pilot participation depth: Countries that were deeply involved in multiple large-scale pilots gained practical experience and feedback loops that accelerate their national implementations.
For organizations operating across multiple EU markets, this uneven progress means the practical availability of the EUDI Wallet will not be uniform across all member states at the legal deadline. Planning for a phased rollout reality is a sensible approach.
What needs to happen before the wallet goes live in every country?
Before the EUDI Wallet can go live in every EU country, each member state must complete a set of technical, regulatory, and operational steps. These include developing a national wallet solution that meets the requirements set out in the implementing acts, obtaining certification for that solution against the agreed standards, having the solution notified to the European Commission, and ensuring that relying parties are registered under the applicable national registration framework and ready to integrate it.
On the regulatory side, the European Commission has adopted implementing acts covering everything from the format of personal identification data to protocols for cross-border identity matching, security breach management, and the certification of wallet solutions. Each member state must align its national execution with all of these legally binding requirements. The ARF provides the technical elaboration to support that alignment. 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 they can request wallet data. Each registration covers the intended use and specifies which attributes and attestations will be requested. The wallet checks requests against this registered scope.
On the technical side, key milestones include:
- Completing and publishing the final version of the Architecture and Reference Framework
- Certifying national wallet solutions against the agreed standards
- Notifying certified wallet solutions to the European Commission
- Setting up the notification and registration systems for wallet relying parties at national level
- Establishing interoperability between national wallet solutions so that a certified wallet from one member state can be used with an appropriate relying party in another member state
- Running and concluding the large-scale pilots to validate real-world use cases
Cross-border interoperability does not make national registration requirements or sector-specific legislation disappear. Relying party registration remains connected to the applicable national registration framework, and sector-specific rules continue to apply alongside the EUDI Wallet framework.
For organizations in regulated sectors like financial services or healthcare, there are also sector-specific integration requirements to address, such as connecting wallet-based identity verification to existing onboarding flows, compliance systems, and data management processes.
How will organizations know when the EUDI Wallet is ready to use?
Organizations will know a national EUDI Wallet is ready to use when the relevant member state has certified and notified its wallet solution, and when the European Commission’s list of certified EUDI Wallets is updated to include it. The regulation requires a publicly accessible list of all certified wallet solutions, giving organizations a reliable reference point. Because rollout is national, organizations should monitor the status of each member state they operate in separately.
Beyond the official certification and notification lists, there are several practical signals to monitor:
- National government announcements: Each member state will communicate the launch of its wallet through official digital identity or government portals.
- The European Commission’s EUDI Wallet website: This is the central hub for updates on the wallet’s development, certified solutions, and implementing acts.
- Relying party registration systems: Once a country’s wallet is live, organizations that want to accept it as a form of identity verification must register as relying parties under that member state’s national registration framework, in line with CIR (EU) 2025/848. The opening of registration processes is a strong signal that go-live is imminent. A relying party must be able to accept every relevant notified wallet, regardless of which wallet provider issued it.
- Industry and sector-specific guidance: Regulators in sectors like banking, healthcare, and government services will issue guidance on how the wallet integrates with existing compliance requirements.
Waiting for a single European go-live moment before starting preparation is not a realistic approach. National rollouts will happen at different times and with different levels of maturity. The technical and compliance work needed to accept and integrate the EUDI Wallet takes time, and organizations that start now will be significantly better positioned when the wallet becomes available in their market.
How the ID Connector supports EUDI Wallet acceptance
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.
In the context of the EUDI Wallet rollout, the ID Connector addresses several concrete requirements that organizations face as they prepare for 24 December 2026 and 24 December 2027:
- Accepting every notified wallet solution, regardless of the issuing member state, without building separate integrations per country
- Verifying attestations against the relevant national trusted lists, which are brought together in the EU List of Trusted Lists (LOTL)
- Checking revocation status using issuer-provided status information
- Validating wallet unit attestations to confirm that a presenting wallet runs on a certified wallet solution
- Enforcing the attribute scope registered under CIR (EU) 2025/848, so that only the attributes covered by the relying party’s registration are requested
- Supporting qualified signing via a connected QTSP, for organizations in financial services, healthcare, pharma, or government that need qualified electronic signatures in their workflows
Organizations in financial services, healthcare, pharma, and government that need to be ready for the public sector deadline of 24 December 2026 or the private sector deadline of 24 December 2027 can contact TrustTech to discuss how the ID Connector fits their integration requirements.