In brief
- Every construction product gets a level of control, written down in advance. A table of 246 rows shows, for each product category, how far an independent body goes into the checking: from certification with factory inspections and audit testing of samples, down to a declaration the manufacturer makes on his own. 186 rows call for an independent body, 60 leave the manufacturer to declare on his own responsibility.
- Nothing falls due on 17 September 2026. The regulation enters into force then and applies directly, with no Romanian law to transpose it, but the table starts working for a product family only after the European Commission makes the European standard of that family mandatory, plus a further year. Until then, the standards of the old regime stay in place.
- One new check appears for absolutely every product: environmental sustainability. It gets system 3+, which did not exist under the old regime and which requires an independent body to validate the manufacturer’s environmental calculation. It applies to all families and categories, without exception.
Published: Official Journal of the European Union, L series, 2026/1310 of 28 August 2026
In force from: 17 September 2026, the twentieth day after publication, under Article 4
The European Commission has laid down, category by category, how strictly the performance a manufacturer writes on a construction product is to be checked. Delegated Regulation (EU) 2026/1310, published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 28 August 2026, enters into force on 17 September 2026 and applies directly in every member state, with no Romanian law to transpose it. For a ceramic block factory in Cluj, for a joinery manufacturer in Arad or for an importer of external insulation systems, the act answers a single question, but the most expensive one: who confirms that the product really has the performance declared, the manufacturer on his own or an independent body that walks into his factory. In Romania these checks are carried out by notified laboratories and bodies, such as the URBAN-INCERC laboratory, redesignated in August 2026.
An assessment and verification system is, in plain words, the recipe that says who does what before the product reaches the market. At one end stands system 1+, in which a notified body, that is a laboratory or a certification company officially recognised by a member state and listed by the European Commission, inspects the factory, continuously supervises the internal production control and also buys samples on the market that it subjects to audit testing. At the other end stands system 4, in which the manufacturer does the testing himself, runs the control in the factory himself and takes sole responsibility for what he declares. Between them lie systems 1, 2+, 3 and 3+, each with a different division of labour.
The declaration of performance and conformity is the document through which the manufacturer says, in numbers, what his product can do: how long it resists fire, how much compression it takes, how well it insulates. It is compulsory for CE marking. The assessment and verification system does not change the product’s performance, only the weight of the signature underneath it. That is why the row in the table covering a particular product means, for the manufacturer, cost and time before sale, and for the buyer it means how far he can rely on the figure on the label.
A delegated regulation is an act the European Commission writes on its own, but only where the European Parliament and the Council have allowed it to. The empowerment here comes from Article 10(2) of Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, the new European construction products regulation, which replaced Regulation (EU) No 305/2011. The text of that article requires the system to be established „for each product family or product category” and, more importantly, „before harmonised technical specifications or European assessment documents become applicable”. In other words, the level of control is fixed ahead of the standards, not alongside them.
That explains why the act appears now and why it looks like a table rather than a narrative. Article 5(3) of Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 allows the Commission to ask the European standardisation organisations for the technical detail needed to implement the assessment and verification system established by the delegated act. The standards could not be commissioned until it was known which system applies. The regulation of 28 August 2026 is the piece that unblocks the standardisation requests, and the whole calendar of the new regime hangs on them.
What it changes in practice
The act has four articles, six recitals and three annexes, over 29 pages of the Official Journal of the European Union. Almost all the content sits in the annexes, and the three are read in order of priority, not at will. Annex I beats annexes II and III, under Article 1(2). Annex II beats annex III, under Article 2(2). For everything else, annex III remains.
Annex I has one row and one idea. Where a separate delegated act establishes that a product is deemed to achieve a level or class of performance without testing or without further testing, the verification drops to system 4, that is to the manufacturer’s own declaration, whatever system would otherwise apply. This is the rule the text calls „deemed-to-satisfy”: if the nature of the product makes testing pointless, nobody pays a body to establish what is known in advance.
Annex II has ten rows and catches the characteristics that do not belong to a particular product but run through all of them. Reaction to fire gets systems 1+, 1, 3 or 4, depending on the reaction to fire class and on the nature of the production process. External fire performance of roofs and facades gets system 3. Release of dangerous substances into soil and ground water gets system 2+, emissions into indoor air get system 3, the content of dangerous substances gets 2+, and environmental sustainability gets system 3+. The last two rows, the content of dangerous substances and environmental sustainability, apply to all families, all categories and all intended uses, that is to any construction product whatsoever.
Annex III is the body of the act: 246 rows, seven columns, from row 1 to row 246 without a break, for 185 product categories in 35 families. Each row ties a product family, a category, the intended uses and the characteristics covered to a single verification system. The split, counted row by row, looks like this:
- System 3, 71 rows. The testing is done by a notified laboratory, and a notified body issues on that basis the certificate of performance and conformity of the product. The day to day control in the factory stays with the manufacturer, and nobody from outside sets foot in the factory.
- System 2+, 61 rows. The notified body does not look at the product but at the factory: initial inspection and continuous surveillance of the production control, with a certificate for the factory production control.
- System 4, 60 rows. The manufacturer does everything and declares on his own responsibility. The notified body has no task at all.
- System 1, 45 rows. The notified body certifies the product, inspects the factory and supervises the production control, but does not buy samples on the market.
- System 1+, 9 rows. Everything in system 1, plus audit testing on samples taken before the product is placed on the market.
Added up, 186 of the 246 rows, that is 75.6%, call for a notified body to step in in one form or another, and 60 rows, that is 24.4%, rule it out entirely. A certificate issued by a notified body, on the product or on the factory, appears in 115 rows, that is in 46.8% of the table. The two heaviest systems, 1 and 1+, together account for 54 rows, a little under 22% of the total.
The nine rows under system 1+, the peak of severity in the whole act, are easy to remember, because they describe exactly the things that cannot be put right after pouring or after installation: cement, for the characteristics not related to its constituents; post-tensioning kits and steel for prestressing concrete; reinforcing steel and non-steel reinforcing products; pozzolanic or latent hydraulic additions for concrete; anchor devices that stop a fall from height; rock and soil anchoring kits; and electric cables, for fire performance.
For the reader in Romania, the families that come up most often look like this:
- Precast concrete products. Two rows that split the world cleanly: structural use, system 2+; non-structural or light structural use, system 4. A kerbstone and a bridge beam sit at opposite ends of the same family.
- Doors, windows, shutters, gates and building hardware. Twelve rows, and the line that divides them is fire. Hardware for fire or smoke compartmentation and for escape routes falls under system 1; the same hardware, for anything else, under system 3. Windows and pedestrian doors related to fire performance, smoke performance, escape routes, bullet resistance and explosion resistance fall under system 1; unrelated to these, under system 3. Shutters and awnings drop to system 4.
- Thermal insulating products. Five rows, and the best selling product in Romania, the external thermal insulation composite system, gets system 1 for the characteristics of the kit. Thermal insulating products taken separately stay at system 3, and vibration and sound insulation also at 3.
- Masonry and related products. Seven rows. Masonry mortar for structural use, system 2+; non-structural mortar, including rendering and plastering, system 4. Masonry units are themselves split between 2+ and 4, on a criterion the act never defines, which is why we come back to it below.
- Cement, building limes and hydraulic binders. Four rows. Cement has two rows: the characteristics related to its constituents at system 2+, the rest at 1+. Building limes and road hydraulic binders, at 2+.
- Steel products for reinforcing and prestressing concrete. Seven rows, four of them at system 1+, the heaviest concentration of severity in the whole act. The ducts and sheaths that merely protect and guide the steel stay, by contrast, at system 4.
- Metal products for structures. Ten rows, nine of them at system 2+: metal elements, meshes and gabions, sections and flat products, welding consumables, wires, protective products, spring elements, profiled sheeting. The single exception rises to system 1 and concerns metal elements for suspended ceilings carrying heavy loads.
- Timber for structures and wood based panels. Nine rows between them. Glued laminated timber and fasteners for timber structures, at system 1. Solid timber, poles and fixing plates, at 2+. Panels that are not load bearing and are used non-structurally drop to system 4.
- Roof coverings, rooflights, roof windows. Sixteen rows, almost always split in two: related to fire, a stricter system; unrelated to fire, a lighter one. Roof tiles, for instance, sit at system 3 for the characteristics related to fire and at 4 for the rest. The only row that rises to 1+ is the one for anchor devices that prevent or arrest a fall of persons from height.
- Fire stopping and fire protective products. Two rows, both at system 1, with no lighter variant. Likewise, five of the six rows for fixed firefighting equipment sit at system 1.
Out of all this the logic behind the split becomes visible. What matters is not how expensive or how conspicuous the product is, but what happens if it fails and whether that can be noticed in time. Fire, structure and falls from height pull upwards. Sanitary appliances, shutters, plaster and a good part of the products that carry no load fall to system 4. The same physical product can sit in two different rows, with two different systems, depending on the use it is intended for, and the use is declared by the manufacturer.
What has changed compared with the previous situation
Under Regulation (EU) No 305/2011, the level of control was also set by acts of the European Commission, but piecemeal and over time. Article 28(2) of the old regulation gave the Commission the power to establish, by delegated act, which system applies to a product, a family or a characteristic, and paragraph (3) said that the chosen system „shall be indicated in the mandates for harmonised standards and in the harmonised technical specifications”. The practical result was a collection of decisions spread over years, each for one area of products, to which the text of the standard had to be added. To find out what applied to you, you had to know in advance where to look.
The new act changes exactly that. All families and categories sit in a single table, adopted ahead of the standards, not after them. It is a difference of method, not of severity: recital (2) says plainly that the systems of the old regime „should be taken into consideration” when establishing the new ones, precisely for continuity. Whoever needed a notified body stays, as a rule, with a notified body.
The second change is one system more. The old regime had five systems, 1+, 1, 2+, 3 and 4, all described in Annex V to Regulation (EU) No 305/2011. Annex IX to Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 adds a sixth, system 3+, for validating the environmental assessment: the manufacturer collects the data, sets the assumptions and does the modelling, and the notified body issues a validation report on the input data, on the assumptions, on the process used and on the calculation software, after an initial inspection of the production plant. The regulation of 28 August 2026 gives that system its only mission: the characteristic „environmental sustainability”, for all product families and all categories. It is the new obligation with the widest reach in the whole act, because it spares no product.
The third change is that four groups of characteristics have detached themselves from the product. Annex X to Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 lists six horizontal groups: reaction to fire, resistance to fire, external fire performance, sound absorption, release and content of dangerous substances, and environmental sustainability. Recital (5) of the new act says the horizontal approach is implemented for four of them, and annex II covers exactly those four. Resistance to fire and sound absorption therefore stay on each product row of annex III, not in a common rule.
The fourth change is one of tone. The old regulation required the Commission, in Article 28(2), to choose „the least onerous system or systems consistent with the fulfilment of all basic requirements for construction works”. Article 10(3) of Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 requires delegated acts to „minimise the burden on manufacturers, whilst ensuring a high level of protection of health and safety of persons and of the environment”. The duty to pick the cheapest of the sufficient options has become a duty to spare the manufacturer, which leaves more room for judgment.
Finally, the calendar has changed, and this is where the most important practical information sits. Regulation (EU) No 305/2011 is repealed from 8 January 2026, but a long list of its articles, together with annexes III and V, is repealed only from 8 January 2040. For fourteen years, the two regimes run in parallel. Harmonised standards published under the old regime and in force on 8 January 2026 stay valid until the Commission withdraws them. And the requirements and obligations of the new regulation apply to a product family or category, under Article 95(9) of Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, only one year after the implementing act that makes that family’s harmonised standard mandatory, unless that act sets an even later date. A manufacturer who wishes to may move across earlier, on his own initiative.
Advantages and disadvantages
What it improves
- The level of control is found in a single table, not in a separate European act for each area of products, read together with the text of the standard.
- The system is known ahead of the standard, so a manufacturer can prepare his factory and his certification budget in good time, instead of finding out when the standard’s text arrives.
- The rules are identical in every member state and apply directly, so a Romanian manufacturer does not compete with one who would have a cheaper level of verification at home for the same product.
- The split follows the risk, not the price of the product: fire, structure and falls from height pull the verification up, products that carry no load leave it down.
- Horizontal characteristics are checked in the same way whatever the product, so two different materials with the same reaction to fire class no longer end up at different levels of control.
- The deemed-to-satisfy rule in annex I cuts out a pointless expense where testing would say nothing new.
- For the buyer, the system behind a product is the measure of how far the declared figure can be trusted, and it can now be looked up publicly, without asking the manufacturer.
What remains a problem
- The act nowhere says from when it produces effects for a particular product. The real date is found only in Article 95(9) of the base regulation and in the implementing act concerning that product family.
- Environmental sustainability at system 3+ means one more notified body for absolutely every product, including those that otherwise sit at system 4 and have never had anything to do with one.
- The number of the product family is the only marker in annex III, and the family names are not in the act but in Annex VII to Regulation (EU) 2024/3110. Anyone reading only the act cannot say what family 17 or family 34 is.
- Family 36 in Annex VII, attached ladders, has no row at all in annex III, even though recital (3) states that the act applies to all product families.
- The same product can fall into two rows with different systems, depending on the intended use, and the use is declared by the manufacturer himself. Whoever declares a more modest use pays for a cheaper verification.
- The act has no transitional provision of its own and no deferred application date. The whole calendar hangs on other texts.
- The wording in the remarks column introduces substantive rules, not clarifications. Row 56 establishes, in a note, an order of priority between product families that Articles 1, 2 and 3 do not provide for.
Practical advice
- First find out the number of the family your product belongs to. The numbers are those in Annex VII to Regulation (EU) 2024/3110, and without them annex III cannot be read.
- Read the rows in the order of priority set by the act: first annex I, then annex II, only last annex III. If your product benefits from the deemed-to-satisfy provision, the verification drops to system 4 and the rest no longer matters for that characteristic.
- Check the horizontal characteristics separately. A product sitting at system 4 in annex III can reach 1+ or 1 for reaction to fire, through annex II, and for environmental sustainability it reaches 3+ in any case.
- Compare the row with the use you actually declare. The difference between structural and non-structural use moves the product from a notified body to a self declaration, and the declared use has to be backed up in the technical documentation.
- Budget for a notified body for the environmental assessment, even if you have never worked with one. Row 10 of annex II has no exception.
- Do not rush to change anything in September 2026. The requirements apply by product family, one year after the implementing act that makes the relevant standard mandatory, so watch the Official Journal of the European Union for your family, not the general calendar.
- If you are a designer or a site supervisor, ask on delivery of materials for the document matching the system: certificate of constancy of performance and conformity of the product for systems 1+ and 1, certificate of conformity of the factory production control for 2+, certificate of performance and conformity of the product for 3, validation report for 3+, and for system 4 only the manufacturer’s declaration.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to do anything by 17 September 2026?
Is a government decision or a ministerial order needed for it to apply in Romania?
What, concretely, is the difference between system 4 and system 1+?
Do costs go up for Romanian manufacturers?
Where do I find out what family 17 or family 34 means?
My product has two uses. Which system applies?
What happens to certificates obtained under the old regime?
Do the notified bodies in Romania stay valid?
As an ordinary buyer, how do I check how seriously a material was controlled?
Errors and inconsistencies in the published text
- Annex III, the whole table, against Annex VII to Regulation (EU) 2024/3110. Annex III has 246 rows and covers product families 1 to 35. Annex VII to the base regulation lists 36 families, the last being „ATTACHED LADDERS”. Family 36 appears in no row of annex III, even though Article 10(2) of Regulation (EU) 2024/3110 requires the system to be established „for each product family or product category”, and recital (3) of the act states that „this delegated act applies to all product families”. For attached ladders, only annex I and annex II remain applicable, which concern deemed-to-satisfy provisions and horizontal characteristics; for the product’s own characteristics no system is established at all. It is, incidentally, the only family that is new compared with Table 1 in Annex IV to Regulation (EU) No 305/2011, which stopped at 35.
- Annex II, row 1 against row 4. Row 1 sets system 1+ for power, control and communication cables in family 31, at reaction to fire classes A, B or C. Row 4 sets system 3 for products in all families for which there is no clearly identifiable stage in the production process resulting in an improvement of the reaction to fire performance, at classes A, B, C, D or E. A cable of class A, B or C made without such a stage falls under both rows, with two different systems. That the overlap was seen is clear from row 2, which expressly excludes power, control and communication cables; row 4 carries no such exclusion. The act establishes priority between annexes, in Article 1(2) and Article 2(2), but no rule of priority between rows of the same annex.
- Annex III, rows 94 and 95, masonry units. Row 94 gives system 2+ to masonry units where the „structure is designed with low safety factors”, and row 95 gives system 4 to those where the „structure is designed with high safety factors and non-structural”. The phrase „safety factors” is defined nowhere in the act, which has no definitions article at all, and appears in no other row of the three annexes. The Romanian version of the same table renders it as „elemente de siguranță”, safety elements, and shifts the subject between the two rows, so that in row 94 it is the masonry units that are designed and in row 95 the structure. A manufacturer of ceramic blocks or of autoclaved aerated concrete cannot establish from the text whether he needs a notified body for the production control, under system 2+, or whether he declares on his own, under system 4, and the difference in cost between the two is the whole difference between having and not having a third party in the factory.
Editorial analysis
The act solves a real problem and solves it elegantly. Under the old regime, to find out who checks your product you had to track down a European Commission decision from fifteen years ago covering your area of products, then read it together with the standard. Now the answer sits on one row of a table, and the table was adopted ahead of the standards, as Article 10(2) of the base regulation requires. The order of priority between the three annexes is written out expressly, in Article 1(2) and Article 2(2), which shows that the drafters thought about overlaps. All the more visible, then, that the same care did not travel down into annex II, where row 1 and row 4 fight over the same cable.
The figures say something that does not show on reading the table row by row. Of 246 rows, 60 leave the manufacturer alone with his declaration and 186 bring in a notified body. But of those 186, only 54 are at systems 1 and 1+, the only ones in which the notified body assesses both the product and the factory, and 9 rows, less than 4% of the table, reach system 1+, with audit testing on the market. The nine rows are not random: cement, reinforcing and prestressing steel, post-tensioning kits, pozzolanic additions, rock and soil anchors, devices that arrest a fall from height, and cables. All share the same trait: they are products that go into the works and can never be inspected again afterwards, either because they are buried in concrete or because their absence shows only in an accident. The severity of the act therefore follows the impossibility of later verification, not the economic importance of the product. Ready mixed concrete, by far the largest volume on the market, sits at system 2+.
The second observation comes from combining annex II with the rest of the table. Environmental sustainability gets system 3+ for all families and all categories. System 3+ is the only system new compared with the old regime and it requires a validation report from a notified body, with an initial inspection of the production plant. The consequence, which is stated nowhere as such, is that the 60 rows at system 4, that is precisely the products spared until now from any contact with a notified body, will need one the moment they declare environmental performance. For a manufacturer of shutters, of sanitary appliances or of plastering mortar, the act that appears to ask nothing of him is exactly the act that brings the first notified body into his factory. How soon that happens depends on a calendar the regulation does not contain: no date in the whole act, apart from that of entry into force, says from when.
The third observation concerns the relationship between deadlines. The act was adopted on 11 June 2026 and published on 28 August 2026, 78 days apart, and from publication to entry into force another 20 days passed. For the addressee, by contrast, the act sets no deadline at all, neither for compliance nor for transition. Regulation (EU) No 305/2011 is repealed from 8 January 2026, but part of it, including Annex V with the old systems, stays in force until 8 January 2040. Fourteen years of parallel regimes, in a market where the same wall is built from products at different stages of the transition, is a problem of application that a table, however well made, cannot solve on its own.
What should be changed
- A row, or several, for family 36 in Annex VII. Without it, attached ladders have essential characteristics for which no assessment and verification system exists, and their standard cannot be commissioned, since Article 5(3) of the base regulation ties the standardisation request to the system established by delegated act.
- The express exclusion of power, control and communication cables from row 4 of annex II as well, as in row 2. It would close the only internal conflict in the act and spare cable manufacturers a choice between system 1+ and system 3, that is between full certification with market testing and plain laboratory testing.
- Replacing the phrase „safety factors” in rows 94 and 95 with the real technical criterion, expressed consistently. Manufacturers of masonry units would know whether system 2+ or system 4 awaits them, and the market surveillance authority would have something to check.
- A general rule of priority within each annex, of the special row over the general row type. The act already has rules of priority between annexes; one more sentence in Article 3 would spare the interpreter a resort to canons of construction and would settle future situations too, not just the cable one.
- Reproducing the names of the product families in a column or a note of annex III. The table is designed as a working tool for factories, not for lawyers, and a working table that requires you to open another act to find out what „17” means misses its purpose.
- Moving the substantive rules out of the remarks column and into the body of the articles. The remark at row 56, which provides that the system applies „unless the AV system is set out by another product family”, is a conflict rule, not a clarification, and has no business in the last column of a table. On top of that, the abbreviation „AV”, used at row 26 as well, is explained nowhere in the act.
Original text of the legal act
The text below is reproduced in Romanian, the official form of publication.
The full text, as published in the Official Gazette of Romania
Official Journal of the European Union, L series, 2026/1310 of 28 August 2026 29 pages PDF, 1.0 MB
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This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific situations, consult a licensed attorney or tax advisor.